The poetry of bill bissett is marked by non-standard spellings that make phonetic sense. This of course poses a bit of a challenge for machine processing. As observed by Christian Bök in “NICKEL LINOLEUM” (Published in Open Letter: bpNichol + 10, Series 10.4 [Fall 1998]: 62-74)
When Wershler-Henry uses his Microsoft program, for example, to correct the phonetic spelling in a poem by Bissett, the software fails to work on behalf of semantic lucidity, translating the desire for errata into a comedy of errors, so that, when confronted, say, with the word “uv,” the device does not read it as “of,” the correct variant, but as “ultraviolet” (1997a:[68]). Just as the gears of a printing-press drag Bissett, screaming, into their own mechanism, so also do the codes of a spelling-check drag the poem, gibbering, into their own formalism: “the machines were thundering on, turning fat ultraviolet” ([68])
The references is to Wershler-Henry, Darren. Nicholodeon: A Book of Lower Glyphs. Toronto: Coach House Books, 1997. And a copy of the referring text is available online via the Electronic Poetry Center at State University of New York at Buffalo http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/bok/nickel.html
And so for day 941
11.07.2009
