The Obvious Flap
what if the rain
referred to something else?
and bowling
and shoes
were done with the mouth?
Sometimes language, thoughts, and emotions are a fixed structure like a warehouse. Sometimes they are fog, waves, light, or music. This is LSE: Language as a second English. English as a grammar of ghosts. Words as the snowfall of ideas.
The Obvious Flap is a musical, poetic flux of recurring and recursive images exploring language's luminous fringes of language. The text weaves a variety of thematic threads of humour, literary allusions, and narrative into a fabric that spreads into an open, proprioceptive linguistic environment. Gary Barwin and Gregory Betts have concocted a collaborative jam session for multiple larynxes and have made an obvious flap as they have fallen through the mirror into Plunderland.
not everyone is a poet
my dog for instance.
GARY BARWIN is a writer, composer, and performer. He is the author of numerous books and chapbooks of poetry and fiction including the poetry collections frogments from the frag pool: haiku after basho (written with derek beaulieu) and Raising Eyebrows and Outside the Hat and the fiction collections Doctor Weep and other strange teeth, Big Red Baby, and Cruelty to Fabulous Animals. He is the author of The Mud Game, a novel written with Stuart Ross. Barwin is also the author of several books for children including Seeing Stars, a young adult noveL nominated for an Arthur Ellis Award and the CLA YA Book of the Year, and Killer Poodle Made Me Island King, co-winner of the Muskoka Novel Marathon 2003. Barwin received a PhD in Music Composition and currently teaches music at Hillfield-Strathallan College and creative writing at McMaster University. Barwin lives in Hamilton, where he has cultivated vague but colourful illusions about his writing. Please don't tell him.
GREGORY BETTS is a poet, editor, essayist, and teacher, originally from Vancouver and Toronto. Since his first published poem, an anagrammatical translation of a short poem by bpNichol, Betts's work has consistently troubled individual authorship through such mechanisms as anagrams, collaboration, found-texts, and response-text writing. Betts currently lives in St. Catharines, where he edits PRECIPICe magazine, curates the Grey Borders Reading Series and teaches Avant-Garde and Canadian Literature at Brock University.
More books by author
