In Stereo
by Paul Hegedus
Toronto: Book Thug, 2008; ISBN 978-1-897388-23-5; 76 pp.;$18.00 paper.

The history of post-modernism began long before the world had ever heard of Derrida, Barthes, Foucault, Lyotard, etc. In fact, it may be considered to have begun in 1857 in Geneva--with the birth of Ferdinand de Saussure. We don't know precisely when he created his concepts of the signifier and the signified, langue and parole, although we know that these concepts were first published posthumously in 1916 by two of his students in the book that became known to the English-speaking world as Course in General Linguistics. But it wasn't until this work was rediscovered by Derrida and others that its postulates became widely disseminated.

In the work translated by Gayatri Spivak as Of Grammatology, Derrida grasped onto Saussure's theories, incorporating them into his philosophy derived from Husserl and Heidegger and thereby inaugurating the era of the post-modern. Through his theory of binarisms, such as in the pair 'good/evil,' where the first term takes precedence over the second, Derrida expounded the slippage of the signified and the signifier, resulting in a sign without reference.

Enter Paul Hegedus, with his first full book. Words tumble upon the page like acrobats, leaving tracers of memory--representations of movement with no hint of where to or where from.

In Stereo begins with a quotation from Steve McCaffery's The Cheat of Words: "This recording was recorded live / distance wind switched part / a village where / this record was recoded." It proceeds with what the BookThug website refers to as "Found language from a wide variety of source texts forms a mashup of manipulated sampled materials: from CD copyright lingo to pop culture text to sound ecology, 'pataphysics, Sun Ra and Gertrude Stein."

The opening salvo in this verbal barrage is titled "[Right Channel 1]." A splattering of words falls like Jackson Pollock paint splotches upon the page:

repeat slapstick sequencer limits frequency repeat run
on print formula one step giant leap for mandate repeat
a waxy cylinder scrape by soundscape repeat container
repeat disbelief it or not perforated paper rolls before
speakers repeat speech as first established late nineteenth
century reeling repeat (9)

A link is established here with the "late nineteenth century" theories of Saussure. We sense the rupture of word with meaning, the slippage of signified from signifier leaving us with merely the remnants of words as sound bites. This is Franz Kline at his ethereal best--paint swatches become words.

Hegedus appears to have been influenced by the post-language poetics of the Kootenay School of Writing. Listen to the puns and other poetic devices on page 13:

in sights this played

resonant rupture colours voices rising shift
of speech lies elsewhere

a cardboard cut out

time keeping control functions
variable artillery

premature articulation

Perhaps it's not paucity but a plurality of meaning that resonates within that second and third line where the enjambment exemplifies that rupture, that shift. Is it speech that lies elsewhere or 'speech lies' that exist elsewhere? These are merely possibilities that exist within the rising voices of those lines.

While the right channel owes its existence to McCaffery, the left bears a debt to Gertrude Stein. "[Left Channel 2]" begins with the following quote from Stein's Ida: "She liked to talk and to sing songs and she / liked to change places. Wherever she was she / always liked to change places. Otherwise / there was nothing to do all day." (50) We can see how this segment influenced Hegedus from these two excerpts from the poem on p. 51: "Space is displaced. Question / notion, position /isolation." and "Out of time equals out / of order. Whistle shoulders appearance / demo omission." Hegedus plays here with the changing of places, both in space and time.

The weakness of the book is found in this section. It would have been interesting if the reference to Stein were more than the acquisition of the concept of change. The only time Hegedus enters Steinian language is on p. 57:

i says what am i says what am i says
what am i says where am i says where
am i says where am i says where am i
says how am i says how am i says how...

Experimental poetry has and will always raise the question "what is poetry?" In Paul Hegedus's case, it is a compressed articulation of sound manifesting itself in words. This comes complete with rhyme, puns, assonance and dissonance--the standard devices of poetic history--expressed in a new and exciting way.

John Herbert Cunningham is a Winnipeg writer. He reviews poetry in Canada for Malahat Review, Arc, Antigonish Review, Fiddlehead and The Danforth Review, in the U.S. for Quarterly Conversations, Rain Taxi, Rattle, Big Bridge and Galatea Revisits, and in Australia for Jacket.

Buy this book at McNally-Robinson Booksellers.

Back to Reviews Index