There
is a delight to seeing what Toronto poet Eric Schmaltz has accomplished with
his first full-length title, SURFACES
(Picton ON: Invisible Publishing, 2018), a title rightly listed equally as
poetry, graphic arts and typography. My first real interaction with Schmaltz’
work came in the form of a chapbook manuscript, produced through above/ground
press as MITSUMI ELEC. CO. LTD.: keyboard poems (2014). As he wrote in an email as part of his original submission,
the chapbook was “an homage to Paul Dutton’s The Plastic Typewriter.” Toronto poet Dutton’s work, produced by
Underwhich Editions in 1993, is described as a “Compilation of concrete or
visual poetry that goes beyond the way the typewriter is traditionally used to
make impressions on to a piece of paper. Completed in 1977, materials used were
a disassembled plastic case typewriter, an intact typewriter, carbon ribbons,
carbon paper, metal file and white bond paper.” Further to Schmaltz’ email on
his response project, he wrote that:
Following Dutton’s example, I dismantled a
keyboard and use its parts and black paint to create a series of visual poems
that simultaneously map and disrupt the materiality of the keyboard. These
poems engage with ideas and questions regarding language's materiality,
tactility, and the language devices we use to creatively communicate.
I
was immediately fascinated by Schmaltz’ curiosity in exploring the work of one
his forebears, composing new work as both study and exploration, as well as
working to find his own way through it, and very openly build on the visual and
concrete experiments already set down. As Gary Barwin writes on Schmaltz’ Dutton project for Jacket2:
And the typewriter: a Flintstones era writing
machine when looked at from the digital age. I’m writing this digitally, the
text appearing on the digital representation of a page. There’s no ink. Only
light. Pixel yourself on a boat on a river. But this newfangled thing is
modeled on that old fashioned typewriting machine. Keys in QWERTY order. The
scrolling page. The word processor defaults to modeling the typewriter
experience. Digital mimicry.
So when Eric Schmaltz in 2013 deconstructs
typewriting, it’s carbon ribbon dating.
He’s a retronaut re(con)textualizing the typewriter and writing in both
space and time. Indeed his typewriter is so changed by spacetime its actually a
computer keyboard. He quotes Kenny Goldsmith in the epigraph to MITSUMI: “The twenty-first century is
invisible. We were promised jetpacks but ended up with handlebar moustaches.
The surface of things is the wrong place to find the 21st century.” (Goldsmith,
“The New Aesthetic and The New Writing.”)
The
collection presents itself as an assemblage of surfaces, playing off the
suggestion of superficial while presenting a sequence of works that work
through a variety of depths of text and texture, lines and rough scapes, from
what jwcurry might refer to as “dirty concrete,” to cleaner lines, collaged
images and manipulated and reassembled texts. SURFACES exists as a collection of sketchworks, presenting a
sequence of studies on image, text, response and the page, extending the notion
of what the concrete/visual poem can accomplish. In the afterword by Joseph Mosconi, titled “THREE SUPERFICIAL THOUGHTS ON SURFACES,” he writes:
These
questions of surface and depty, of superficiality and profundity, have been a
central concern of textual scholarship in the wake of Sharon Marcus and Stephen
Best’s call for what they term “surface reading”—an attention to surface as
materiality, as verbal structure, or as an affective and ethical stance. Marcus
and Best situate “surface reading” in opposition to the seemingly oppressive
structures of “symptomatic reading,” or the search for hidden textual truths
typified by Freudian and Marxist literary criticism. “We take surface to mean
what is evident, perceptible, apprehensible in texts,” write Marcus and Best, “what
is neither hidden nor hiding; what, in the geometrical sense, has length and
breadth but no thickness, and therefore covers no depth. A surface is what
insists on being looked at rather than what we must train ourselves to see
through.”
One
of the remarkable things about Eric Schmaltz’s Surfaces is that, like the put-down joke, and like the duck-rabbit
illusion, the book manages to engage both the shallows and the depths. It asks its
readers not only to confront its textual experiments—its schematics, patterns,
substrates, and structures—but to think through the social, political, and
cognitive contexts that lie beneath such surface encounters.
The
past twenty-odd years of Canadian writing has been wonderfully rich in the
production of visual and concrete works, an explosion of publishing, producing
and curiosity that seemed to come out of nowhere, with dozens of writers and
artists now composing and producing, from the older writers who have been
working away for decades—jwcurry, bill bissett and Judith Copithorne, for
example—to the mid-career practitioners—derek beaulieu, Gary Barwin, W. Mark Sutherland, Sharon Harris, Billy Mavreas, Christian Bök and Helen Hajnoczky—to the array of emerging writer quietly moving their own ways
through multiple threads of history to begin producing their own works—Sacha Archer, Kate Siklosi, Kyle Flemmer, Ken Hunt and Dani Spinosa (these lists
aren’t meant to be exhaustive, but simply to give a quick sense of some
gatherings of activity). All of this activity is impressive, and the benefits
of a growing community of practitioners in the digital age have allowed the
work being produced to be more thoughtful, and often presented in deep
conversation with other works already produced (Spinosa, for example, has been working on some very interesting homage pieces over the past few years). All of
this to say that, while Schmaltz’ work is part of something larger and grander,
it has also become one of its ongoing highlights, something SURFACES can’t help but broadcast.
