Manic_Skafe & roachboy, I took a course of Christian Bök's when I attended York. (And I enjoy his work too.) It was a course that looked at recently published avant garde poetry in Canada (from Coach House, mostly). Christian is a very interesting lecturer, and since it was a seminar-style course, we had many interesting conversations about language and poetry. His approach to poetry is non-traditional, of course, and so I learned much considering most of the other poetry I studied was from the Romantic period and earlier.
And so here is my (first) entry:
(completely random expert from two pages)
Tapeworm Foundry, Darren Wershler-Henry -
and then make living paintings by brushing samples onto glass sheets coated with
agaragar andor write on yellowing velvet andor vomit alphaghetti onto the page as
an homage to rob ert rau schenb erg and jubal brown andor title a story the fall of
t hehouse of escher andor think of the souvenirs without nostalgia andor annoy the
people at the art bar andor take a newspaper andor take a pair of scissors andor
choose an article as long as the poem that you are planning to make andor cut out
the article andor cut out each of the words that make up the article andor put them
in a bag andor shake it gently andor take out the scraps one after the other in the
order in which they leave the bag andor copy conscientiously so that the poem is
like you and voila you are a writer infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility
that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar andor do all of
these things andor kidnap someone and then make them happy andor construct
grammatically correct sentences that in a given text might link the last word at the
end of each line to the first word of the following line andor continue to consider
yourself very likeable andor take a cow that damien hirst has cut in half and then use
it to make a squishier equivalent of a humongous potatoprint andor work flat for a
while andor do concrete poems in needlepoint andor write poems for your pets not
publish the results in a prominent medical journal andor write a poem using only
the names of paint swatches from a hardware store and then arrange the colours
syntactically andor make a popup version of the making of americans andor plan
some actions for the stupefaction of stupid factions andor have it inscribed on a
grain of rice and then cook the grain into a pilaf and then serve it to the critics andor
make it pointy and inhospitable andor write it across an empty field in cursive script
by rolling a big snowball in front of you realizing all the while that the snowball must
eventually form the period at the end of the sentence andor renounce the language
made impossible by journalism andor burn a painting once a day say yours or
some one el ses andor pract i se surri elism after ca nadada andor happen very
naturally andor make a mondrian colouring book andor take the jokes seriously
andor write for a world where instead of proper names everyone has one unique
term that he or she uses to refer to everyone else andor fool the americans with it
andor connect the rooftops of the city with delicate wroughtiron footbridges andor
place a completed manuscript into a cage and then let a gerbil do the final edit
andor regret not having sported a suit the colour of an unripe lemon nor a red paper
gendarmes hat because alas one cannot think of everything andor annotate a blank
This book (one long poem) is essentially a "recipe book" for creating art; what it is upon close inspection is taking existing ideas and turning them on their heads. The result: both humorous and intriguing. The entire book reads like these two pages throughout as a single string.
There are references on varying levels: high art, pop culture, bawdy. There are some clever puns as well. I seem to remember a good Star Wars reference, or was it Star Trek? I should reread this.
Highly recommended.
EDIT: You can get a free PDF on ubu.