Antipoetry Month, Language as Virus and Literature for Girls

Kootenay School of Writing is in the midst of a little something we like to call "Antipoetry Month," otherwise known as a transformative spring and summer of poetic programming. We just finished a full weekend, with readings by poetic-fiction writer Hannah Calder (More House) and poet-critic Chris Nealon (Plummet); a talk by Nealon on materiality, capital and textuality, based on his soon-to-be-released The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Spectacle in the American Century, and another talk - on Mother's Day, no less - by the ubiquitous Christian Bök on his (generatively masculine?) Xenotext Experiment.

This little poet's head is still reeling from all the ideas presented by our speakers, and by the ideas suggested in this Globe & Mail article on intelligent machines (incidentally, queries on the possibilities of machine-human interactions were foregrounded by poet Jason Christie in i-ROBOT, set to premiere as a play in Calgary some time in the future), so you'll have to forgive the lack of cogent analysis in this post.

I count myself among the younger generation of skeptics, so I offer a guarded Happy Birthday to the Pill. (Now I know why yams.com keeps spamming my blog!) Though if you've got the time, a read through the comments section is oh so hilarious! Sample:

All the estrogen in the environment from female urine, is converting male fish and amphibians to females... and accumulating in human tissue. Conclusion: The pill is turning our men into girly men. Thanks Feminism.

I may not like it when Christian Bök refers, as he did yesterday, to science as the most important human cultural activity, but I'm unable to dispute the claim.

Speaking of feminism, I wish that Joey Shithead were reading these stories aloud when I was a girl.

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Nikki Reimer is the author of [sic]. She lives in Vancouver.