you are entirely happy with your poem / you are not happy then there is no charge and your deposit is returned / you are totally satisfied with the outcome / you are a man / you are a little confused / you are entirely happy with your poem / you are not happy then there is no charge and your deposit is returned / you are totally satisfied with the outcome ..."Apostrophe" is:a) a figure of speech in which a person, an abstract quality or a nonexistent entity is addressed as though presentb) a poem written in 1993 in which every sentence is an apostrophec) a program - apostropheengine.ca - based on the 1993 poem that hijacks search engines in order to extend the poem infinitelyd) a book of poetry written using the website The answer:e) all of the above. Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler - Henry's Apostrophe contains all of these things, except the search engine (but you can visit that any time you like). Each line from the original poem has become the title of a new poem generated by the program's metonymic romp through the World Wide Web. Phrases rub against each other promiscuously; poems and readers alike come to their own conclusions.
The results are by turns poignant, banal, offensive and hilarious, but always surprising and always unaffected. In other words, everything a book of contemporary poetry should be, and then some. Poet and scholar Charles Bernstein has suggested that Apostrophe may be related to Freud's notion of the uncanny, a somnambulistic drift that appears aimless yet somehow always returns to "you." Apostrophe is an entirely new kind of poetry: neither stable nor unstable, sections come and go, but the overall shape of the poem remains vaguely familiar, like a trick of memory.
- ISBN10 1459653246
- ISBN13 9781459653245
- Publish Date 13 December 2012 (first published 5 April 2006)
- Publish Status Inactive
- Out of Print 11 April 2017
- Publish Country CA
- Imprint ReadHowYouWant
- Edition Large type / large print edition
- Format Paperback
- Pages 518
- Language English