Kyle Flemmer is a Calgary-based writer, publisher, and digital media artist. So far, he has not risen to the notability standard set by Wikipedia.

“My goal for this book was to shake up my creative practice by circumventing the obsessive need to control every single word,” he notes. “My second book, Supergiants, took a decade to write, and I still agonize over particular word choices and rhythms.”

By contrast, The Wiki of Babel only took a couple of months to draft.

“Its writing felt automatic and fun, like a well-rehearsed gymnastic routine set deep in my muscle memory, but without any of that pesky rehearsal,” Flemmer says. “It was liberating and validating to let these poems unfold with minimal guidance.”

The Wiki of Babel also benefited from the input of editor Helen Hajnoczky, whom Flemmer had known for almost a decade before they worked on this book.

“She balanced a reassuring appreciation for my vision with a keen sense of my blind spots and a sensitivity for the needs of my potential readership,” Flemmer says. 

“It is a rare treat to have an editor who is all things: a good friend, a perceptive editor, a talented poet, and an industry ally. Perhaps it breaches professional decorum to say this, but Helen is a sister to me, and I could not be happier with her involvement in this book.”

While he is humble in acknowledging his influences, Flemmer isn’t immune to questions of notability.

“On a more public level,” he says, “I hope this book continues the overall trajectory of my work, which is to bring the fringes of experimental poetic form to the people in a way that feels more inviting than forbidding.” 

But his third poetry collection may change all that. While Flemmer was inspired by work by Jorge Luis Borges and John Cage, and by Oulipo’s literary experiments, Wikipedia was a critical text for The Wiki of Babel.

“The entirety of my book has been copied and pasted directly from Wikipedia articles; these poems simply could not exist without it,” Flemmer says, noting that he has been using the online encyclopedia almost daily for the last two decades.

The techniques Flemmer was using to build his poems weren’t new, but the way he was using them was.

“The Oulipo movement, founded in the 1960s and which produced imaginative writing under abstract restrictions, was very much rooted in print culture,” Flemmer notes. 

“The N+7 technique I have adapted to my purposes originally required the selection of two print books, a dictionary and a source text to modify. It assumed a fixed, linear organization of source texts and imposed a set of rules to reorganize those texts to produce new ones.”

But that’s not how online encyclopedias work: instead of alphabetically arranged entries on subsequent pages, they use hypertext links to combine linear texts with a multitude of other linear texts. 

Flemmer says that’s a “fundamental ingredient” separating digital texts from print ones and that by combining the two, he was able to take a reverent look back while trying something original and surprising.

And while writing The Wiki of Babel was interesting formally, it also helped Flemmer loosen up as a writer.