The 19th-century German mathematician Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann’s ideas had a profound effect on the development of modern theoretical physics and provided the concepts and methods used later in Einstein’s relativity theory and Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle.” Riemann is popularly known for his challenge of Euclidean geometry’s axiomatic (“given” or “natural”) presumption of space, hinging on the question of the value of zero. In the simplest possible terms, in this realm of theoretical physics and mathematics, zero represents not the absence of something in and for itself, but only the potentiality of some thing existing in relation to some other thing. This means that what is “known” or “perceived” by any observer can only ever be defined by and through that act of perception, and not by its absence, which can never be experienced but can only ever be postulated. Thus everything we can communicate about the known world consists entirely of a cascade of perpetually unfolding “non zero definitions.”

Fiction writers such as James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, William Burroughs, and poets such as William Carlos Williams and Robert Creeley have applied these theories from the physical sciences to their acts of writing, but the pyrotechnics of their progressive narrative deconstructions and reconstructions have remained muted by a lingering textual self-awareness. Not until the work of Gil McElroy’s clearly present mentor, bpNichol, did the language of poetics emerge into the light of the purely formalist and luminous “definitions” of things and their movements in which McElroy excels so brilliantly. In the poems of McElroy’s NonZero Definitions, things can never cease to be; they only can, and do, gloriously engage in the ceaseless metamorphosis of replication in all of their luminous present and endlessly unfolding possibilities.

Born in Metz, France, poet Gil McElroy grew up on air force bases in Canada and the United States. He studied English Literature at Queen’s University in Ontario. His poems and other works have been published in countless periodicals throughout North America since the late 1970s; issued in a number of self-published chapbooks, broadsheets, and one-of-a-kind book works; and anthologized in Groundswell: best of above/ground press, 1993–2003 (Broken Jaw Press, 2003), Side/Lines: A New Canadian Poetics (Insomniac Press, 2003), and Written in the Skin (Insomniac Press, 1999). He currently lives in Colborne, Ontario with his wife Heather.

McElroy has also been an independent curator and freelance art critic for 20 years, organizing exhibitions for public art galleries and museums in Canada and writing art criticism for magazines in Canada, the United States and Australia. A selection of his catalogue essays and reviews was published as Gravity & Grace: Selected Writing on Contemporary Canadian Art (Gaspereau Press, 2001) and in the anthology CRAFT Perception and Practice: A Canadian Discourse (Ronsdale Press, 2002). His show ST. ART: The Visual Poetry of bpNichol pays tribute to one of the great poets of the twentieth century. Originally mounted at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery & Museum in Charlottetown, P.E.I. in May through October, 2000, it later moved to the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia before touring the country throughout 2001. McElroy’s curatorial essay accompanying the exhibition also won the Christina Sabat Award for Critical Writing in the Arts.

Gil McElroy's profile page

“A master of the craft … [McElroy] is very, very intelligent and his ear is infalliable … “
— Arc