Transformations of the Poetry Book as General Economy: Darren Wershler-Henry's the tapeworm foundry

Transformations of the Poetry Book as General Economy:Darren Wershler-Henry's the tapeworm foundry Susan Vanderborg (bio) What will avant-garde poetry books look like in the next decades of the twenty-first century? There has been much critical speculation over the new models of literary production, circulation, and reception generated by digital poetry and archiving or by new incarnations of poetic book sculptures and installations.1 Lovers of these forms can find numerous examples described in Darren Wershler-Henry's galvanizing text the tapeworm foundry andor the dangerous prevalence of imagination (2000), a poem composed wholly of notes for creating future poetry texts.2 Several of the experiments are already being tested. A 2008 student art exhibit at the University of Pennsylvania featured tapeworm-inspired poems made "via conference call," "television … channel" surfing, and "ocr scanner" (Wershler-Henry, tapeworm 27, 32, 37).3 [End Page 146] Even the tapeworm foundry's visionary direction to "encode [text] in a helix of dna" (39) refers back to an ongoing project by fellow Canadian conceptual poet Christian Bök.4 But rather than simply promoting the newest poetry vocabulary, Wershler-Henry's book is equally dedicated to the past, to ideas of both excessive repetition and obsolescence. The result is a simultaneous display of multiple technologies and formats, even ostensibly competing ones, in a literary economy that redefines the material boundaries of the poem. Wershler-Henry's previous poetry book, nicholodeon (1997), is, in part, a set of creative responses to the visual and procedural experiments of bpNichol. [T]he tapeworm foundry increases the scope for a lively art of repetition and variation. As the frontcover flap advertises, much of the book focuses on extending old avant-garde "recipes we've inherited," often couched in the prior authors' words. Lines on a single page of the tapeworm foundry shift nimbly across text references from futurism, Dada, New York school poetry, American Romanticism, and neo-romanticism, with art nouveau and Marxism thrown in for good measure (14). Poetry-writing directions themselves are a traditional avant-garde tactic, Wershler-Henry concedes, as he quotes Tristan Tzara's recommendation to "cut out each of the words" from a newsprint story and rearrange them (16) or Bernadette Mayer's exercises for a St. Mark's Poetry Workshop (22). The very familiarity of one of Mayer's best-known directions, slightly revised in the tapeworm foundry to "work your ass off to change the language [End Page 147] but never get famous" (22), gives that charge a satiric twist here.5 Reviewers have commented at length on the extent and implications of the tapeworm foundry's allusions. Marjorie Perloff reads the book as a paradigmatic example of avant-garde modernism revisited, its clauses combining Gertrude Stein's sentence structure with T. S. Eliot's symbolism and Marcel Duchamp's art (Twenty-first-Century Modernism 76). Tim Conley describes the tapeworm foundry as a text "in love with possibilities" (25) but speculates on whether the number of quick allusions reflects "a rejection of commitment" to a fully developed new book poetics (24). Johanna Drucker sees the text's repetition even more strongly as problematic. While it might "show the viability of old mythologies …to newly engaging ends" ("Un-Visual" 126), she argues, the tapeworm foundry comes across as "a work of exhaustion" and "defeat" as much as "play": "The title invokes both industrial production and organic parasitic replication equally, and the conviction that art and literature can be reduced to formulaic operations whose terms can be stated is clear" (123). Questions of influence and formulas come up especially in connection with one of the tapeworm foundry's main dialogues with predecessors, in the scrutiny of Language writing—its precursors, evolution, and effects on subsequent poetries. Wershler-Henry once described Language authors as "limit-case writers" who "didn't leave much frontier left" (Wershler-Henry and Stefans 34). As Bök comments, "Wershler-Henry has observed that, for young poets like us, the conceit of entropy has defined the millennial anxieties of our own belatedness, particularly in the face of the exciting, but imposing, precedent set by Langpo, whose broad and varied innovations have so thoroughly exhausted the...

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