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 present
b) a poem written in 1993 in which every sentence is an apostrophe c) a
program -- apostropheengine.ca -- based on the 1993 poem that hijacks
search engines in order to extend the poem infinitely d) 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.
