Encyclopaedia MERZ
Synopsis

The title comes from a Swiss Dadaist writer, Kurt Schwitters, and from a Canadian poet, Yves Troendle, who in his work often refers to the mode of thinking established by the former author. One puts everything in MERZ, as if into a hat, and shakes the contents to see what comes out of it.
In Encyclopaedia MERZ our contemporary world takes shape in a poetic form. By the turn of the millennium most people had moved to cities, and mechanization reached the peak of evolution. We know little about human relationships, mostly because we are not in touch with ourselves and much less with each other.
Encyclopaedia MERZ is an attempt to put the pieces together, the fragments of real living scattered on the streets of our cities. It’s a book about cities and countries, especially in the Western hemisphere. Three continents are the locations for the monologue of the author: Toronto, Canada, Lerida, Spain, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, Israel, Budapest, Hungary, and many other places the writer visited over the fifteen years of working on his book. But true traveling is for the mental traveler, the journey takes place inside.
Encyclopaedia MERZ is a collection of different ways of writing poetry. Almost every form of poetry, rhymed and unrhymed can be found in this collection. The author’s fascination with the great epic works of the past lead him to explore the possibility of creating a “lyric epic” of postmodern times. Since there is no commonly accepted poetic form today, and definitely no appreciation of poetry in our world, he found it necessary to show the importance of lyricism in any work of art. Music, drama, painting and photography, including the film, all borrow from it, and if they have no poetry in them, they cease to be art all together. 
Throughout the book the first person singular is used. However the I or the i of the poems are not to be understood as simply confessional. Since it would have been unethical to experiment on human beings, the author found no one, except himself to experiment upon, but in most cases he tried to be safely removed from his ego. He might not have been successful in achieving this, but only for being human.

15 November 2007, Padua, Italy