On Malice
Page 5
The sonnets source vocabulary from Walter Benjamin’s records of his son’s language acquisition between the ages of two and six (Walter Benjamin’s Archive: Images, Texts, Signs, Verso Books, 2007). Benjamin himself appears on page 49. The source text is then abandoned at each sonnet’s volta. The italicized ‘incident reports’ that appear in lieu of a traditional sonnet’s closing couplet imagine collisions between light aircraft and common swifts in what would have been Soviet airspace. The collisions begin in Siberia at ‘A’ and travel westward (through a malfunctioning clock) to Berlin and ‘Z’.
Perfect Blue Distant Objects: This poem makes use of the language in William Hazlitt’s conjectural essay on the mechanics of looking, ‘Why Distant Objects Please,’ Table Talk: Essays on Men and Manners, 1822. Perfect or pure blue has a wavelength of 470 nanometres.
Deep Packet Din: ‘Eternity is a child playing checkers; the kingdom belongs to a child.’ – Heraclitus
Five Eyes: ECHELON became AUSCANZUKUS, or AUSCANZUKUS became ECHELON, or they both, or one of the two, or something else altogether, evolved to become Five Eyes.
The poem restricts itself to vocabulary mined from John Donne’s essay ‘Biathanatos.’ Written in 1608, late in the poet’s life and after his ordination, and published posthumously in 1647, it is a philosophical and theological defence of suicide.
Acknowledgments
Earlier versions of some parts of this book appeared previously. I’m extremely grateful to the editors and staff of: EVENT, Maisonneuve, The Wolf (U.K.), Critical Quarterly (U.K.), Boston Review (U.S.), eleveneleven (U.S.), Hazlitt, Lemonhound, Cordite (Aus.).
Excerpts from ‘SIGINT’ appeared as a hand-bound chapbook from NO PRESS, with illustrations by Jonathan Ullyot. Deep thanks to derek beaulieu of NO PRESS.
An excerpt from ‘Perfect Blue Distant Objects’ was included in Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics, edited by Andrew Ridker, Black Ocean Press.
To Karen Solie, Kevin Connolly, Matthew Tierney, David O’Meara, Susan Holbrook, Jeramy Dodds, Srikanth Reddy, Dan Bejar, Laura Repas and Michael Helm, who all offered valuable readings and talk and camaraderie and intelligence, I’m immensely grateful.
Frederic Jameson’s Valences of the Dialectic broke a silence, or opened on to one.
The Berliner Künstler Programm of the German Academic Exchange Service (daad) in Berlin made a year of study and writing possible in a city I still dream about. Many thanks to everyone at the organization, and to the international and German writers and artists who made the year richer.
I acknowledge and thank the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for invaluable assistance during the writing of this book.
The brilliant and generous Andrew Zawacki, who served as editor for the press, brought an exquisitely tuned mind and immaculate timing to the final stages. I’m indebted to him.
Alana Wilcox at Coach House. Thank you, friend. You are immense.
Laura and Samuel. None better to share the days with.
About the Author
Ken Babstock’s most recent collection, Methodist Hatchet (Anansi, 2011), won the Griffin Prize for Excellence in Poetry and was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award. His previous collections of poetry include Mean (1999), winner of the Atlantic Poetry Prize and the Milton Acorn People’s Poet Award, Days into Flatspin (2001), winner of a K. M. Hunter Award and finalist for the Winterset Prize, and Airstream Land Yacht (2006), finalist for the Griffin Prize for Poetry, the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Winterset Prize, and winner of the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. His poems have been translated into Dutch, German, Serbo-Croatian, Czech and French, and he has appeared at festivals in Rotterdam, Brisbane, Sarajevo, New York and Brno. He was awarded a year-long international artist residency in Berlin by the DAAD. Ken was born in Newfoundland and now lives in Toronto.
Typeset in Arno and Eurostile
Printed at the Coach House on bpNichol Lane in Toronto, Ontario, on Zephyr Antique Laid paper, which was manufactured, acid-free, in Saint-Jérôme, Quebec, from second-growth forests. This book was printed with vegetable-based ink on a 1965 Heidelberg KORD offset litho press. Its pages were folded on a Baumfolder, gathered by hand, bound on a Sulby Auto-Minabinda and trimmed on a Polar single-knife cutter.
Edited for the press by Andrew Zawacki
Designed by Alana Wilcox
Drawing on pages 9, 23, 37 and 51 by Jonathan Ullyot
Cover art © E. L. Brown, Happentrance (2013), courtesy of the artist.
Private collection.
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