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A hypercube is a work of electronic fiction based on the structure of a cube. It comprises six pages, each of which links to four others. Letter to Linus uses the form of a hypercube to explore, through six points of view, the politics of electronic literature.

Reviews:

Letter to Linus combines prose and poetic language in a wide-ranging commentary on creative writing itself. It is structured both by the short lines on the six faces of the cube and the six boldface words that also form a kind of poetic refrain: cut, shut, blow, break, take, lock. The picture that emerges is of a struggle between creative potentiality and the juridical and economic forces that would regulate, patent, and encrypt language. - Electronic Literature Organization [http://collection.eliterature.org/2/works/gillespie_letter_to_linus.html]

With this poem, Gillespie has created a sleek machine made of words - one that is a delight to operate and read. The cube structure of this six node hypertext (seven, if you count the title page), uses the title verb for each node as a transition for the next node. This economically clever structure to link to the next four possible pages make the user's choice a meaningful one, and one that creates a logical flow between the pages. Its lines vary from Whitmanesque to Bernsteinesque in length and will leave you thinking about how we take language and poetry for granted. - February 4, 2012 by Leonardo Flores [http://iloveepoetry.com/?p=482]

Newspoetry

information

Table of Forms hardback

Dark blue paperback and hardback. Collection of experimental, ludic, constraint-driven poetry; puzzle book; and writing manual. Hardback cloth version includes extra material.

An exploration of new poetic form & constraint-driven literature . Collection of experimental, ludic, constraint-driven poetry; puzzle book; and writing manual. Hardback cloth version includes extra material. Cloth: ISBN 0-9724244-6-6 $25. Paper: ISBN 0-9724244-7-4 $25. 6 by 9 inches. 136 pages. Distributed by Ingram. 12-31-2006. 

Reviews:

A wonderfully specific and witful inventory of forms in all senses and sizes. This is the pro model, believe me. — Robert Creeley

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Book review by Joseph Dewey
DOMINIQUE FITZPATRICK-O'DINN. TABLE OF FORMS. SPINELESS BOOKS, 2006. 113 PP. PAPER: $12.00.
Upon seeing an exquisitely wrought statue of, say, a horse, most would see the horse, few would see the marble. So it is with sounds, crude if musical, audaciously coaxed into words. Here is a gathering of language exercises, poems that constrain language by preset obligations, intricate, inventive, demanding directives (words juxtaposed within a line must share a vowel; each line must contain all 26 letters; each successive line must contain one additional letter); here is, in short, an intemperate delight in the marble. The volume--there areno editors listed and the author's "name" is a glorious fabrication--provides a glossary should the careful eye fail to perceive the imbedded patterns. If the challenge is to uncover the design, the glossary may seem intrusive, like a tacky magician distributing a lame handbook of magic tricks to patrons during a show; but in practice the guidelines only help clarify the exotic designs (among them, liponymns, haicoups, and pangrams), like taking a backstage tour of Disneyworld.Of course, language so precisely sculpted must struggle against appearing oppressively clever--a poem that "must" use all the consonants once before repeating any can seem a sterile thing. Only news poems collaged from current events even acknowledge the real world. What we are given, rather, is the compelling it-ness of language liberated from the tedious expectations of mimesis and narrative, language played with brio and elegance. Language thus constrained may depress some readers, like seeing some magnificent jungle animal caged. These are acts, such readers sniff, but not art. But language here is far from restrained--it is disciplined, wily, animated, resourceful, in turn nonsensical and musical, but supremely vital, dazzling to confront ("read" is not quite the verb), sculpted lines smeary with fingerprints, stunned by the audacity of their own construction.-Joseph Dewey, Review of Contemporary Fiction

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Even though few books provide such thorough explanations of their principles of composition as this book does, Table of Forms revels in deception. It is, to begin with, a Spineless Book with a spine that has nothing on it. The author, Dominique Fitz- patrick-O’Dinn, is a patently fraudulent pseudonym for William Gillespie. The “fourth edition,” with a 2006 copyright date, is the first fully revised edition, and was released in the spring of 2007. Anyone who has noticed Spineless Books, with its 2,002-word palindrome story 2002 (2002) by Nick Montfort and William Gillespie and its Fitzpatrick-O’Dinn Prize for rule-driven literature, might be prepared for this audaciously ambitious and beautifully realized col- lection of poems written by formal constraints, and yet even the most devoted followers and practitioners of such work may cringe at the prospect of having to deal with procedural poetry. Formal work poses two problems: will the forms overpower the poems, making these pieces more interesting as puzzles than as works of art; and, will the act of reading be reduced to a guessing game, in which the reader must solve the puzzle behind the poem or feel stupid at being left out of some joke perpetrated by the poet? Gillespie solves the latter problem by providing a glossary, with definitions and etymology of the methods he uses, and identification of which poems follow which methods. Even when the forms are traditional and obvious (sonnet, sestina, palindrome), this is an essential key, particularly when so many poets take liberties with certain forms, such as the sonnet, as to defy definition. Relieved of having to play the guessing game, I found myself going back and forth from glossary to text, but even- tually the elegance and panache of the poetry kept me from checking the glossary until later. Although formal constraints have been around for centuries, Gillespie works in a contemporary tradition whose foremost practitioners are members of the Oulipo, the Paris-based group of writers and mathematicians founded in 1960 by Raymond Que- neau and François Le Lionnais. Gillespie’s poetry can seem as feverishly wrought as some works of Ian Monk and at other times as stylishly refined as some works of Harry Mathews, but Table of Forms more resembles Queneau’s 1947 classic, Exercises in Style, where he retells the same vignette in different ways, branding each version with the rhetorical device he uses, as well as the recently re-released Oulipo Compendium (2005) edited by Harry Mathews and Alastair Brotchie, with its definitions and demonstra- tions of a wealth of formal devices. Occasionally, Gillespie’s terms and definitions vary from what other rhetorical guides offer, but these variations, along with their examples, amplify rather than con- fuse the issue at hand. As Georges Perec, particularly in his novel Life: A User’s Manual (1978), seems disinclined to limit himself to using “only” one constraint at a time, Gillespie often uses more than one form at once, sometimes combining them, such as in the following heimlich (haiku plus limerick). Maneuver Newspoem 16 March 2000 there is a forest on fire, flames spreading higher and higher. do I stand around, while it burns to the ground, this deadly maniacal pyre? For that matter, the entire newspoem series not only introduces another layer of constraint to many of the poems here, but also addresses a complaint poets often hear when forms are as evident as content: by forcing readers to adjust to an unusual mode of expression, the writer is being effete or hermetically self-indulgent. Using reports of current events, Gillespie began writing newspoetry in 1995, and from 1999 to 2002, he and Joe Futrelle edited a newspoetry site at http:// www.newspoetry.com that offered a poem a day. These poems show that a level of personal engage- ment with the world at large is more moving and effective than the emotional slop political feelings too often inspire. After all, using their own table of forms, “embedded” journalists that call mercenaries “contractors” render events in an authoritative cant that is more intent on protecting the status quo than with revealing what really happened. A writer using formal devices can emphasize the insidious linguis- tic patterns people have come to accept, whether it comes from the newspaper of record or some broad- cast of fair and balanced propaganda. The advantage of working with a variety of demanding rules is not that you get to say whatever you feel like saying, but that you get to say whatever the rules allow. Using the pantoum, Gillespie retells the story of people sent to prison for protesting the School for the Americas in “Dan and Doris Sage.” As the second and fourth lines of each stanza become the first and third lines of the stanza that follows, the pattern high- lights the pathetic absurdity of the protesters’ plight, as they are trapped in the government’s scheme of justice. In another pantoum newspoem, Gillespie and Andy Gricevich commemorate a presidential encounter with a former adversary, but in “Clinton Does Vietnam,” the form takes on a breezier, hilari- ous tone as it plays with the mode of speech of a consummate politician. Many of these poems express a certain personal stake, either in political or social matters, and many do not express a stake in anything Gillespie or his pseudonym might care to reveal. The advantage of working with a variety of demanding rules is not that you get to say whatever you feel like saying, but that you get to say whatever the rules allow. The freedom such restriction allows can lead the writer to write works she or he never would otherwise think of writing. One disadvantage of working with a variety of demanding rules is that the objective of meeting the demands of the rules can overpower all other con- cerns. I don’t mind if the forms take over the poem, but some of the poems here (e.g., “Joey Zoey” and “Poetry Class”) strike me as more interesting in the ways they follow their rules, while others, such as the above-mentioned newspoems, reach out to readers to make them alternately forget and appreciate the rules of their construction. One danger of working with rules is the rule of taking a constraint to the limit. That is, to tap the potential of a particular constraint, a writer tries to test all of the possibilities such a constraint offers. After spending time on a project, it’s tempting to publish the outtakes as well as the more refined work. Gillespie avoids this pitfall. If he sometimes provides only brief illustrations of constraints that others have applied to more fully realized projects (why attempt lipograms, after Georges Perec wrote a novel without using the letter “e” and Christian Bök wrote a long poem in univocal sections, practically exhausting the words that contain only one kind of vowel), his facility at combining constraints sets and meets additional challenges. Rather than repel readers by cloaking its procedures, Table of Forms invites anyone to participate. This is a generous and welcome addition to the literature of constraints.-Doug Nufer, American Book Review

Tinyman for President

Reviews:

“Back during the turbulent 60s, faced with the threat of nuclear holocaust, racial and cultural unrest, political assassinations, and the Vietnam War, American artists Stanley Kubrick (in Dr. Strangelove) and Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) responded by inventing absurdist satiric fantasies so outrageous and compelling that they exposed the nightmarish logic underlying our nation’s collective peril—and kept us laughing even as they cut most deeply. Q. Synopsis’s hilariously disturbing and deeply informed novel about the 2020 American Presidential election, Tinyman for President, is that same kind of ambitious satire—albeit one whose off-the-grid creative impulses have the ability to channel moral outrage into the literary equivalent of Never Mind the Bollocks. Wake up, Americans, and…  Make America Tiny Again!"— Larry McCaffery,  editor of Storming the Reality Studio,  Expelled from Eden,  and Avant-Pop: Fiction for a Daydream Nation

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The New New Journalism
Davis Schneiderman (bio)
Tinyman for President
Q. Synopsis
I-BeaM Books
https://shop.spybeambooks.com/product/tinyman-for-president
150 Pages; Print, $20.20

That this anonymous novel’s price is that of the vexed year it covers is one of the many small details lovingly girding the body of this metafictional text. Another is the name of the purported author, a pseudonym for a small-press writer whose impressive work has been seriously underappreciated, even while maintaining a those-in-the-know impressiveness for those, well, in the know.

In fact, it was because an ABR editor approached me to review a work by this specific author under their real name that caused me to agree to write this review. Only when Tinyman for President arrived in the mail did I discover the nom de guerre; after corresponding with the editor, I was told the author would prefer I review the work “as a novel by ‘Q. Synopsis’ rather than mentioning that ‘Synopsis’ is one of his pseudonyms” (though he added, “if Davis feels comfortable doing it this way”). Since I’ve long ago given up any sense of comfort, I agreed, although the preceding sentence suggests this is not the first Kierkegaardian identity our intrepid author has deployed.

That I started writing this several days before the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and a mere week and change after the insurrection at the Capitol that provides a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction for Tinyman, it’s also true that the book manages to carry more than enough insightful surprises. These hold water during a period where everything about the United States is leaky. Or maybe air filled, as the Tinyman cover shows an untethered balloon with American flag design (foreground) about to be popped, optical illusion style, on the tip of the Capitol dome (background). There’s no middle ground anywhere.

Q’s frame — diametrically opposed to the QAnon cult and its role-paying-game paranoia — is one part New Journalism (see the back cover comparisons to Hunter S. Thompson) and three parts questioning of a “what the actual f*&% is going on?” mode. Put those in a blender with a bit of barely credible comic-book backstory, and you have a satire not for the ages but for this age. This now. This muddle. Let me explain.
In the novel, Tinyman is the most pathetic type of self-involved superhuman, in a world that has more than its fair share:

Not a maniac, but endowed with superpowers with which a true maniac could cause severe mayhem…Tinyman was not tiny. In socks and sandals, he stood about 5’8 3/4”, 98 pounds. Though he was obliged to fight crime, he had a nonconfrontational disposition and social anxiety, insecurity, hypersomnia, and his supersenses were prone to hallucinations…. Also, unlike his many glamorous supercolleagues, his entertainment properties were slim, and amounted to a three-issue comic book run, long out of print.
Q. runs with the joke, as Tinyman takes on various public- and self-deprecating aspects that collect against the dominant narrative of omnipresent superhero stories. In a world without The Tick, The Boys, etc., this might be enough of an animating spark, but it’s precisely the sense of imminent deflation (cue soon-to-be-popped cover balloon) that make Tinyman work so strangely compelling.

It’s not the plot, which is deliberately simple — Tinyman and his team try to get him both elected and not elected as President, and he persists nonetheless; there’s a Watchmen (1987) like chill over the proceedings, as heroes are forbidden from using their powers, and the ambiguous toggle of Tinyman’s un/electability proves an acerbic commentary that exists both narratively and as a seeming act of meta-narrative omniscience.
In any event, Tinyman doesn’t want to be President (or does he?), and the while the enterprise benefits from the Bartelby-like ambiguities of the titular here, the novel’s crypto-protagonist is his hapless campaign manager Johnny Werd, who works for Tinyman precisely because Werd doesn’t really believe Tinyman can win (and despite their mutual disdain for Trump...