Andrew McLuhan, noted poet, scholar, punk rock guitar player, projectionist, hockey dad, and keeper of the scriptorium, {and The McLuhan Institute} etc hosts a radio show on 99.3 County FM from Picton, Ontario, Canada called “the Spoken Word” and, after returning from a far-flung foray into the world speaking about the important media study work he continues on from his father Eric and his grandfather Marshall, in his October 20th, 2024 broadcast, he dove into my visual poetry book “Items, Forgotten (in drawers)” which arrived by post from Japan as #3 of 5, full-color print editions, inscribed of course
The poems are visual as they are literally cut and pasted onto various substrates, mostly hotel stationery and also aerogrammes, sometimes are typewritten, sometimes added onto envelopes or in passports with stamps, both inky and postal and other ephemera
Andrew jumps right in with a variety of the poems – after the usual intro music, radio station ids and blurbs – and with a tender hearted reading, rolling with some of the steps, typos and place names like a gentle dignified champ. The canonical source is https://archive.993countyfm.ca/ – archived here as unsure if the shows *expire* after a time (btw, the studio is location at: 2 – 38 Cold Storage Road beside the County Farm Centre)
Written in various forms at an Ayurvedic clinic in Nepal for the most part and also while transiting from Abu Dhabi to Rome via the Suez Canal on an ocean liner, then combined with other bits found in lost notebooks reuniting along the way – later transcribed from originals (from menus backs to coasters to notebooks) and printed out on standard paper with default typeface thinking i would work through and correct or change or whatever but instead, following the inspiration of William Burroughs, David Bowie and others, eager to make the words alive, i cut up and pasted in a way which made sense to my swirling brain – typos, digressions, hard turns, coffee stains and watermarks and all, onto the substrates, many of which were acquired at a Greek monastery shop in Mile End neighborhood of Montreal (thanks BM)
The poems explore themes of identity, geography, cartography, history… All combining to wonder “Who we really are? Who did we come from? How do we choose the way in which our societies are structured?”
I imagined hanging these up on telephone poles and grocery store bulletin boards next to lost cat posters and leaving them on bus seats and whatnot, in the meanwhile, printed some basic copies and personalized on a ferry from Newfoundland to Cape Breton, and mailed around
Later scanned, compiled with some other found items from my archive and crafted hand sewn chapbook series (letter-size cardstock in color, thank you brother Andrew for use of your printer in Vegas), folded and hand-stitched and shared with friends, mostly in Utah. Not sure if anyone read but i had fun in Marty’s yard putting ink stamps and thumb/toe prints to make each unique
Thinking about it, some of them are water colored “telegrams” made at drawing room at the Majestic hotel in Kuala Lumpur, others on Nusa Ceningan, Indonesia – now 7 or 8 “volumes” [update: 10 volumes, named thusly]
1 Arab disguise
2 Earth rambler
3 Time traveler
4 Gone to Sea
5 Hubris
6 Circumnavigation
7 Interlaken
8 Fragile
9 Lost mostly
10 Reinvention
PS There’s also a page in this edition which is kind of dedicated to Andrew himself in a roundabout way featuring some of the artifacts he mailed to me combined into a collage as another “item, forgotten”