Spotlight series #29 : Kyle Flemmer
Curated by Canadian writer, editor and publisher rob mclennan, the “spotlight” series appears the first Monday of every month.
STATEMENT
My series of Barcode Poetry investigates the overlap of art and money by emulating a digital form of communication on a manual typewriter. These poems are generated with a 1940’s Remington Rand Deluxe Model 5 and consist of a 38-character line (including spaces) repeated fourteen times, plus a line of numerals corresponding to the width of each column, forming what is recognizable from afar as a barcode. The code produced by each statement is unique in the series, even excluding the two-digit prefix and suffix numerals indicating their order in the sequence. The machine-oriented language of barcodes — also the ubiquitous hallmark of consumer goods — bestows upon a piece of artistic labor the distinctive aura of worth as determined by our technocapitalistic society, while simultaneously stripping it of the worth we traditionally assigned to cherished artifacts. There is an obvious tension between Oscar Wilde’s conception of art as entirely useless besides for appreciation and the need for artists to sustain themselves financially. In my view, money and art are paradoxically linked. All creative endeavors rely on the material circumstances of their production, and so one’s art is inextricable from the resources one has at their disposal, just as it is from their historical context.
Though many of the boundaries imposed on analog media have been exploded by computer processors’ ability to replicate and manipulate information, the limits imposed by one’s resources are still present in all work. Rather than avoid this fact, my project emphasizes it by drawing parallels between the messages we encounter in consumer spaces, the understanding of poems as images, and the manual labor required in their making. Each typographic imprint is both symbol and pixel, intelligible grapheme and asemic component, bodily exertion and mechanical reproduction. They ape their own digitization, resisting while relying on it. Though the visual composition of these poems divides space into discrete regions of black and white, leaving no room for grey, I hope the complications which arise from flaunting art objects as consumer goods (and vice versa) serve to create gradients of significance between the lines.
THREE POEMS




Kyle Flemmer founded The Blasted Tree Publishing Company in 2014 as a creative outlet and community for emerging Canadian artists. He is currently the Managing Editor of filling Station magazine, were he served as Associate Poetry Editor for two years. Kyle graduated from Concordia University with a double-major in 2016, and has released several other recent poetry chapbooks, including Astral Projection (above/ground press, 2017), Lunar Flag Assembly Kit (no press, 2017), and PRAY/LEWD (The Blasted Tree, 2016). A new chapbook, Coronagraphic, is out soon with above/ground press.