Kevin Stebner, Inherent

 

In creating Inherent,I respond to the vibe of each typeface itself, trying to demonstrate how thesetypefaces would speak without the constraints of human language and if theyweren’t forced into the hard linearity of how words appear on the page. As bothreaders and writers, we are so often stuck to the flagpole of the left margin,to strict semantic meaning, biases of words, end rhyme, and conventions oflanguage. Instead, I am interested in how a typeface would wish to expressitself if given the freedom to do so. I want to let the letter forms move howthey will and show us their voices separate from human language. I am seekingto find what is inherent within the typeface, and what aspects of form anddesign will lead to a typeface’s own poetic stance. What is innate in a letterform? What does it want to express? I have forgone my own authorial hand to tryless at expressing an exacting statement and to allow that punctum to arisefrom the letter forms themselves. (“Explication”)

“Typefaceshave personality built into their forms.” So writes Calgary poet, artist, bookseller and musician Kevin Stebner to open the end-note, or “Explication,”of his full-length assemblage of visual poems, Inherent (Picton ON:Assembly Press, 2024). Stebner’s letterform work, as it would appear, builds onsome of the prior and ongoing work done by contemporary Canadian poets such asDerek Beaulieu, Kate Siklosi, Amanda Earl and Gary Barwin, among others. Acrossthe nine word-sections of Inherent, Stebner works through how lettersare freed from language or even meaning, one might say, into elements of pureshape, simultaneously regressing and progresing through origin, back when shapeimplied shape and only itself.

Thebook moves through and across thirteen letterformsequence-clusters—“Ultramatum,” “AdieuAdo,” “Totemic,” “Agalma,” “Significant,”“Süperiör,” “Peaceful,” “Brethren,” “Assemblage,” “Present,” “Kindled,”“Unbroke” and “WellWorn,” followed by the aforementioned“Explication”—providing an elasticity of letterform shapes and possibilitiesthat move almost immediately beyond the realm of language purpose and meaning.There’s something ancient in these forms, something complex and yet basic in anunderstand of how letters begin, evolve and continue. This is a fascinatingexploration of shape, and, if, through Kroetsch, a Phoenician might have had cause for grief, these forms could only delight.