The Tapeworm Foundry: And or the Dangerous Prevalence of Imagination

by Darren Wershler-Henry

A brilliant list of book proposals, Darren Wershler-Henry's the tapeworm foundry challenges current poetic rules of form and subject matter and turns a seemingly utilitarian handbook for writers into a powerful artistic expression of defiance. Both a recipe book for poets and a critical examination of the recipes we've inherited, this is an eloquent and absurdist long poem on the parasitic nature of all expression and the anxiety of influence.

Genres: Poetry

34 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2000

Reviews

[Ky · Rating 3 out of 5]

ask for poetry recommendations from your hinge match only to find that the recommendation is not poetry in fact it is a series of funny little ramblings that are meant to act as suggestions with creative output to which you will scratch your head and perhaps seek to write your own collective recipes for rambling works andor outline your legs on your velvet couch by spilling droplets of turmeric chai along your skin and letting them soak the fabric as you read the world’s longest run on sentence aloud while loungenjoying gifted nectarines that are not yet ripe andor write your very own run on sentence in the notes app of your iphone 13 rather than properly articulating that you enjoyed yourself but are confused and didn’t understand some of the larger words but you won’t admit to this because you want to come across as smart with a gargantuan vocabulary that is no match for this manic whirlwind of a so called poem andor perform the world’s dorkiest trust exercise by lending him your library copy because it turns out he never even finished the book what the hell is that about and

[Milanimal · Rating 3 out of 5]

"write an essay on the collected works of jane austen treating the text as a tour de force lipogram that never once makes use of any characters in the sinhalese alphabet"

A who's who of avant garde poetry, assorted Canadiana, too-smart-for-you literary in jokes. All killer, some filler. The kind of book you stumble upon while browsing ubuweb, read a couple dozen pages until you 'get it', then suggest half jokingly to someone you want to date even though it's a long form academic shitpost but when they double down and finish it you do the same and enjoy the rest despite three too many references to Klingons

[Mark · Rating 2 out of 5]

Each time I hit you and you laugh and I retch
And you run and the stairs trip you up “no no no”
They say, the carpet down the middle like a patch
Of fur entraps you it comes alive that tapeworm
Flat as a stomach rent by bullets and bulldozed–

The title and tone of "The Tapeworm Foundry" (not to be confused with the Cheesecake Factory) reminded me of the above deranged poetry I wrote a couple years ago. "Foundry" essentially is a litany of one, a long runon list of poem/performance art ideas a la Yuko Ono's "poetry." The reader notices two things immediately: the "poem" begins mid-sentence (or at the very least initially doesn't make any sense), and the "ideas" are all separated by "andor"; A quick glance at the end of the "poem" reveals that it ends where Finnegan's Wake begins, (where the ending wraps around to the start). Specifically, Wershler-Henry references the start of FW: "...restarting with the words riverrun past eve and adams but..." So, if you know even a tiny bit about Finnegan's Wake, you can be sure the contents of this will be strange; unfortunately, there is a bit of range in the quality of these "andor" ideas/poems, with some being quite kitsch or annoying (especially the excessively referential parts), but others are quite fun. Essentially, the "book" reads quite like Finnegan's Wake, where reading A to Z is missing the point; you're to take it off of the shelf, open it at random, scan until something catches your eye, then build off of that inspiration. As such, it doesn't keep up the same sort of tension or consistent quality that a similar book like Neruda's "Book of Questions" may, because these all run into each other. Thankfully, each of the "ideas" are short enough it's not much wasted time to go through a dozen duds, but they do pile up after a bit. Mildly enjoyable, but not really innovative or avant-garde. I'll leave some misc/faves below:


litter a keyboard with milletseed so that exotic songbirds might tap out their odes to a nightingale

discuss the magnetic fields emitted by each vowel when surrounding consonants like iron filings and then note that sometimes the letter y emanates a magnetism of its own

insert chapbooks into the newspapers sold in vending boxes on the

rewrite don quixote from the viewpoint of the windmills andor print a set of instructions for dry cleaning the sacred shroud of turin

construe a word by word synonymic replacement for finnegans wake

write an encyclopedic novel about a whale but maintain throughout that the whale is a fish not a mammal

dial a number at random and then finagle your way into reading poems to the person who answers

document what is going on in a room not necessarily but possibly the one that you might be occupying

sandblast the scrawled missives of schizophreniacs onto sheets of coloured glass in church windows

then shuffle the pages before you bind them

write with your head between your hands

look closely at the most embarrassing details and then amplify them

replace sigourney weaver with jacques derrida and then make a film about him chasing hegelians through the airducts of a spaceship in order to immolate these vermin with a flamethrower

do your part to end joblessness by posting a classified ad calling for applications to a training school for such fabulous obsolete or bizarre profess ions as anchorite or apostate or bearbaiter or bodyservant or carnival geek or chirurgeon or contact lensman or elvis impersonator impersonator or fudgepacker or ghoul or hangman or hayward

write with inane but appropriate naivete

contradict yourself for you are vast and contain multitudes

document your participation in an illegal activity and then render the document nearly but only nearly illegible through the application of artistic means before you show the document to the cops

kidnap someone and then make them happy

take a cow that damien hirst has cut in half and then use it to make a squishier equivalent of a humongous potatoprint

translate the æneid into pig latin

scrawl graffiti all over someone elses liberal utopia

if anyone complains plead agoraphobia

write a comic book in a which a famous novelist who has committed crimes against his muse must write in his own blood on the walls of the city because he has been cursed with an endless flow of ideas for stories like the one about a city in which the streets are paved with time or the one about a train full of silent women plowing forever through the twilight or the one about a computer made of light or the one about small green pieces of paper or the one about a sweet plum cold and tart or the one about a weregoldfish that transforms into a dogfish at the full moon or the one about two old women taking a weasel on a holiday or the one about why griffins never marry and why succubi never dance or the one about a man who inherits a library card to the library of alexandria or the one about a nightingale and a rosebush and a dog collar or the one about a man who falls in love with a blue dress or the one about horsetooth soup or the one about a biography of keats from the viewpoint of the lamia or the one about an old man in scarborough who owns the universe and keeps it in a jam jar locked inside the cupboard under his stairwell andor start a society for the ethical treatment of pokemon

find the intelligence to recognize the truth and the courage to write the truth and the art to use the truth as a weapon and the judgement to choose those in whose hands the weapon becomes effective and the cunning to spread the weapon among them andor never spell the same word the same way twice

prepare a ballistics report comparing the head wound of apollinaire to that of mayakovsky andor look busy because jesus is coming andor write a play about two guys who spend all of their time trying to get rid of godot

walk a lobster on a leash along the banks of the seine

get a sympathetic postman to help you defend what you have done

[Jessica Bebenek · Rating 5 out of 5]

So fantastic. A piece of conceptual poetry which is not only readable, but smart, funny, and ultimately witty.