Kyle Flemmer, The Wiki of Babel

 

I was built by Skanska at a cost of £333 million

I was provided with two machine gun companies

I am near resonance

I later ran a joiner’s workshop

On August 1, 2015, I became a UN Special Rapporteur

I had urged the purchase of the mountain

I placed it with all the other pigeons

I belong mainly to the district

I protested in a telephone conversation

One day, I kill a ninja from a different family

During Lenten services, I tap prayer sticks to keep the rhythm

I received generally positive reviews

After the Rwanda genocide, I returned to Rwanda

In 1927, I was elected a Fellow (“About me”)

I’m admittedly a bit behind on the work of Calgary poet, editor and publisher Kyle Flemmer, the author of Barcode Poetry (Calgary AB: The Blasted Tree, 2021), Supergiants (Hamilton ON: Wolsak & Wynn, 2025) and TzAR: Pixel Art Anthology (The Blasted Tree, 2025) (as well as a mound of chapbooks), with the latest full-length title being The Wiki of Babel (Calgary AB: University of Calgary Press, 2026). As poets such as bpNichol and Steve McCaffery and Derek Beaulieu and Christian Bök and Amanda Earl and Kate Siklosi and Dani Spinosa and jwcurry and Hugh Thomas (among many, many others) have worked elements of translation, mistranslation and recombination, Flemmer incorporates a further layer through digital manipulation and elements of chance, offering a variation on prior procedural works by such as Jackson Mac Low—including the recent publication of The Complete Stein Poems 1998-2003 by Jackson Mac Low, edited by Michael O’Driscoll, with a foreword by Anne Tardos (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 2025) [see my review of such here]—Ottawa poet Grant Wilkins [see his latest title here] and Toronto poet R. Kolewe—including the recent A Net of Momentary Sapphire (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2023) [see my review of such here]—or the infamous collaborative apostrophe (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2006) by Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler, “the first book ever written with a search engine” [see my review of such here]. The notion of the procedure, of course, being both the means to a new kind of end as well as a processional end unto itself, blended together to shape fresh and unexpected ways of considering how words and meaning are shaped and comprehended; how information is collected and stored, and how it connects to other information. As he offers as the opening of his introduction to the collection:

The Wiki of Babel is a collection of poetry by Canadian writer and artist Kyle Flemmer. It was published in 2026 by University of Calgary Press. The poems in The Wiki of Babel are composed from text fragments copied from Wikipedia through a series of chance operations and word association games that make use of the hyperlinked structure of wikis. It is a work of conceptual writing that explores the aesthetics of collaboratively-authored hypertexts.

The collection includes five series of poems that use a variety of browser-based tools and selection procedures to navigate, excerpt, and rearrange text from Wikipedia articles. The Wiki of Babel addresses themes of collective knowledge, information organization, and reader interactivity.

I’ve always considered the best kind of writing one that allows a collision between unexpected words, sounds, ideas or structures; one that allows, through that collision, the pure elements of the poem to form in the reader’s own comprehension of those collisions, and Flemmer’s The Wiki of Babel is an ambitious assemblage of the multiple languages of the Biblical Tower of Babel (in which a scrabbling group were struck by G-d to speak in multiple different languages, thus no longer being understood by each other, therefore seeming to all speak in a “babble”) and the wealth of information shaped and collected and hyperlinked across Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (and this title reminds me that Vancouver poet Rob Manery had been working on a hyperlinked poem/poem project back in the mid-1990s, which makes me wonder whatever happened to that, if it ever saw completion). Organized into cluster-sections, Flemmer’s engaging, delightful and playful collection of collage-lyrics is structured via sections “Suggested languages,” “Alternate histories,” “Current events,” “Community portal” and “Canadian hypertext,” the final of which includes some fun explorations through language via Canadian classic novels, including Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers (1966), Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (2001), Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912), Marian Engel’s Bear (1976) and Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners (1974). Consider the first third of Kyle Flemmer’s “The Diviners,” that reads:

writer who grew up in Manawaka, Manitoba
confused with the real-life town of Maniwaki, Quebec. 

not far south of Route 117 (Trans-Canada Highway
route between southern Quebec and the
      Abitibi-Témiscamingue
economy continues to be dominated by resource extraction
      industries
such as farming, logging, fishing, forestry and
timber, fuel wood, wildlife habitat, natural water quality
moisture, range of temperature, and light intensity. 

electromagnetic fields, capacitive methods, and the more
      traditional
one of the four fundamental forces of nature
scientists hypothesize that a fifth force might exist
much weaker than electromagnetism or the nuclear forces
of the mass of a common proton
independent of the composition of the matter. 

particles (or combinations of particles) that act as if
in which case they are called mesons