The Wiki of Babel

Rising poetic talent Kyle Flemmer presents beguiling conceptual poetry created by constraint techniques from the world’s largest online encyclopedia—the ultimate Wikipedia rabbit hole.

Wikipedia is a modern-day miracle. The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit has become a monumental repository of common knowledge, a springboard for research, a source of entertainment, a site of discussion, an archive, a hobby, and a digital representation of information forever in flux.

In The Wiki of Babel, Kyle Flemmer subjects Wikipedia articles to chance operations and poetic constraints, building up an intriguing and bewildering bricolage from fragments of text. Drifting through data, he divines playfulness and humour in the logic of hyperlinks and the surprising juxtapositions they afford. This is poetry of the paratactic leap, a core sample taken from an ever-shifting network of oblique associations.

Fancifully factual, The Wiki of Babel shows how the organization of information and the method of its navigation changes its meaning. A celebration of collaborative expertise and hypertext publications on the internet, this book takes a reverent look back at Oulipian wordplay and a bold step forward in digital poetics.

Kyle Flemmer is a writer, publisher, and digital media artist from Calgary, Canada in Treaty 7 territory. In 2014, he founded The Blasted Tree Publishing Co., a small press focused on experimental poetics and visual art. His artworks and publications have been exhibited locally and abroad. Flemmer’s other books include Barcode Poetry, Supergiants and TzAR: Pixel Art Anthology.

Kyle Flemmer’s The Wiki of Babel surveys the poetic possibilities of Wikipedia, wikiracing, collage, erasure, and substitution and discovers poetry that may not look like anything you’ve seen before, but feels immediate, present, and prophetic. Every page is a poem from the future, using the tools of today.

—Derek Beaulieu, author of Do It Wrong: How to be a Poet in the 21st Century

The Wiki of Babel underlines that Flemmer is one of the most inventive writers in Canada today. This book, in its play and action, surfaces the contemporary collective unconscious through associative jumps and multilingual juxtapositions. These works are both instruction and poetry, surprising and puzzling, simultaneously roadmaps between wikis and sonnets, imagist works and hyperlink reportage. There is a hidden hand behind the random number generators and N+7 here, Flemmer’s and ours, writing by connecting words, phrases, lines, stanzas across the multiple expanses of the Internet’s knowledge.

—Aaron Tucker, author of Soldiers, Hunters, Not Cowboys