Not often will a lecturer rouse me (for probably a decade I’ve listened to mundane-talkers while quietly lusting more hyperized stimuli like video games, reality programming, and gonzo-blogging) so when the packed lecture hall at the University of Winnipeg finally settled, and Henderson was set to begin, I questioned whether I’d stay engaged.
Henderson was pique and handsome, dressed in a fantastic black sweater with matching black slacks, and he possessed an angular intensity from the very outset of his talk that couldn’t help but keep the most pixelated of attentions engaged.
Henderson explained that the subject of Nerve Language was Daniel Paul Schreber, a late 19th century German judge, who was institutionalized for lunacy at time predating any conceptions of the unconscious.
“I was reading Shreber’s memoirs,” Said Henderson, “and I was taken by the poetry of the language, the German phraseology.”
Henderson explained it was first time he had got into a relationship with a dead writer, and he wanted to make a body of poems less forensic than the memoirs left to history and its multitude of psychoanalysts.
Henderson talked in that brilliant circuitous manner that is impossible to summarize; he is no stodgy tweedsmuir variety of Prof. When it came time for the audience to ask questions, Henderson considered each answer thoughtfully and answered with never too much authority, with just the perfect modulation of mirth to let the audience enjoy his answers for what are all answers, in Art, but speculation?
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J.S. is a propagandist and pamphleteer for over sixty-six Crown and Association publications. He has been both staff and contributing writer for weekly newspapers such as the Selkirk Journal, the Gimli Spectator, and the Midnight Sun, in Dawson City, Yukon. His poems and prose have appeared in the Golden Buzz (now the Force Gazette), Tart Magazine, and as low, low, low-run chapbooks. He is also founding member of the now defunct rap-futurist collective, Xenophane Six.
