Last Scattering Surfaces

By (author): Gil McElroy

In the Standard Model of Big Bang Cosmology, about 300,000 years after its birth the temperature of the universe had dropped to the point where the first simple elements were formed, matter became cool enough for light to at last move freely, and the universe itself became transparent to radiation. This transition during the infancy of the universe is called the “surface of last scattering.”

These poems map out such zones of last interaction. In the texts, the visual and semantic vectors of authorial intention run headlong into the messy and mundane material stuff of everyday life. In the apparent cause and effect of the resultant textual interactions between writer and reader, each influences the consequent shape, direction and possible outcome of the other. Any meaning is therefore entirely contingent upon the readers’ engagement of the text, without which it is uncertain these texts exist at all. From his ongoing long poem “The Julian Days,” framing abstract and representational takes on life and death with a calendar system that is cumulative rather than cyclical; to poems that respond to the auras of the visual and the aural that envelope language; to a poetic narrative enacting a history of what Charles Olson called “the human universe”; McElroy engages what words mean. There are no cause-and-effect events in the universe, he reminds us—there are only interactions.

AUTHOR

Gil McElroy

A military brat, Gil McElroy was born in Metz, France, and grew up on air force bases in Canada and the United States. He studied English literature at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. His critical writing on art has been published in magazines in Canada, the United States and Australia, and he has worked as an independent curator since the 1980s, organizing exhibitions for galleries in Ontario and the Maritimes. From 1997 to 2000, he was Curator at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery and Museum in Charlottetown, PEI. He won the Christina Sabat Award for Art Criticism in 2001 for his curatorial essay on the visual poetry of bpNichol, “Ground States: The Visual Contexts of bpNichol.” He is also an artist, exhibiting gallery and site-specific installations based on his interests in cosmology. He has published poetry widely in Canadian and American periodicals and anthologies, and a book-length collection of his recent poetry, Dream Pool Essays, was released by Talonbooks in the fall of 2001. He currently lives in Colborne, Ontario.


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“A master of the craft … [McElroy] is very, very intelligent and his ear is infallible.”
Arc


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In the Standard Model of Big Bang Cosmology, about 300,000 years after its birth the temperature of the universe had dropped to the point where the first simple elements were formed, matter became cool enough for light to at last move freely, and the universe itself became transparent to radiation. This transition during the infancy of the universe is called the “surface of last scattering.”

These poems map out such zones of last interaction. In the texts, the visual and semantic vectors of authorial intention run headlong into the messy and mundane material stuff of everyday life. In the apparent cause and effect of the resultant textual interactions between writer and reader, each influences the consequent shape, direction and possible outcome of the other. Any meaning is therefore entirely contingent upon the readers’ engagement of the text, without which it is uncertain these texts exist at all. From his ongoing long poem “The Julian Days,” framing abstract and representational takes on life and death with a calendar system that is cumulative rather than cyclical; to poems that respond to the auras of the visual and the aural that envelope language; to a poetic narrative enacting a history of what Charles Olson called “the human universe”; McElroy engages what words mean. There are no cause-and-effect events in the universe, he reminds us—there are only interactions.

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Details

Dimensions:

112 Pages
9in * 229mm * 6in * 152mm * 0.375in10mm
206gr
7.375oz

Published:

November 15, 2007

City of Publication:

Vancouver

Country of Publication:

CA

Publisher:

Talonbooks

ISBN:

9780889225756

9780889227118 – EPUB

Book Subjects:

POETRY / Canadian

Featured In:

All Books

Language:

eng

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