About
I am a writer and archivist living in British Columbia, Canada, on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Coast Salish peoples. My professional experience has largely been in records management and archives of local government. In 2016, 2018, and 2023 I taught the Archival Studies course “History of Record Keeping” (ARST 517) as an adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia School of Information.
When I started these posts I had in mind an overview of history of the petition, hence the name of this website. I’ve since expanded to include other topics in the history of recordkeeping, and resources for students. Comments are welcome.
Dan Farrell
Master of Archival Studies (MAS)
University of British Columbia, 2007
BA (History)
San Francisco State University, 2005
dan[at]whatisapetition.ca
Poetry Books
The Inkblot Record. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2000.
Last Instance. San Francisco: Krupskaya, 1999.
(Untitled Epic Poem on the History of Industrialization by R. Buckminster Fuller, pp. 1-50) Grid. San Diego: Meow Press, 1999.
366, 1996. New York: Iced Ink Press, 1997.
Thimking of You. Vancouver: Tsunami Editions, 1994. PDF
ape. Vancouver: Tsunami Editions, 1988. PDF
Audio recordings
Articles
Review of SFU Archives 40th Anniversary Exhibit. Archivaria 63 (Spring 2007).
“Apostrophe to Furniture.” Open Letter 10.5 (Spring 1999)
“ape, Years Later.” Open Letter 10.1 (Winter 1998)
Bibliography
Ardam, Jacquelyn. “The ABCs of Conceptual Writing.” Comparative Literature Studies; 51 (1) 2014: 132–158.
Ashton, Jennifer. “Labor and the Lyric: The Politics of Self-Expression in Contemporary American Poetry.” American Literary History 25, Issue 1, Spring 2013: 217–230.
Ashton, Jennifer. “Poetry of the Twenty-First Century: The First Decade.” in The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry since 1945. Cambridge University Press 2013: 216-230.
Beaulieu, Derek. “Review of The Inkblot Record by Dan Farrell.” filling Station. 19 (2000).
Burnham, Clint. The Only Poetry that Matters: Reading the Kootenay School of Writing. Arsenal Pulp Press: Vancouver 2011.
Dworkin, Craig. “The Imaginary Solution.” Contemporary Literature March 2007, 48 (1) 29-60.
Dworkin, Craig and Kenneth Goldsmith, eds. Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing. Northwestern University Press, 2011.
Flender, Karl Wolfgang. “Do Conceptualists Dream of Electric Sheep? Algorithmische Interpretation des Unbewussten in Conceptual Writing und konzeptueller Codeliteratur” Text+Kritik, 2021.
Fitterman, Robert. “CHORUS: Collective subjectivity in quotational writing practices,” Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, 13:1, 2020: 77–90.
Klobucar, Andrew and Michael Barnholden, eds. Writing Class: the Kooteney School of Writing Anthology. New Star Books: Vancouver (1999).
Gizzi, Peter, ed. Exact Change Yearbook. (Boston: Carcanet Press, 1995).
Leong, Michael. “Conceptualisms in Crisis: The Fate of Late Conceptual Poetry,” Journal of Modern Literature 41, No. 3 (Spring 2018): 109-131.
Morton, Stephen. “A Poetics of Place in the World-System: West Coast Modernism and the Integration of Vancouver into the Global Economy.” ariel: A Review of International English Literature 47 no. 1, 2016: 127-161.
Ngai, Sianne. “Stuplimity: Shock and Boredom in Twentieth-Century Aesthetics.” Postmodern Culture 10.2 (Jan. 2000).
Orange, Tom. “Coach House Books at the Turn of the Century.” Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2000.
Price, Katie L. “A≠A: The Potential for a ‘Pataphysical Poetic in Dan Farrell’s The Inkblot Record,” Canadian Literature 210-11 (2011): 27-41.
Publisher’s Weekly, Jan. 2, 2000 (Dec.) Review of The Inkblot Record.
Stout, John C. “Experimenting with Letters: Alphabetical Sequences in Contemporary Innovative Poetry. Bök, Silliman, Mullen, and Christensen” The Modern Language Review 111, n.3 (July 2016): 613-632.
Kaufmann, David. “Approaching the Trans-subjective: How to Do Things with the MMPI.” in Reading Uncreative Writing: Conceptualism, Expression, and the Lyric (2017): 125-160.
Leong, Michael. “Conceptualisms in Crisis: The Fate of Late Conceptual Poetry.” Journal of Modern Literature 41, no. 3 (2018): 109–31.
Nexø, Tue Andersen. “Skriver du alt det, jeg siger, ned?.” Passage-Tidsskrift for litteratur og kritik 19, no. 50 (2004).
James, Emily. “The Modernist Inkblot.” Twentieth-Century Literature 63 (3) (2017): 299–328.
Reed, Brian. Nobody’s Business: Twenty-First Century Avant-Garde Poetics. Cornell University Press (2013).
Scharf, Michael. TextFrame: Cosmopolitanism and Non-Exclusively Anglophone Poetries. Diss. City University of New York, 2019.
Stefans, Brian Kim. “Comedies of Separation: Toward a Theory of the Ludic Book” Journal of Electronic Publishing. Volume 14, Issue 2, Fall 2011.
Stefans, Brian Kim. Review of Last Instance Tripwire: A Journal of Poetics 3 (1999) 145-146.
Wiens, Jason. The Kootenay School of Writing: History, Community, Poetics. Diss. University of Calgary, 2001.
What is a Petition? 