On Lionel Kearns

Here's a new piece. It's called On Lionel Kearns at
http://turbulence.org/spotlight/kearns . Lionel's from Vancouver. He did
some work in the sixties-through-eighties that's brilliantly relevant to
contemporary digital poetics in books such as By the Light of the Silvery
McLune: Media Parables, Gestures, Signs, Poems, and Other Assaults on the
Interface (1969, Talonbooks, Vancouver). He also did some animated video
poems in the seventies that are part of On Lionel Kearns.

On Lionel Kearns is a binary meditation on some of his work–the stuff
that's relevant to contemporary digital poetics. It's a kind of a fucked-up
hypertext. Lots of interactive visual poetry in it, and one of the videos
(the second) is interactive also. Trying to take the literary hypertext in
different directions.

I came across Lionel's work last year. And met him for the first time last
week when I presented the piece at Western Front over in Vancouver. There
probably aren't any poets from around here except Kearns and bp Nichol (it's
little known Nichol was from Vancouver–he and Kearns were friends) who were
thinking about poetics in the sort of polyartistic, electronically-mediated
way that Kearns was back in the mid sixties.

He was going back and forth between Vancouver and London in the sixties,
where he did a PhD in Linguistics and was involved in London with a lot of
the experimental poets. In Vancouver, he was involved with Tish (sort of
'shit' backwards), Vancouver writers such as George Bowering, Frank Davey,
Fred Wah, Gladys Hindmarch, Jamie Reid, and others. They were the first
'group' of serious writers to emerge from Vancouver, and they're all still
involved in writing. Most of them went on to teach in Vancouver and
elsewhere in Canada. There was a strong Olson/Black Mountain influence,
which is probably involved in the later history of the relations between
Vancouver's Kootenay School and lang po. Vancouver is "as good as anywhere
in the English language" concerning poetry, as Gerry Gilbert has pronounced,
and that has a lot to do with the life and work of the generation of poets
from Vancouver that Kearns and the Tishers are part of.

But Tish wasn't into visual poetry or video or other non-print-oriented
experiments. That was peculiar to Kearns and Nichol and a few others like
David UU.

I'm grateful for their work. On Lionel Kearns is a tribute to Lionel's work.

ja