{"id":17441,"date":"2023-11-21T10:30:00","date_gmt":"2023-11-21T05:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/?p=17441"},"modified":"2023-11-08T03:00:30","modified_gmt":"2023-11-07T22:00:30","slug":"cameron-anstee-sheets-typewriter-works","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/editorials\/cameron-anstee-sheets-typewriter-works\/","title":{"rendered":"Palimpsest and Play: Anstee\u2019s Typewritten Explorations and Invitations"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The opening epigraph sets the scene for this collection, endearingly crooked, the text of it veering wildly upwards and to the right: \u201cTHE MOST DIFFICULT PART ABOUT TYPING IS GETTING THE PAPER IN STRAIGHT.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Cameron Anstee. <\/em>Sheets: Typewriter Works.<\/em> Toronto, ON: Invisible Publishing, 2022<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

From the jump, then, we are reminded that the poem is tactile, and the context of its production is only ever tactile. Here, the physical creation of the text is not obscured, as it is in most finished books these days, but instead called out, made visible. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Having shown us the foundation of constraints\u2014the text dependent on paper, ink, and the tiny fallible arms of each typewriter letter\u2014Anstee sets out to explore how these constraints can be bent, broken, undermined. Even when constraints cannot be circumvented\u2014North American typewriters are overwhelmingly tied to the roman alphabet, for instance\u2014they can be reimagined as possibilities for play. The whole book is dedicated to this kind of play, this kind of transformation, even a kind of defamiliarization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We see this in an especially playful way in \u201cEllipsis (lowercase)\u201d and \u201cEllipsis (uppercase)\u201d: two poems, that are, seemingly, exactly the same\u2014three periods typed and blown up to a half inch or so. Each period is distinctly unique, its rough edges and distortions made clear by their enlargement, and yet each period is also the same as the one before, typographically speaking, and communicates the same meaning. In Anstee\u2019s hands, the mark becomes more and less than it is: a diagram, an illustration, a distillation of meaning. Usually, letters are thought of as part of larger formations: words, sentences, books. Here, though, Anstee\u2019s play seems to centre on a different kind of question: what can we (re)build when the code is stripped away and letters and punctuations become merely marks? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And, in another playful sense, the whole book is perfumed with palimpsest in an expansive and exploratory way. Take Anstee\u2019s first experimental section, titled \u201crehearsal,\u201d which plays with inscribing and resinscribing the words once and once again<\/em>. The words are pushed into the page so deeply that they become unintelligible, then their layers separated so it feels like a chorus speaking out of tandem. Each iteration seems to impart some different sense\u2014a different tone, a different emphasis, a different kind of play.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Or, in perhaps the best palimpsestic example, take the plump middle section titled \u201cOttawa Poems,\u201d filled with poems that are mostly x-ed out. The original source text, as the book\u2019s afterword tells us, comes from poet William Hawkins\u2019 collection of the same name published in 1966\u2014the same poet who bequeathed Anstee the typewriter on which he retyped and over-typed these poems to create something new. The original poems can still be read if the reader is willing to strain towards a magic-eye picture kind of ocular dissociation, but the words left unexcoriated produce new narratives, injecting a secretive slowness into the source text. The resulting poem-within-poem feels a bit like stargazing: making new meaning from the points of light blazing back at you in a practice that feels ancient, familiar, and in some senses almost arcane\u2014an alchemical transformation from one solid thing into another. Anstee presents the fruits of this labour, play and palimpsest in this book, and his reticence to call them poems\u2014the front cover labels them, coolly, as typewriter works\u2014<\/em>is a further invitation to the reader. What meaning can be made here? <\/em>Anstee asks, although not in so many words. What can we make from constraint, and from grief, and from the words of those around us? <\/em>Sheets<\/em> is, ultimately, a reminder of just that: nothing exists in isolation, and nor should it. This is clear in Anstee\u2019s riffing on other poets, and the defamiliarized symbols made into entirely new images on the page, but also in the way the reader is invited to decide for themselves: is this poetry? And what is it doing? This, I think, is the idea at the heart of poetry as a whole\u2014the collaborative creation of meaning. And it is, especially, something at which Sheets<\/em> excels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

Bios<\/h2>\n\n\n

Dessa Bayrock<\/a><\/h3>\r\n

Dessa Bayrock<\/strong> lives in Ottawa with two cats and a variety of succulents, one of which occasionally blooms. She is the poetry editor at Shrapnel Magazine and was the recent winner of the Diana Brebner Prize. You can find her, or at least more about her, at dessabayrock.com<\/a>, and at @yodessa on Twitter. [provided November 2023]<\/p>\r\n <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The opening epigraph sets the scene for this collection, endearingly crooked, the text of it veering wildly upwards and to the right: \u201cTHE MOST DIFFICULT PART ABOUT TYPING IS GETTING THE PAPER IN STRAIGHT.\u201d From the jump, then, we are reminded that the poem is tactile, and the context of its production is only ever […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"3301","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"16394,17822,17671,16219","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3301],"tags":[],"genre":[21],"publisher":[193],"issue":[],"poet-in-residence":[],"series":[3134],"topic":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17441"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17441"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17441\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17450,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17441\/revisions\/17450"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17441"},{"taxonomy":"genre","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/genre?post=17441"},{"taxonomy":"publisher","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/publisher?post=17441"},{"taxonomy":"issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue?post=17441"},{"taxonomy":"poet-in-residence","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/poet-in-residence?post=17441"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=17441"},{"taxonomy":"topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topic?post=17441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}