Wershler-Henry, Darren 1966–

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Wershler-Henry, Darren 1966–

(Darren Sean Wershler-Henry)

PERSONAL:

Born 1966, in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada; son of a Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer. Education: University of Manitoba, B.A. (first-class honors), 1988; University of Alberta, M.A., 1989; York University, Ph.D., 2005.

ADDRESSES:

E-mail—[email protected]; [email protected].

CAREER:

Worked as a technical writer, c. 1996-97; Coach House Books, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, senior editor, 1998-2002; Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, assistant professor of communications, 2002—.

WRITINGS:

Nicholodeon: A Book of Lowerglyphs (poetry), Coach House Books (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1997.

(With Scott Mitchell) Internet Directory 2000, Prentice Hall Canada (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1999.

(With Mark Surman) Commonspace: Beyond Virtual Community, Financial Times (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2000.

The Tapeworm Foundry andor the Dangerous Prevalence of Imagination (poetry), House of Anansi Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2000.

(With Hal Niedzviecki) The Original Canadian City Dweller's Almanac: Facts, Rants, Anecdotes and Unsupported Assertions for Urban Residents, illustrated by Marc Ngui, Viking Canada (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2002.

Free as in Speech and Beer: Open Source, Peer-to-Peer and the Economics of the Online Revolution, Prentice Hall (New York, NY), 2002.

(Editor, with Mark Higgins and Stephen Pender) The Common Sky: Canadian Writers against the War, Three Squares Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2003.

(With Bill Kennedy) Apostrophe (includes links to hypertext poetry site), ECW Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2006.

The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting, Cornell University Press (Ithaca, NY), 2007.

Contributor of essays, articles, and poetry to periodicals, including Sulfur, Prairie Fire, Quill & Quire, Grain, Boston Review, Brick, Boundary 2, Open Letter, Matrix, Postmodern Apocalypse, Semiotext(e) Canada(s), West Coast Line, Gone to Croatan: Origins of American Dropout Culture, and Rampike.

SIDELIGHTS:

A writer, educator, and former editor, Darren Wershler-Henry has explored cutting-edge poetry in such experimental forms as concrete poems and hypertext. Since his college days, he has been fascinated by how technology—from the typewriter to the computer—has influenced our writing and even our culture, as ideas blend with technology to create new forms of expression. While still a graduate student, for instance, he and another poet named Christian Bök wrote the "Virus 23 Meme," which they then had published on a mailing list in 1993. The "meme" was a raw idea they implanted in the list and that then was spread to recipients of the magazine Future, spreading the idea to others like a virus.

The former editor of the innovative Canadian publishing house Coach House Books, as a poet Wershler-Henry is particularly known for his experiments in concrete poetry, or verses for which the visual component of the written word is important to grasp their meaning. For example, in one poem he repeats the word "sun" over and over and then has the word "moon" also repeat. On the page, the two words come closer and closer together, and eventually the word "moon" eclipses the "sun." The author explained in an interview reprinted on the Rock Critics Web site that "what concrete poetry does when it works, is it reveals the everyday aspect of language." He added: "I think what concrete poetry does is it says … language is a material thing, as material as the table we're sitting at or the pen that you write with. And words are tools, they're things—you can do things with them."

Long interested in computer technology and the Internet, Wershler-Henry worked with poet Bill Kennedy to produce the innovative work Apostrophe. The printed version actually includes some of the results from 2002 of an Internet experiment posted at http://www.apostropheengine.ca. The Web site includes a long poem written by Kennedy, and when a reader comes across a line that interests him or her, or that he or she feels is relevant to his or her life, the reader then clicks that line. Wershler-Henry created the novel links that then use search engines to find relevant text associated with the line from the poem; then the program actually "writes" a new poem for the reader. In essence, the Internet itself is a coauthor of the poem. "Net effect? A weird sense of déjà vu, reflected through cyberspace," remarked Rachel Pulfer on the Taddle Creek Web site. She added: "Hyperlinking the lines of a poem to a search engine, and enabling readers to generate their own poems riffing off one of those lines, takes a pretty creative brain." Calling the concept "ingenious," Pop Matters writer Jason B. Jones felt there was value to the printed version of Apostrophe as well. For one thing, it archives the results of previous visitors' reactions to the Web site; secondly, "the uncanny coherence of the poems anthropomorphizes the author, that is, the web itself."

It is not just new technology that influences writing, though, as Wershler-Henry's The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting explains. Originally written as his doctoral dissertation, the book, with a number of revisions, was not published until 2007. Here, Wershler-Henry describes the complex history of the typewriter's evolution, but he also goes into the many influences it has had on society. For example, in the early twentieth century typing pools were mostly comprised of women, and this helped bring them into the workforce, thus eventually lending impetus to the feminist movement. Wershler-Henry also discusses how the mechanical writing device, replacing the pen and pencil, influenced the way writers ranging from Mark Twain to Jack Kerouac and Truman Capote composed their works. A central theme in the book is "the notion that typewriters made writers feel they were being dictated to," according to Joan Acocella in a New Yorker review. Acocella also related Wershler-Henry's thesis that "there was a mythology that what was typewritten was true, that the machine somehow caused writers to bare their souls." Acocella further commented, "Both these ideas are surprising—furthermore, they seem to contradict each other—but Wershler-Henry never really tries to prove them or reconcile them." In the New York Times Book Review Joshua Glenn reported that Wershler-Henry concludes that the replacement of the typewriter with the computer is a positive development: "Unlike typewriting, a discourse whose rules are determined ‘by mechanical devices and hierarchies,’ he writes reassuringly, ‘computing is a discourse whose rules are determined by the functioning of software and networks.’"

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Danforth Review, January 1, 2006, Derek Beaulieu, "Type Cast: Darren Wershler-Henry," interview and review of The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting.

New Yorker, April 9, 2007, Joan Acocella, "The Typing Life," review of The Iron Whim.

New York Times Book Review, May 6, 2007, Joshua Glenn, "Prison Made of Type," p. 26.