Poet Kyle Flemmer zooms in on Wikipedia as a bastion of collective knowledge in new collection

We independently select everything we recommend. Buying through us may earn us a commission, which supports our work.

When Calgary poet Kyle Flemmer was attending high school, he and his friends would challenge each other to games of Wiki Racing.

It seems a suitably word-nerdy endeavour for a future poet, but it was also arguably the first spark that led to his recent collection, The Wiki of Babel. Wiki Racing has players trying to find the shortest route between two unrelated Wikipedia pages, travelling through the sprawling online encyclopedia exclusively through blue links found in the body text.

“You would hop from one article to the next and the next until you would arrive at the destination, the target article,” says Flemmer. “Whoever got there quickest or had the fewest clicks won. So while we were in the computer labs supposedly working on our papers, we were often just playing this game on Wikipedia.”

Your weekday lunchtime roundup of curated links, news highlights, analysis and features.

A welcome email is on its way. If you don't see it, please check your junk folder.

Fast-forward 15 years or so, and Flemmer was locked down during the pandemic and suffering from COVID-19.

“I was a little delirious, and I was playing around on Wikipedia and decided I would play this game to entertain myself and take notes, and maybe I could use some of those notes as material for a poem. I realized as I was building it up, the notes themselves were these fun poems. I didn’t need to do anything for them to become a poem. They already were.”

The Wiki of Babel is a series of poems made up of text fragments generated through various word-association games and “chance operations” that Flemmer employed as he navigated the hyperlink structure of wikis using browser-based tools. The five series all have specific themes. The first, Suggested Languages, takes inspiration from no less a source than the Tower of Babel. That’s the Old Testament story about God derailing humanity’s efforts to unite by dividing their language as they attempt to build a tower to heaven, thus resulting in the human race speaking multiple languages. Actually, the original inspiration was Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges’ short story The Library of Babel, which is about people living in an endless library who get lost in a maze of literature containing every possible combination of text. Flemmer was always fascinated by the story’s idea of being surrounded by excessive information, but it eventually brought him back to the biblical source.

“One of the things I noticed on Wikipedia is that there are articles in many different languages,” he says. “Something clicked in me. If the Tower of Babel story is about the division of language and information into discreet groups that can’t communicate with each other, Wikipedia really does a great job of the reverse: Bringing different cultures and knowledges and languages together in such a way that we better understand each other.”

It seems like a heavy theme, but the approach Flemmer took on this series and all the others in the book was playful. He began with an article on Wikipedia that had been translated into many languages.