Kevin Stebner, Inherent

 

In creating Inherent, I respond to the vibe of each typeface itself, trying to demonstrate how these typefaces would speak without the constraints of human language and if they weren’t forced into the hard linearity of how words appear on the page. As both readers and writers, we are so often stuck to the flagpole of the left margin, to strict semantic meaning, biases of words, end rhyme, and conventions of language. Instead, I am interested in how a typeface would wish to express itself if given the freedom to do so. I want to let the letter forms move how they will and show us their voices separate from human language. I am seeking to find what is inherent within the typeface, and what aspects of form and design will lead to a typeface’s own poetic stance. What is innate in a letter form? What does it want to express? I have forgone my own authorial hand to try less at expressing an exacting statement and to allow that punctum to arise from the letter forms themselves. (“Explication”)

“Typefaces have personality built into their forms.” So writes Calgary poet, artist, bookseller and musician Kevin Stebner to open the end-note, or “Explication,” of his full-length assemblage of visual poems, Inherent (Picton ON: Assembly Press, 2024). Stebner’s letterform work, as it would appear, builds on some of the prior and ongoing work done by contemporary Canadian poets such as Derek Beaulieu, Kate Siklosi, Amanda Earl and Gary Barwin, among others. Across the nine word-sections of Inherent, Stebner works through how letters are freed from language or even meaning, one might say, into elements of pure shape, simultaneously regressing and progresing through origin, back when shape implied shape and only itself.

The book moves through and across thirteen letterform sequence-clusters—“Ultramatum,” “AdieuAdo,” “Totemic,” “Agalma,” “Significant,” “Süperiör,” “Peaceful,” “Brethren,” “Assemblage,” “Present,” “Kindled,” “Unbroke” and “WellWorn,” followed by the aforementioned “Explication”—providing an elasticity of letterform shapes and possibilities that move almost immediately beyond the realm of language purpose and meaning. There’s something ancient in these forms, something complex and yet basic in an understand of how letters begin, evolve and continue. This is a fascinating exploration of shape, and, if, through Kroetsch, a Phoenician might have had cause for grief, these forms could only delight.