Kyle Flemmer's ​The Wiki of Babel

Reviewed by bonnyCD

(University of Calgary Press, 2026)

​Wikipedia has always been, to me at least, a game of chance. Less Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard than “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.”*

*​I like to do this but with Terry Fox instead, and then immediately announce my supposed second or third cousin-ship with Fox, by way of my deceased Great Aunt.

My (extremely difficult) instructor for the undergraduate surveys of early English literature loved Wikipedia—in fact she was not an ‘English’ specialist, rather a Medievalist—and saw herself and fellow medievalists as especially devoted to its accuracy and its potential to expand/naturalize/democratize the niche knowledge pool; that crowd, according to her anecdotes, would get together and get pissed on mulled wine and recite The Odyssey from memory, back when they were ‘our’ age; Beowulf and Da Bard were sure to follow, in original, jagged-er Englishes.
 
As I age and my energy and attention wane, as the once-sharp needle-tip of my focus is burnished, blunted, made molten then brittle, by the broil of the incoming techno-feudal hellscape, I think of Wikipedia as harmless quicksand,* the kind of thing I can lose an hour to, but not something I get much use from—spurious; Lars Iyer; Manchester Metropolitan University; L.S. Lowry; knighthood; Lady; peerage; &c..**

*In contrast to the paralyzing k-hole of social media feeds.

**​These are the fundamentals of The Wiki of Babel, these sorts of movements. They’re generally pretty clear about how they’re working, and intuitive, sometimes offering great surprise, but more often taking straight trajectories, not t(r)amping down their own desire paths

​Flemmer’s particularly pointed filching of a commons resource by and large is not circular, does not stray down dark, dead-ended net-alleys; it stays alert, pert, pertinent, choicely associative.
 
Flemmer has always threaded a needle of chance in my literary life; at Shelf Life books, purple-haired and having gone to high school with the friend I’d gone in to browse with, and as my first point of contact for events coordination when I did my “home-town” launch for my trade book there—though there were two who followed him in the timeline from when I inquired to the launch itself; meeting Jimmy T. Cahill later that year in Halifax Flemmer had of course published them; interviewing micro-presses in Canada for Substack, everyone encourages me to “ask Kyle” for an interview, which I’ve already done, which was how I found those particular micro-presses in the first place, his recommendation; getting tattooed from flash of a dark pegasus in the feminist tattoo shop, Flemmer’s wife pops her head up from another table when I mention I write, comes over and asks “do you know my husband, Kyle?”
 
Kyle Flemmer erupts all over the place; stuff links back to Kyle Flemmer readily.
 
The sort of chance I have, I guess, pledged myself to? Not nomadic chance, as Flemmer’s Wikiwork embodies, but tub-drain chance. I have long held the position that an ampersand is a potent magic for its recursion, its compression, its infinite inward coil, in that it contains itself: ampers&.
 
In turn, Flemmer’s OuliPotency, his improvisatory yes & is perhaps less ingrown hair than my own infinitely jointed serializations, more a knowledge-seeking tentacle, or a jet-ski towline, a real-deal so what motivating it and the procedure-first sanctity than the chasing down of errant music in my “voice” —Metallica; Miles Davis; Sarte; philosophy.
 
This is work on the rails, so very many rails in these procedures, crosshatched to depth, so many frogs and switches and X-ings; Flemmer an able conductor! 

​choo choo 🚂

I do find myself more partial to the chapbook dosage of the procedures (published by Temz’ grand poobah,* Schneider, with 845 Press), though I appreciate the diversification of procedures and deepening of the overall argument. That Flemmer prefaces the collection and each section with thoughtful writing on the facture and result of the tasks at hand is less handholding or overdeterministic justification than showing your work (like in math class); a freely shared recipe of a cherished dish.**

*Moose Lodge; The Flintstones; Gilbert and Sullivan; The Mikado; orientalism; Edward Said; Sianne Ngai; Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgement and Capitalist Form. 

Could I have traveled from one of these to the next? Probably. I picked most of them up from the definitional entry I visited, then I ordered them in an arbitrary way to stage the kind of thing Flemmer leaves to chance (which is temporally inflected, as Flemmer points out: “Wikipedia articles are revised constantly, so even if readers begin in the same place and follows these procedures exactly, they are bound to write their own unique poems” (5)). This is also my first time learning the origin of the term, which I’ve only ever really heard as a gag used to poke fun at bosses and leaders, and I think is within the spirit of Flemmer’s project to leave the trace and discovery of in this review, troubling origin of the term notwithstanding.

**A cynical reading of this would be that this transparency is included to help beleaguered profs transplant the work directly into the syllabus for the “weird stuff” week as a creative writing prompt for the students to cling to, a readymade, didactic instructional handbook. But it’s hard to tell what Flemmer thinks of his role in “CanLit,” or his relationship to the academy, and his publishing practice does indicate a realllll plural expansive feeling for literature(S).

Also overshadowing this trade collection, the original WikiPoems’ paratextual elements, the Wiki-haecceity of the READ EDIT VIEW HISTORY toolbar and other elements, the square, browser-ly chapbook that felt less book-ish than an oversized, excised stamp or screengrab of Wikipedia itself.
 
Are there meaningful risks in squeezing conceptual and materially conscientious works (like those Flemmer finds felicity with) into the “Brave & Brilliant”* series from University of Calgary Press? There aren’t really artistic risks in extending the initial work into a trade-length book, you’re not going to blow up Wikipedia’s gatekept niche spot, say, but there are other complicating factors, the denuding of the formatting and the shape itself into a boilerplate 114 pages of “writing.” Flemmer himself works for an academic press, and isn’t reproducing the usual Avant-whatever crimes of Letraset doodling and the like; Flemmer’s love for public knowledge repositories feels genuine, but if his work is, as I suggest it is, motivated by a so what of procedure > feeling, perhaps it strays into the Avant-Abnegatory territory that conceptualist work always runs the risk of trespassing.

*I cannot help but cackle at the idea anything coming out from a Uni press could be either of those things but whatever.

Does that make the book less worthy? No, probably not. We need conceptual work to bash down the fence to let the Chosen Poets of nationalism come in and graze on fresh grass, or to borrow language from bpNichol, to start “treading on the private preserves and the areas you’ve kept as private...let’s take a bigger risk, let’s throw this area open too and see what happens...there’s the person who gets out there on the edge and gathers in the materials. There’s another person who’ll take that material and synthesize it and do incredible things with it, and there’s the popularizer who’ll take the same...eventually it filters right out into the mass market thing.” And thank god it does! (/s).
 
The Wiki of Babel stands in contrast to other works that draw on fascination with Borges, the most germane in my memory being Jonathan Basile, who made the library itself in digital form,* and produced a text of justification thereafter—not for me.

*​Flemmer’s bio: “Kyle Flemmer is [sic] writer, publisher, and digital media artist from Calgary, Canada in Treaty 7 territory.” Here on LoB’s site: 

I am not necessarily less interested in Flemmer’s bio—conspicuous in its omission of the indefinite article (an error I would guess) and its omission of Alberta (perhaps a craven wish to not have to own up to the terrible place you live, where I live too, which is a mixed-bag shithole but the place I stay [and could assume Flemmer stays in too] because I believe in a working toward a better world where I am, not fleeing to some other place where writing is more writerly and Toronto-y and MFA-y and the neighborhood already always agrees with me, where it’s already always good); no comment on the global woke recession and the deletion of Mohkinstis from the bios he used as of a few years ago to the now truncated Calgary, Canada—as plucked from da infinite RNG depths of fake infinity library than I am his Wikimeander, in fact I prefer Flemmer’s approach because it is composed of greater stretches of choate, encyclopedically-motivated language chunk, it strives for accessibility and good-will association-making. But LoB offers a glimpse at true chance, at unconventional, absolutely alien and unusual Englishes, which perhaps hold a different, Kristevan choric babel/babble sort of political valence than a didactic, somewhat hemmed project like Flemmer’s does; maybe we don’t need (or deserve) daydream-y glimmering possibilities, maybe we would do better to aggregate, to clump up and endorse and testify to the merit of the commons as Flemmer’s tack. I have no solutions, I’m just a poet.

Each of these works strives to make real, by some measure, the impossible library of Borges’ extremely clever fancy, but where works such as these necessarily struggle is to make visible the always invisible building blocks of the real.* “A celebration of collaborative expertise and hypertext publications on the internet” (see: backmatter copy) that cannot (and makes no interventional attempt to) subscend,** to reveal the building blocks of WikiAuthorship or polyphonic collaboration, that, in its formal deployment as a trade book with a university press, dismembers the hyperlinked liveliness, the literal two-way associative relationality of the thing Flemmer so obviously loves.

*​There are of course exceptions in the book in the micro. Take the very first line of the entry “Bear (novel),” originally published in WikiPoems and reprinted in Babel: “awarded a Canada Council grant on the strength” (103, bolded emphasis original). The immediate foregrounding of what it means to make a living writing, the matrix of merit-based (?) funding schemes, what a turtarrier to open the knowledge node from. It tells us a lot, particularly in a section rooted in notoriety and nationhood.

**From the somewhat impish though occasionally instructive Timothy Morton: “Humankind is ontologically smaller than the humans who make it up! There is so much more that humans do other than be parts of humankind. Humans modify their bodies to change their gender and add electronic and decorative prostheses. Humans form relationships with nonhumans. Humans contain nonhumans such as the bacterial microbiome in such a way that if the nonhumans left, the humans would die. This means that the correct left concept of the human is of a partial object in a set of partial objects, such that it comprises an implosive whole that is less than the sum of its parts.” Many contributors worth more than the sum of their entries, would be the WikiAdapted thought here. 

​Should this have “just” been some sort of CCA-funded website that you could click around on? Has something like that probably been made 1000 times before? And 11 years earlier by an American? I don’t know. Flemmer has done something that leaves me ambivalent about what to do with it. Babel puts me in a position where I can’t turn away from questions of why poetry, leaves me to scramble to other visions of textuality and other arts altogether.
 
But I don’t resent it. I am, in my own bitchy way, and have long been, a fan and endorser of good old Kyle and his superlative literary citizenship. I set out on the writing of this review wondering how I’d file the serial numbers off my precondition of appreciation, how I’d couch gushy praise in close-reading and super-blurbing, a happy pull-quote for UCP to plaster like a holographic sticker on their website.
 
But I’ve done my best not to quote incessantly from the text itself here, contrary to my usual critical approach (crutch?), because what good is thirdhand hearsay? My useless stamp on top of the already ably-piped (a la frosting) cake of human knowledge Flemmer has baked, tiered and tucked under a frosted cloche?
 
What can be said, in unbarbed praise, for Babel is that it has drawn my reading and critical brain into a set of enduring questions that must necessarily always remain unanswered, drawn to the slow blink of the search bar’s caret, the hip-check leap from thing to thing to thing, into an e-njambment of mediated chance. A queer gift, that it resists the insipid reductive qualities of Good/Bad reviewing I do loathe (the good more than the bad lmao), and likewise Babel cannot compel from me breathy abstractions about it doing some great novel thing or being singular, some treatise of genius, some thing making English anew!
 
In fact, tactical ambivalence might be exactly where Flemmer intends to strand us. From the afterword to Barcode Poetry: 

I started this series with an adamant disdain for money and an assortment of naïve and enthusiastic notions about art. By now I should think my ambivalence toward both has become clear. Not that I don’t despise the exploitive structures of capitalist society, or wish to critique its requirement to produce unto exhaustion, particularly the imperative that an artist must profit to be valid, only that it’s been helpful to adopt a neutral stance toward these structures, so far as the work and, frankly, my mental health are concerned.

Perhaps this truly is best read simply as labor, like any other work work—read as till-scanned sundries or quenched smith’s metals, read as matte, molted found poetry. I like the book, got pleasure from getting it in the mail (as a commodity, because I am evil 😈), and got pleasure from sitting down with it, from returning to its nascent form as a chap, from returning to Flemmer’s ultimately less politically valent (though more passionately and fulsomely essayed-in-justification-of*) Barcode Poetry.**

*I like Flemmer’s essaying in that text quite a bit. I like an afterword that outweighs, that leads from the rear (the literal opposite of the avant garde) of the text, that is angrier and angsty-er and a bit academy-poisoned and naive. It’s like the fatty growth on my dog Bacchus’ belly, that I joke is another dog attempting to immaculately birth itself from his ribcage, Greek mythology style. 

**I have unfortunately not had a chance to read Supergiants, which sucks because I do like to situate a writer’s work as fulsomely as I can, and which, at a glance, appears to be much closer to traditional poetry, which facilitates a less opaque, barrel-rolled magic-trick sort of personality infusion than the berth conceptual poetry wedges between the writer and the work. 

​I have been distracted by the fish-hook of meaning, which usually transmutes to readerly pleasure, foolish bitch I am.
 
But I struggle as a reader to enter a text without menace, without mischief. Goody two-shoes stuff. The stuff of supposed—from the annoying fucking hand-holding single-sheet writeups they always send in review copies of books— “Rising poetic talent Kyle Flemmer” (bolded my emphasis, because Kyle has been doing this a long time, and that kind of narrativization of artistic growth / Chosen-ness / assimilation is so fukn grotesque to me).
 
So no pleasure. No fun. No intervening hand, no choice-making that is not subservient to supposedly neutral and mature procedure. Just work, the work being the argument that a collective commons Encyclopedia matters; is Babel convincing on that front? I already agreed, as I imagine most poets (aka the entire audience for poetry) do. So if we cannot appraise the book as a pleasure object, and we cannot evaluate its effectiveness as an argument for WikiWorthiness,
 
where does that leave us? Here, with one another, gawking at so many spent violet links on the horizon; where oh where our untrod lupin blue portal? Would the daydream of such a path be as beautiful unshouldered by so many of her sisters, purpled with chill?

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​bonnyCD lives and works in rural Alberta (Treaty 7 territory). They are a proud founder of the reading series Feud Court (@feudcourt), alongside Jimmy T. Cahill and MLA Chernoff. Their recent books include The Repoetic: After Saint-Pol-Roux (Gordon Hill), GLADDENER (Anstruther), and Banazir Galbasi Doubtfiring with the Farmerettes (solipCYST). They are the most recent winner of the Grain Hybrid Experimental contest, and a previous winner of Geist’s Short Long-Distance Writing contest. They are currently at work on a short pamphlet advocating for wage transparency amongst writers, plus evil, purple short fictions.