In addition to the film I made documenting a reading of Zane Koss’s artist book Ephemera titled The Act of Reading Ephemera by Zane Koss I would like to jot down a few words that have occurred to me while thinking about his book.
As one can plainly see when viewing the film, or if they encounter Ephemera themselves, the book is big. Not bible big, nor hardback storybook big, not even phonebook big or OED resting its tired spine on a lectern big, but another sort of big entirely, which is to say not particularly thick but perhaps taller than a bookcase and in wingspan more appropriate as a sail if only it was made of the proper material. Its size is novel, but not cheap. It is essential. It is the book.
I get the sense from having spoken to various writers over the years, that is, I am certain, that many, encountering such work, work that exaggerates form and or explodes the book in one way or another (be it form or content) fixate on that word I used above, novel. Oh, what a strange thing it is! How odd. How funny. These are appropriate and predictable initial responses to work that delivers the reader outside of their comfort zone before they have even opened it. Unfortunately, many stop there.
Koss’s book is big. It is a big book with few words, each of them written largely, sometimes only a single word to a page. Even these largely written words are dwarfed by the colossal size of each page. Furthermore, the words don’t say much. They don’t do a lot of dancing. They reference the act of reading the book that they are in. Here is the text in its entirety,
this space / between / here and / another / ephemeral / a fold / touch / this / trace where / a body once / how / one / differs / is
In a sense, within the book, the text functions much like Lorem ipsum. Words, but placeholders, a dummy text that allows the reader to read without having communicated very much particularly. And anyway, as the poet himself pointed out, the words are so far apart, and so much labour goes into turning each page, that by the time you encounter the next word or phrase you’ve forgotten how it connects to what came previously. It is a short book, but the reader is lost immediately, page by page.
As I wrote above, the size of the book is the book. Despite its size it is almost impossible to hold onto. The endeavour readers are so comfortably familiar with that it requires no thought, the act of picking up a book, opening it, reading the words and turning the pages… is suddenly a foreign act in which the reader becomes consumed, lost, unmoored. The meaning the reader came for drifts away on the wind of the pages. The labour of manipulating the book transforms it into an ephemeral experience that never quite arrives. The reader circles the open book, a frustrated animal that cannot get at its prey, which is appropriate because it is a vast landscape, tundra, through which you must move.
While a book generally pulls you inwards, into its words, its narration and images, so that the reader in reading almost disappears, Koss’s Ephemera points outwards, outside of the book, directly at the body that hardly knows what to do with itself now that it has been made so unceremoniously the protagonist.
And I was moved.
It
is a courageous book, not afraid of being absurd. And it is absurd and
courageous. And even successful. And more risks in this direction are needed
desperately. As the geo-political trend is increasingly towards the right, as
AI promises to fulfill the technocratic, techno-bureaucratic, total
surveillance state the blueprint of which we’ve already read in our favourite
sci-fi/ dystopian fictions, works like Ephemera give some sorely needed
hope in action.
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Sacha Archer is a Canadian writer and concrete poet. He resides in Hamilton, Ontario with his wife and two daughters. Archer’s most recent book is marcel marcel marcel (Simulacrum Press). Some of Archer’s other publications include Second Sight (Redfox Press), Havana Syndrome (The Blasted Tree), Sweet Sixteen (Zimzalla), Mother’s Milk (Timglaset), which was included on CBC’s best poetry books of 2020 list, and In Remembrance of Lost Children (Paper View Books). He has been a judge for the Hamilton Literary Awards and Grain Magazine’s hybrid/experimental writing contest. Archer’s concrete poetry has been exhibited in galleries internationally. Find him on Facebook and Instagram @sachaarcher.
