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When Calgary poet Kyle Flemmer was attending high school, he and his friends would challenge each other to games of Wiki Racing.

It seems a suitably word-nerdy endeavour for a future poet, but it was also arguably the first spark that led to his recent collection, The Wiki of Babel. Wiki Racing has players trying to find the shortest route between two unrelated Wikipedia pages, travelling through the sprawling online encyclopedia exclusively through blue links found in the body text.

“You would hop from one article to the next and the next until you would arrive at the destination, the target article,” says Flemmer. “Whoever got there quickest or had the fewest clicks won. So while we were in the computer labs supposedly working on our papers, we were often just playing this game on Wikipedia.”

Fast-forward 15 years or so, and Flemmer was locked down during the pandemic and suffering from COVID-19.

“I was a little delirious, and I was playing around on Wikipedia and decided I would play this game to entertain myself and take notes, and maybe I could use some of those notes as material for a poem. I realized as I was building it up, the notes themselves were these fun poems. I didn’t need to do anything for them to become a poem. They already were.”

The Wiki of Babel is a series of poems made up of text fragments generated through various word-association games and “chance operations” that Flemmer employed as he navigated the hyperlink structure of wikis using browser-based tools. The five series all have specific themes. The first, Suggested Languages, takes inspiration from no less a source than the Tower of Babel. That’s the Old Testament story about God derailing humanity’s efforts to unite by dividing their language as they attempt to build a tower to heaven, thus resulting in the human race speaking multiple languages. Actually, the original inspiration was Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges’ short story The Library of Babel, which is about people living in an endless library who get lost in a maze of literature containing every possible combination of text. Flemmer was always fascinated by the story’s idea of being surrounded by excessive information, but it eventually brought him back to the biblical source.

“One of the things I noticed on Wikipedia is that there are articles in many different languages,” he says. “Something clicked in me. If the Tower of Babel story is about the division of language and information into discreet groups that can’t communicate with each other, Wikipedia really does a great job of the reverse: Bringing different cultures and knowledges and languages together in such a way that we better understand each other.”

It seems like a heavy theme, but the approach Flemmer took on this series and all the others in the book was playful. He began with an article on Wikipedia that had been translated into many languages. He would pick a phrase at random to start the poem and then add to it by visiting translated pages from the dropdown menu of languages and adding another phrase. Another series, Current Events, uses Wikipedia’s current events portal, a random number generator and a text line shuffler to create sonnets. Flemmer used the number generator to provide a number between three and 14 and copied that many words from a news summary, repeating the process on multiple news summaries until he had dozens of lines. Then he would use the text line shuffler to randomize the order of the lines and delete all but the first 14 of them.

The playful randomness of the poems is meant to explore themes of collective knowledge and reader interactivity, which are also ideas that govern Wikipedia in general. The book gives a generally positive view of Wikipedia, which has had its naysayers over the years. Flemmer says he probably visits the site every day and calls it “a bastion of free, public, accessible, and factual information.” In his acknowledgements, he even suggests readers donate to the Wikimedia Foundation.

The Wiki of Babel is certainly conceptual and perhaps falls into the vague category of experimental poetry. For those who believe verse should be made up of carefully considered words and phrases loaded with deliberate meaning, this may seem somewhat antithetical.

“What I’m trying to get people to think about is what counts as a poem, or what should be going on in your head as you’re reading the poem or what is the point you’re supposed to arrive at at the end of a poem,” Flemmer says. “Particularly with this book, I imagine the poems living more so in the reader’s head than even on the page. I made all of these associative leaps as I’m writing the book, and there is something between the lines that is maybe not obvious or unique to my process. But as someone else reads these poems, they are going through their own set of leaps: How are these two things connected? Why are they close to each other? What does this mean?”

Flemmer did his undergrad studies at Concordia in Montreal before grad work at the University of Calgary, which has long been a hotbed of experimental poetry. In 2014, he founded The Blasted Tree Publishing Co., which focuses on experimental poetry and visual art. He was also a past managing editor of filling Station, a literary magazine focused on publishing experimental poetry. His past books, including Barcode Poetry and TzAR: Pixel Art Anthology, explore the connection between language and technology.

“A lot of the things we’re talking about are pretty heady: How does information technology work and what does that mean for literature and this sort of stuff,” Flemmer says. “I just want to emphasize that I want it to be fun. I try to imbue it with a sense of humour, and I hope that readers approach it with an open mind and enjoy themselves rather than interrogate like (in) high-school English class: ‘What does the poem mean?’ It’s more like ‘look at the stuff on the page and isn’t it silly to read through it, or silly and profound?’ It’s the human experience in a way. I don’t want people to find the work forbidding because it has that conceptual framing around it.”

The Wiki of Babel by Kyle Flemmer is available from University of Calgary Press.

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