IN THE BEGINNING
There was either one or none, 1 / 0
Ok, so lets get started. That has been the problem. I want to begin right at the beginning. The beginning of the story that I have been writing out of since 1972. That’s like the previous century, no, it’s the previous millennia for Data’s sake.
I was attending Loyalist College of Arts and Technology, Communications Arts course in Belleville. I took script writing, radio production, journalism, video production, photography, and data processing, which was outside the course. (I also took a couple semesters of sociology and psychology, which was a horror and made me sick.)
The technology began to inform the way I began to perceive the world. It also began to inform my poetry. I began to write ‘prose-poetry’. I wrote several pieces, one of them was in the form of a spontaneous computer printout. In idiomspeak, it’s called the Politics of Spring.
It was in this piece that I asked questions. “If a poet were the Premier of something . . .” It was shortly after this that I began to conceive of the glorious Imagine Nation of the Peoples Republic of Poetry.
The font is OCR (Optical Character Recognition), machine readable back in olden times. Vowels were removed for efficiency’s sake. Italics was the organic language. This document was hand-made on an IBM Selectric one letter at a time. The page had to be fed into the Selectric precisely so that there was no ‘slant’ showing on the lefthand margin. White-out or back-up were disallowed, so that meant many remakes until it was perfect, that it gave every appearance of being a legit computer printout.
I like how Wally Keeler worked at getting his prose-poetry exactly the way he wanted it to appear. Since it’s HIS way of using the most effective and efficient way of using words and style to communicate exactly what he wants/needs to communicate, I appreciate the perfectionism of his approach. And at our age (very close), why not? It’s one of the few advantages of aging!!