A REVIEW OF ROGER FARR'S
IKMQ
BY ANDREW MCEWAN

The Rusty Toque | Reviews | Issue 5 | November 15, 2013
 PictureIKMQ
by Roger Farr
New Star Books, 2012
Search the word “ludibrium” on the internet, and the majority of the hits you’ll receive direct you to a place of that name in the South Korean online multiplayer game Maple Story. According to MapleWiki.net, “Ludibrium is a subcontinent of Ossyria, located over Ludus Lake in the MapleStory world. It can be accessed by riding the flying train, located in Orbis. It is entirely made of Lego Blocks.” Originally, though, the word derives from the Latin “ludos” for “game,” but also suggests “mockery.” The Wikipedia article for the term takes it to describe a farcical conspiracy for the purposes of parodying organizations and their followers. The article applies this meaning with Rosicrucianism, as well as the Situationist Internationale. It lacks sufficient sourcing for these claims, though, raising questions of veracity, and suggesting the possibility of a performatively deceptive game. Bringing together the productive location of Ludibrium, in which avatars manipulate a world of movable construction blocks, and ironic and potentially mocking organizations, the word comes to connote a potentially ironic game of organization that hides more than it discloses.

Roger Farr’s IKMQ presents a series of sixty-four brief prose poems in the form of simple narratives, instructions, formulae, screenplays and scenarios, one of which, importantly, carries the title “Ludibrium.” In each piece, the letters I, K, M and Q take the place of “characters,” interchangeably performing the given task or production of each piece. In the first section, the characters create mercury fulminate, a primary explosive used to trigger other explosive material, which the characters determine “can be deployed in a plot.” (5). Later, the characters participate in the slaughterhouse procedures of preparing pork, which I knows “would be cut into smaller pieces and prepared for packaging…” (30). The characters even literally become actors in “Breaking the Law,” in which they participate in a restaging of the courtroom scene in A Few Good Men. K, as Jack Nicholson’s character, shouts at Q, Tom Cruise, about the relative importance and truthfulness of language. Such substitution of the four characters into novel scenarios forms their play, both in terms of the Wittgensteinian language games, as well as their malleability as actors moving through various scenes and productions. 

Common among the sixty-four prose pieces is a self-reflexivity on the functioning of language and poetry. Often the twists toward self-reflexivity occur in the disjunction between title and process described. This joins chemical, industrial or bureaucratic processes with poetic-oriented titles. In “Against Expression,” which takes its name from the title of the Kenneth Goldsmith and Craig Dworkin edited anthology of conceptual poetry, the characters of IKMQ go through the process of making beer. Although, at the end of the procedure, K feels that the beer is ready to consume, 
I knew that if the goal was a completely clear and tasteless product, this procedure would have to be repeated 63 times until all traces of the originary substance had bee removed. (31)
This links the project of IKMQ with conceptualist poetics, as the procedures are reproduced 64 times, yet also hints at the intoxication effects of the product. Bringing the description of procedural and conceptual poetics into the content of the piece, the theory and form merge into a single move. The interchange of characters resists any easy interpretive move by the reader to collapse the poetry into a function of the poetics. As K notes,
Language is very imprecise … there is a gap between the signifier and the signified, an aporia over which various ideologies and discursive practices compete for hegemony, then the notion of verification, the very essence of the Law itself, becomes highly fraught. (17)
The fundamental gap between signifier and signified gestures toward a conceptual poetics less rigid and more prone to gaps and fissures between process and product. Yet, as K describes this concept of linguistics, the characters meet to discuss approval of the minutes from a previous meeting, which becomes a game of chess as Q takes a pawn to suggest that “there is a motion on the table,” (17) performing the described slippages of meaning in any use of language.

Oulipian constraints govern the use of each character, as hinted on the back cover, which states that, “[v]arious clues, suggested by the rules of grammar and syntax, hint at connections and continuities, and at narrative peaking out from behind the screen of action.” The eponymous letters, as the book’s overarching organizational system, each give their name to a section of sixteen prose pieces, as well as the first word of each piece. Throughout the book, the characters I, K, M, and Q begin the form personalities in the reader’s mind as they take up various roles from piece to piece. Other constraints and commonalities that run throughout the book include: all sections written in the past tense; all characters referred to in the third person (even the sometimes productively misinterpreted “I”); and pieces tending toward the process-based, focusing on order and production. Unlike other books working in the Oulipian vein, such as Christian Bök’s Eunoia or Georges Perec’s La Disparition, both of which suppress or highlight letters, IKMQ teases the reader with an underlying constraint and organizational system, while never fully disclosing its procedures. The poems play with this lineage, as the characters themselves posit the possibility of their own suppression in the text. “What about a story without the letter I, Q said. K looked at M. Impossible, I said.” (41). Through the character I, the presence of an authorial and yet also readerly subject remains close, but held at arm's distance through the grammatical agreement with the third person. Both the author as well as the letter insist on an intractable presence within the textual object, in spite of the resistance of the constraints. Yet the Oulipian rules governing the text also remain out of reach as the back cover acknowledges: “Various clues, suggested by the rules of grammar and syntax, hint at connections and continuities  … But never mind the theory–enjoy the ride.” (my emphasis).

What are we to make of a book that hints at its procedural poetics yet tells us, nevertheless, to disregard it in favour of the pleasure of the reading experience? Does such a dichotomy between formal procedure and content-based experience exist in a text so heavily meta-critical? Don’t both the constraints and processes of the book’s formal design constitute a significant part of “the ride”? We could ask such questions of many recent books of poetry, but IKMQ highlights these questions in productive ways, incorporating them into the content and procedures it inscribes. This line of questioning, finally, is where ludibrium becomes a provocative and helpful concept.

The poem “Ludibrium” presents a wordsearch in the form of a sixteen by sixteen grid of letters. Similar to the other prose pieces, yet more blatantly, the letters here insert themselves within a process-based game. The constraints are particularly obscure, since although the four key characters present themselves frequently within the grid, their arrangement appears random and non-alphabetical. Even as a wordsearch, the poem presents itself enigmatically, with few letters congregating into meaningful words. Only the reversed Q M K I comes out of the wordsearch (in my reading). So “Ludibrium” posits a trivial game, self-critiquing language and its chance arrangements and organizations. I explains: “this experiment is being carried out solely for entertainment purposes.” (5). Through setting up expectations of conceptualism through Oulipian constraint, IKMQ entertains itself, its characters, in spite of its reader’s pleasurably frustrated expectations. It makes its reader part of its conceptual conceit: “I had to ask why the question of audience had once again subsumed the problem of form.” (66). Not to say that IKMQ is a test of readerly belief, rather through its back cover’s prompt to “never mind the theory,” and its own self-reflexivity on conceptual and experimental poetics, it makes its own conceptual conceit the question of the readerly knowledge of theoretical and compositional processes.  

In ludibrious fashion, IKMQ provokes more than it reveals, as its characters go through their processes much in the same way writers (experimental and otherwise) push letters and words through constraints, hoping to produce a significant text. On this language continent, the building-blocks move, and the instructions are inaccessible. Even the characters debate the possibilities of a legible message:
M told Q that before a message could be communicated, the sender had to consider the purpose of the message. What is the purpose of this message, M asked. What are the choices, Q replied. To persuade, to entertain, to inform, or to express emotions, M said. Or to deceive, I added. (66)
As a ludibrium organized on the basis of shuffling expected purposes, much as it shuffles its characters, IKMQ runs through procedures, the obscured premises of which form a conceptual conceit perpetually playing language games.
ANDREW MCEWAN is the author of the book repeater, a finalist for the 2013 Gerald Lampert Award, and the chapbooks LINE STARTS HERE and Input / Output. His work has been awarded the E.J. Pratt Poetry Medal. He is working on his M.A. at the University of British Columbia, where he is an organizer for the Play Cthonics reading series.