NonZero Definitions

By (author): Gil McElroy

The 19th-century German mathematician Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann’s ideas had a profound effect on the development of modern theoretical physics and provided the concepts and methods used later in Einstein’s relativity theory and Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle.” Riemann is popularly known for his challenge of Euclidean geometry’s axiomatic (“given” or “natural”) presumption of space, hinging on the question of the value of zero. In the simplest possible terms, in this realm of theoretical physics and mathematics, zero represents not the absence of something in and for itself, but only the potentiality of some thing existing in relation to some other thing. This means that what is “known” or “perceived” by any observer can only ever be defined by and through that act of perception, and not by its absence, which can never be experienced but can only ever be postulated. Thus everything we can communicate about the known world consists entirely of a cascade of perpetually unfolding “non zero definitions.”

Fiction writers such as James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, William Burroughs, and poets such as William Carlos Williams and Robert Creeley have applied these theories from the physical sciences to their acts of writing, but the pyrotechnics of their progressive narrative deconstructions and reconstructions have remained muted by a lingering textual self-awareness. Not until the work of Gil McElroy’s clearly present mentor, bpNichol, did the language of poetics emerge into the light of the purely formalist and luminous “definitions” of things and their movements in which McElroy excels so brilliantly. In the poems of McElroy’s NonZero Definitions, things can never cease to be; they only can, and do, gloriously engage in the ceaseless metamorphosis of replication in all of their luminous present and endlessly unfolding possibilities.

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 infalliable … “
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The 19th-century German mathematician Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann’s ideas had a profound effect on the development of modern theoretical physics and provided the concepts and methods used later in Einstein’s relativity theory and Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle.” Riemann is popularly known for his challenge of Euclidean geometry’s axiomatic (“given” or “natural”) presumption of space, hinging on the question of the value of zero. In the simplest possible terms, in this realm of theoretical physics and mathematics, zero represents not the absence of something in and for itself, but only the potentiality of some thing existing in relation to some other thing. This means that what is “known” or “perceived” by any observer can only ever be defined by and through that act of perception, and not by its absence, which can never be experienced but can only ever be postulated. Thus everything we can communicate about the known world consists entirely of a cascade of perpetually unfolding “non zero definitions.”

Fiction writers such as James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, William Burroughs, and poets such as William Carlos Williams and Robert Creeley have applied these theories from the physical sciences to their acts of writing, but the pyrotechnics of their progressive narrative deconstructions and reconstructions have remained muted by a lingering textual self-awareness. Not until the work of Gil McElroy’s clearly present mentor, bpNichol, did the language of poetics emerge into the light of the purely formalist and luminous “definitions” of things and their movements in which McElroy excels so brilliantly. In the poems of McElroy’s NonZero Definitions, things can never cease to be; they only can, and do, gloriously engage in the ceaseless metamorphosis of replication in all of their luminous present and endlessly unfolding possibilities.

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Details

Dimensions:

128 Pages
9in * 229mm * 5.9375in * 151mm * 0.375in10mm
184gr
6.5oz

Published:

March 15, 2004

City of Publication:

Vancouver

Country of Publication:

CA

Publisher:

Talonbooks

ISBN:

9780889224995

9780889227118 – EPUB

Book Subjects:

POETRY / Canadian

Featured In:

All Books

Language:

eng

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