Calgary-based poet, publisher, and digital artist Kyle Flemmer has long been a vital member of his literary communities, both in Canada and abroad, and he has just released his second full-length book of poetry, Supergiants, with Wolsak & Wynn. Supergiantsis impressive for the way it represents Flemmer’s robust imagination and technical skill as a poet working at the intersection of language and visual media. Embracing a poetics of the clinamen, his collection gazes at the stars, contemplating terrestrial connections and projections to those places in the universe that often exceed our physical reach and challenge our imaginations. Flemmer’s poetry brings the unknown closer to us through experimental poetic sequences that both critique and appreciate space exploration. From lyrical poems like “Stellar Sequence,” which critiques billionaires, to poems that embrace a Saganite utopian vision of space exploration, Supergiants is a poetic constellation that transmits the sublimity of our upward gaze.
Writing each other from near-opposite sides of this country, so-called Canada, Flemmer and I corresponded to discuss Supergiants, and I am so privileged to have enjoyed both his passion and intellect as he discusses this stellar new book.
Eric Schmaltz: Before we begin discussing your new book, Supergiants (2025), I’d like to step back and think about your creative practice more broadly. Over the years, your work has often focused on the intersection of language and technology, especially digital and capitalist languages and technologies. Your book Barcode Poetry (2022) comprises poems that “masquerade as the hallmark of digitized consumerism” while being composed on a 1940 Remington. Supergiants comprises the technical language of engineering and astrophysics. And your forthcoming book, The Wiki of Babel, sounds like it focuses on the language of the internet and online culture. Can you speak to the intersection of technology and poetics that seems to underpin your practice? What is so captivating about it for you?
Kyle Flemmer: For as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated with books as a vehicle for information, be it fiction, history, art, or whatever. At the same time, I find text and information elsewhere in the world just as interesting, particularly stuff like the list of ingredients on a box of cereal or the safety infographic cards in airplanes. I’ll even admit to an early love for the systematic organization of information as found in dictionaries or the Dewey Decimal System. For some reason (perhaps a deeply Protestant investment in the primacy of the book), our society places special emphasis on texts that are bound between two covers, giving them pride of place in our collective understanding of authority and importance, while everything else is treated as somehow less weighty. While I do dearly love books, their categorical separation from other formats for the transmission of text feels wrong to me. The medium contributes to the message, of course, but is not its be-all and end-all.
Alongside my appreciation for books and other print publications, which have always been close at hand, I also grew up surrounded by consumer electronics, most notably: personal computers. From the age of ten and onwards, computers have been a fixture in my, and most of my generation’s, daily life. We took typing lessons, completed assignments in the school computer lab, played video games, and used instant messaging platforms way past bedtime. For a long time, I took the near-limitless possibilities of text in the digital environment for granted while failing to connect this moveable feast in any way with print culture, but when I eventually turned to publishing as a creative practice, the entanglement of print and digital text became obvious immediately. Since this realization hit home for me, all of my poetics and a sizable portion of my publishing activities have explored this entanglement. I write about the intersection of technology and poetics because I am trying to account for and represent the formal, compositional, and conceptual stakes of writing poetry in the digital era.
ES: By way of introducing your new book, how would you say your fascination with technology and your curiosity about the book as a medium intersect in Supergiants?
KF: Supergiants, like most of my poetry, blends visual and textual material. Not to downplay the importance of sound in poetry, but I am most interested in graphical representations of information as a form of communications technology, and one of the foundational technologies of civilization at that (in the Anthropological sense of civilization as the bureaucratic administration of an urban society). Historians regard pre-history as that time before the written word, before eye-witness accounts could survive the eye-witness themselves. History as we know it is characterized by our embrace of graphical forms of communication, from pictograms and hieroglyphics to alphabetics and morphosyllabics, cuneiform-inscribed clay tablets and group chat emojis, musical notation, quipu, barcodes, and so on.
Star-gazing is another one of those foundational qualities of human societies. Astronomy has evolved alongside writing and has given rise to many of its own systems of notation. Supergiants includes star charts, astronomical coordinate systems, rocket assembly diagrams, and other visual material that works in tandem with the text to emulate the way people really communicate with each other through graphical means, be they astronomers or otherwise. The book frames space exploration as a practice of documentation and communication at the limits of human experience. There is much to be said about Supergiants as it relates to technology more broadly, but this identification of writing with technology fascinates me.
ES: Framing your practice that way is compelling. It explicitly situates Supergiants – which otherwise looks like a hyper contemporary book – within a long tradition of human expression. I’m also thinking about reading in relation to your work. Astronomy and star-gazing strike me as disciplines that require an informed mode of reading – identifying constellations and recognizing patterns, for example. Each poem or sequence seems to engage with reading in different ways, but I’m thinking in particular of “Astral Projection” and “Coronagraphic.” Can you speak to how you think of reading in relation to this book?
KF: Reading is several things at once: looking, recognizing or “decoding,” and interpreting or “comprehending.” Cognitive science tends to focus on the decoding and comprehending aspects of reading, but Supergiants places looking at the forefront of the reading process. It’s my way of bringing the body and its sensory apparatus into the act as a necessary precondition for the mental processes that follow. “Coronagraphic,” for instance, presents excerpts from star charts as visual sonnets, literally substituting lines of sight into outer space for lines of text in the poem. The act of looking very much prefigures any meaning that can be read into this poem, just as the act of observation prefigures the identification of constellations.
I also prefer to think of reading as interpretation as opposed to comprehension, which implies the successful unpacking of the one true meaning, or perhaps of all possible meanings, conveyed by a text. Readers always bring to a text an interpretive framework that is partly cultural and partly personal. We might disagree on the precise definition of ‘god’ or ‘love’ or whatever, but we have enough shared understanding to enable discourse. “Astral Projection” applies this line of thinking to the asteroid belt, a jumbled region of detritus formed by the collision and breakup of larger, primitive rocks. The study of the asteroid belt has involved much observation and interpretation to determine which fragments came from which “parent” asteroid. The poem is itself a jumble of textual fragments and detritus, forcing the observer to assemble disparate parts into a reading that involves active interpretive leaps. It’s not so much a puzzle or a challenge to find the correct reading, but an invitation to navigate and interpret the text as one sees fit.
ES: Supergiants is a coherent book. While each section is significantly different from another and requires different reading strategies, it doesn’t feel like the book comprises various chapbooks. How do you conceive of this collection? Is there an interpretative thread or idea you hope readers will glean?
KF: That’s kind and also a bit funny for you to say because Supergiants very much consists of several chapbook-length projects smooshed together. I had a vague idea of a space-themed book in the back of my mind for years, but none of these chapbooks were explicitly written to fit alongside the others at first draft. It was only in retrospect that the unifying theme came clear: I am interested in astronomy as a particular mode of observation. In a way, these chapbooks are each about the mind-bending phenomena we have documented, how the process of witnessing and seeking to comprehend the cosmos drives the continuous reinvention of our understanding of ourselves and our relationship to everything else. If readers take anything away from the book, I hope it is a willingness to savour the act of star-gazing anew.
Despite each section having a different look and reading strategy, there is also an underlying theme behind the formal experimentation throughout Supergiants –– i.e., that communication is a modular technology. Words and imagery can be combined and re-arranged ad infinitum, as can the basic elemental parts of rocket assemblies, like rivets, tubes, and valves. I think a lot about Apollo 13’s failure to land and their need to jury-rig a modification to their carbon dioxide scrubber to make it back to Earth alive. Language, and life itself, is very much like this; using whatever materials are at hand to perpetuate itself. My editor, Paul Vermeersch, helped bring the final version of the book into line with this vision of language as technology through his insightful questions and feedback. The cohesiveness you point to came about late in the game and is largely thanks to this invaluable outside perspective.
ES: Are there poems or moments in this book that you see as a critique of space exploration? I can’t help but read parts of your poem “Lunar Flag Assembly Kit” that way –– the degradation of the flags, symbols of nationalism, colonial connotations. Do you see critique alongside the appreciation that certainly imbues this collection?
KF: Yes, in that implicit critique is there, and no, in that explicit critique is avoided. The book adopts a Saganite position on space exploration, assuming it to be the highest calling of our species. To paraphrase Carl Sagan, a meteor could easily wipe us out at any time, so colonizing the moon and other planets is the only viable insurance policy for our long-term survival. Human longevity aside, Sagan had a utopian vision of space exploration and did not sufficiently address the consequences of pursuing it within the geopolitical realities of our time.
Personally, I am more critical of space exploration than is the perspective I adopt throughout this book. I am aware of the gratuitous cost, geopolitical expediencies, military entrenchment, and nationalistic dimensions of space exploration. Nevertheless, I still believe that it is one of the most important undertakings in recent human history.
Personally, I am more critical of space exploration than is the perspective I adopt throughout this book. I am aware of the gratuitous cost, geopolitical expediencies, military entrenchment, and nationalistic dimensions of space exploration. Nevertheless, I still believe that it is one of the most important undertakings in recent human history. Astronomy and space exploration underwrite my conception of reality. Their most terrible and exploitative parts are characteristic of all our endeavors, but their most elevated and noble aspirations are unique in human history. So, in adopting this optimistic point of view on space exploration, I make no apologies, but I also forgive no wrongs.
“Lunar Flag Assembly Kit,” for example, is anti-nationalistic. I appreciate that the preconditions for landing a human on the moon involved plenty of jingoistic warmongering, but, in the long run, I hope nationalistic overtones dissolve into an understanding of this feat as a “giant leap for mankind” in the literal sense. Most of my critical vehemence is actually vented in the last section of the book, “Stellar Sequence,” where I equate the life and death of different types of stars to various human archetypes. Here I critique billionaires, religious zealotry, celebrity worship, mercenary violence, capital punishment, and many other human failings. Not to put too fine a point on it, but space exploration only presents ethical challenges because its implementation is complicated by our own moral failings.
ES: Conceiving of language as technology and communication as “Words and imagery [that] can be combined and re-arranged ad infinitum, as can the basic elemental parts of rocket assemblies, like rivets, tubes, and valves” resonates with my own conception of language, and publishing for that matter. One of the things I admire about your work is your publishing practice, which truly embraces the book as an art form. Can you say a little about how your creative practice extends to publishing?
KF: Gladly! I have published stuff in a variety of print and digital formats, including everything from leaflets, chapbooks, and posters to videos, albums, and computer programs. Regardless of whether the publication is physical or digital, I try to attend to the materials of the medium. How does a reader interface with a text? How do they navigate its various parts? What part of the sensory apparatus does the medium engage? This has led me to view publishing as a creative endeavor in its own right, and I get to ask questions like: What kind of cover material best supports the contents of the chapbook? Can the text itself be enhanced through its design?
I must admit that, so far as my indie press The Blasted Tree goes, I take a somewhat more interventionist role in the work’s design than the average publisher. I’m not really content to obscure myself behind the publication or pretend that publishing is totally objective and impersonal. A creative design is my way of asserting a bit of agency over the publishing process. My aim is to surprise (and hopefully delight) the poet or artist at the presentation of their work. So a script about lab rats living through the apocalypse is bound into a cover that looks like a flayed rat pelt and a chapbook that treats the biographical details of other poets as meat is bound and packaged like a filet mignon. Mostly, I am trying to have fun with it and make book objects that trigger the “oooo I have to have this” response in those who encounter them.
ES: What is your assessment of small press culture in Canada today?
KF: This might sound harsh, but the more I have focused on what I am personally interested in publishing versus what the small press scene in Canada seems to be about, the easier it has been for me to sleep at night. The Blasted Tree has passed through a few distinct phases that I think correspond to my personal shifts in relation to Canadian small press. First, I published all comers, which comprised mostly my friends and peers from the creative writing program at Concordia University. Then, once submissions started to come in from people I didn’t know personally, I started to narrow in on a niche or brand I thought captured the spirit of my publishing enterprise. Next, people started to respond to this specificity, and I experienced a heyday of projects in line with my vision. Finally, I lost steam, and have shifted to selecting a few projects a year that I really could not pass on without regretting it on my deathbed.
The honest truth is that small press publishers, both print and digital, now face an existential crisis. Serious readers are vanishingly few, and the resources small presses rely upon to publish in traditional modes are drying up. I think what is needed is a sea change driven by the younger generations, whose reading and publishing habits are digital-native and adaptive by necessity. The future of small press lies in the willingness of young people to shed the expectations of traditional publishing models and forge new platforms for sharing poetry, prose, and art.
This recent phase is surely the most healthy — only publishing what I will reminisce upon fondly — but it is very far from constituting a coherent scene or industry. The honest truth is that small press publishers, both print and digital, now face an existential crisis. Serious readers are vanishingly few, and the resources small presses rely upon to publish in traditional modes are drying up. I think what is needed is a sea change driven by the younger generations, whose reading and publishing habits are digital-native and adaptive by necessity. The future of small press lies in the willingness of young people to shed the expectations of traditional publishing models and forge new platforms for sharing poetry, prose, and art.
ES: I have only anecdotal observations in this regard, drawn from my time in creative writing and literature classrooms. On the one hand, I’ve noticed that students – let’s call them the “young people” for this conversation – are increasingly turning to “older” modes and media such as zines, analogue photography, vinyl, cassettes, iPods, and so on as preferred technological apparatuses. On the other hand, I see some students using existing platforms such as Substack and Wattpad to start their writing and small press ventures. I think it’s really interesting that you say, “forge new platforms” and not encourage new generations to use existing platforms. Personally, I’m disillusioned (I’ve long been distrustful) of the promises made by existing mainstream digital platforms to increase access to information, dialogue, audiences, community, and so on. What’s your take on the diversity of this media landscape? Can you say more about how you see current digital, capitalist technologies impacting the small press landscape?
KF: Perhaps “platforms” is the wrong word; I think maybe I have in mind “systems” in general. And “young people” should probably be “the unentrenched.” I have worked in the book industry in various capacities — creative, sales, marketing, distribution, editorial, design, events, etc. — for most of my life (my first job was shelving books at the library when I was thirteen years old) and I have very few positive things to say about the industry as a whole. There are, of course, exceptions, but for the most part, existing systems are either set up in favour of industry giants like Amazon and the major corporate publishing houses, which function as an oligopoly, or they are struggling under the weight of these giants. Some things are better than they’ve ever been; colour printing and short-run printing, for instance, are cheaper and more accessible than ever before. But other things keep getting worse, like the cost of distribution, the paper waste and inefficiency, discoverability on the internet, and the prospects of writing as a livable career. Small press is supposed to address these issues, but margins are so tight and workload is so high that I am seeing less and less energy for innovation.
I thank my lucky stars that I work for Athabasca University Press as my day job. It’s an open-access scholarly press supported by a publicly-funded university, so we are insulated from the pressures of capitalism to a certain degree, which means we can afford to publish in open access (i.e., to give our digital editions away for free) and to innovate in spaces like accessibility and distribution. It works because we are able to meet readers where they are and cater to their changing expectations around access, technology, cost, and so on. My gut says that a return to traditional modes like zines, vinyl records, etc. is great and to be encouraged (I love these modes too!), but this alone is not enough to save small press. For small press to remain a vital and viable part of contemporary cultural discourse, to make it more than just a tradition in need of saving, it must also adapt to and perhaps even lead the way through this ever-changing media landscape. My point is that new entrants into the publishing industry should be enabled to explore new ideas about what publishing can be. Their ideas are sorely needed.
ES: You work at the intersection between art and technology in other places, pixel art, for example, with numerous digital visual artworks on sites like objkt. Can you tell me a little about your digital media artworks as an extension or diversion from your poetics?
KF: Oh man, this is a distinction I wrestle with all the time. My visual art is very much an extension of my poetics in that I’m working with the same brain and mostly the same goals for creative expression, regardless of medium. There is a clear continuity from my poetry to my visual poetry, then on to digital poetry, digital media and visual art in general. I suspect that creativity is like athleticism: you can apply the former to different media just as you can apply the latter to different sports. Maybe the best painter is too specialized to write good poetry, but I am not so competent in any one thing as to discourage experimentation across mediums. Rather, these activities feel interconnected; sequential in time like stepping stones but also somehow recursive, like a feedback loop. I am finally following up on ideas planted when I was a teenager, and I hope what I do now leads to surprising new conclusions decades from now.
All that said, perhaps the differences between my various practices are more interesting precisely because they speak to the mechanics of the art-making process. For me, the more purely visual a medium, the more instinctual is my practice. I try to make digital art that tickles an irrational, impulsive, subconscious part of my mind, like fingerpainting with pixels. But when writing, I tend to choose my words cautiously, like solving a puzzle, so it is helpful to have a predetermined goal to shoot for. This distinction within my practice isn’t strictly black and white, and I am usually trying to draw mediums closer together. Incorporating technology helps in this regard in that it requires deliberate learning, engaging the familiar conceptual frameworks I am drawn to while also forcing me into unfamiliar territory. Ultimately, whether I’m working on pixel art or poetry, it’s the same root impulse that keeps me busy at my desk.
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Eric Schmaltz, an intermedia artist, poet, scholar, and editor, is the author of numerous creative and scholarly works, including poetry books I CONFESS (Coach House Books) andSurfaces (Invisible Publishing) and scholarly monograph Borderblur Poetics: Intermedia and Avant-gardism in Canada, 1963-1988 (University of Calgary Press). He also edited and introduced Another Order: Selected Works of Judith Copithorne (Talonbooks) and the forthcoming We Have Seasonal Bodies: The Poetry of Gerry Shikatani (Wilfrid Laurier University Press), and he was co-editor of I Want to Tell You Love by bill bissett and Milton Acorn. He lives in Kjipuktuk (Halifax).
