We Who Are About To Die : Eric Schmaltz

Eric Schmaltz is an artist, writer, and educator living in Toronto. His work has been previously featured in Lemon Hound, Jacket2, The Capilano Review, The Berkeley Poetry Review, The Puritan, and Open Letter. His first book of poetry and text-art, Surfaces, is available from Invisible Publishing. For more: ericschmaltz.com or @eschmaltzzz.

Where are you now?
Physically, I am in Toronto, Ontario, a city that occupies the traditional land of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, and the Mississaugas of the Credit River. Mentally, my sense of where-ness is distributed across this space and a multiplicity of other spaces, networks, devices, and future tenses.

What are you reading?
I’m reading a lot again. Most recently, Living a Feminist Life by Sara Ahmed, Johnny Appleseed by Joshua Whitehead, Sludge Utopia by Catherine Fatima, and I Left Nothing Behind On Purpose by Stevie Howell.

What have you discovered lately?
I’ve recently discovered the privilege of a less structured mode of living that is very temporarily untethered from the direct machinations of the neoliberal institution of higher education. 

Where do you write?
I create wherever I can I place my laptop.

What are you working on?
I’m working on a few things: I’m researching for a new poetry project, (finally) completing a final draft of an edition of I Want to Tell You Love by bill bissett and Milton Acorn, and editing the inaugural issue of Not Your Best, a new periodical published by Knife | Fork | Book.

Have you anything forthcoming?
I have a handful of periodical publications forthcoming, including poems, articles, interviews, and book reviews.

What would you rather be doing?
Nothing.


from Assembled Lines

On Writing #77 : Eric Schmaltz

Writing as an Intimacy with Machines

Eric Schmaltz

We are born into language, into its flows, into its complex of shifting & shimmering circuitry. Every component of language has a machinic life that emerges in & through interactions with humans & non-humans. Each language component is a piece of data, encrypted with visual & sonic information which we meet in endless recombinance like lovers among & upon themselves. Writing is an intimacy with machines.

When we write, we construct a multitude of machinic assemblages. Beginning within, our body initiates an interaction of synaptic events coupled with the application & interaction of muscles, tissues, textures, & pressures that guide the flow of data. These bodily processes assemble with a technologic realm––taut skin on a fine tipped pen; graphite on a yellowed notepad; a Macbook held close as it purrs at midnight. Like antennae, we receive & transmit data thru & into these assemblages. This is an intimacy.

For us, writing opens at these realizations: the machinic & the assemblage. Letters, sentences, paragraphs, poems, & books are machines formulated from various strains of input & output, all of which are created collaboratively in & thru the meeting of bodies, of machines, & of systems. The visual & sonic information of language is that which acts upon us & with us. It alters our biochemistry & neurology, & we respond with our placement of & response to the mark. This is how we arrive at the delicate curve of a meticulously designed serif, the flick of a tongue sounding “love” or, the epic span of the long poem. There is no one assemblage. Each language component is a block of data that we couple to another to formulate a machinic enterprise of potentiality. Writing is being intimate with an assembly line of infinite configurations.

Eric Schmaltz is a language artist, writer, researcher, & curator. Born in Welland, Ontario he now lives & works in Toronto, Ontario. Eric’s work has been featured online & in print across Canada & internationally including places such as Lemon Hound, The Capilano Review, Rampike, CTRL+ALT+DEL, Open Letter, & Poetry is Dead. His visual work has been featured across Canada including Havana Gallery (Vancouver), Rodman Hall (St. Catharines), & Niagara Artist Centre (St. Catharines).

Recent Reads: "MITSUMI ELEC. CO. LTD.: keyboard poems" by Eric Schmaltz

MITSUMI ELEC. CO. LTD.: keyboard poems by Eric Schmaltz

Published by above/ground press, 2014.

Every time I flip through Eric Schmaltz’s debut chapbook, I remind myself not to review it. Clearly, this impulse is acting out of self-preservation. I’m borderline illiterate when it comes to the intentions and disciplines of visual poetry but that alone cannot discount the number of times I’ve leafed through MITSUMI ELEC. CO. LTD.: keyboard poems. So, here goes.

Despite the retro-futurist product information and disclaimer that are reprinted on the inside jacket, there’s something endearingly primitive about these keyboard poems. Although composed of symbols and shapes of rigid construction, their inevitably varied ink absorption gives Schmaltz’s stampings a humane texture. Take the cover image, for example, which ekes out a path through minuscule, modulated typeface to create a moving cascade as opposed to a flat grid.

If my description sounds akin to topography, there’s enough evidence on these pages to support it. Keystrokes spatially construct disorder – scenes that handily reimagine Microsoft’s warning of “undesired operations” – in conversation with images of pristine organization. Think the erratic busywork of bees and the diligent geometry of their nests, side by side. My perspective often embraces the bird’s eye view, looking from above at Schmaltz’s architecture and trail-markings. Visually leaping this divide brings to mind descriptors that nations tend to encamp on (civilized, developing), and how these terms attempt to fragment a singular worldview. Even without that runaway stream-of-conscious, I sense abandonment from both terrains:

Aforementioned user text only furthers the case for a lost civilization, obscured within a hand-scrawled grid or visible in stacked windows that tower like condos over Toronto’s waterfront. Perhaps I’m meeting some of these keyboard poems more than halfway, seeing the below example’s words squeezed into a fist of clay and blotted by what looks like slabs of continent. Can you see the faint ink blemishes on the northern hemisphere, like rocky tundra? Maybe you can’t, as it’s entirely possible these vaguely post-apocalyptic signs of desertion reside with me alone. Still, the steady contrast between sterile geometric surveys and these grimier details beg a social commentary next to an aesthetic one.

above/ground press has reproduced these black ink poems stark enough to capture rogue smudges that dab and destabilize from the outer limits of the frame. And although the saturated effect doesn’t lend a deeper sense of narrative, page by page, it does have a serendipitous effect on the chapbook’s sequence, as poems leave a discernible ghost image on the backside, often merging in complimentary ways:

In constructing space, I suspect there’s a parallel between navigating visual poetry and jazz; how placement of concrete expression reverberates the channels of interplay around it. Alas, today I’ll stick to talking about only one art form I shouldn’t. Schmaltz’s poems toy with notions of structure and decay that are readily interpretable and, in some cases, quite frame-able.