Brian Kim Stefans

Word Toys: Poetry and Technics is an engaging and thought provoking volume that speculates on a range of textual works—poetic, novelistic, and programmed—as technical objects. With the ascent of digital culture, new forms of literature and literary production are thriving that include multimedia, networked, conceptual, and other as-yet-unnamed genres while traditional genres and media—the lyric, the novel, the book—have been transformed. Word Toys: Poetry and Technics is an engaging and thought-provoking volume that speculates on a range of poetic, novelistic, and programmed works that lie beyond the language of the literary and which views them instead as technical objects. Brian Kim Stefans considers the problems that arise when discussing these progressive texts in relation to more traditional print-based poetic texts. He questions the influence of game theory and digital humanities rhetoric on poetic production, and how non-digital works, such as contemporary works of lyric poetry, are influenced by the recent ubiquity of social media, the power of search engines, and the public perceptions of language in a time of nearly universal surveillance. Word Toys offers new readings of canonical avant-garde writers such as Ezra Pound and Charles Olson, major successors such as Charles Bernstein, Alice Notley, and Wanda Coleman, mixed-genre artists including Caroline Bergvall, Tan Lin, and William Poundstone, and lyric poets such as Harryette Mullen and Ben Lerner. Writers that trouble the poetry/science divide such as Christian Bök, and novelists who have embraced digital technology such as Mark Z. Danielewski and the elusive Toadex Hobogrammathon, anchor reflections on the nature of creativity in a world where authors collaborate, even if unwittingly, with machines and networks. In addition, Stefans names provocative new genres—among them the nearly formless “undigest” and the transpacific “miscegenated script”—arguing by example that interdisciplinary discourse is crucial to the development of scholarship about experimental work.

Poetry and Technics

Word Toys

Poetry. Following on the diverse, ambitious FASHIONABLE NOISE: ON DIGITAL POETICS, Brian Kim Stefans' WHAT IS SAID TO THE POET CONCERNING FLOWERS collects an equally varied set of small projects written over the past six years. Ranging from the spare lyrics of "Les Assis" and "Like the Corn Laws" to the socially engaged thought experiments of "The Screens" (which features, among other work, explorations of italics, a poem about ideas for poems, a piece in which every vowel has been replaced with a U, and a sardonic look at "social cripples"), Stefans' work is densely and rewardingly packed with fascinating language and plenty of provocative ideas. Here we have conceptual poetry at its best. Brian Kim Stefans is the editor of the /ubu series of e-books and the creator of arras.net, a website devoted to new-media poetry and poetics. He lives and works in Brooklyn. His book FREE SPACE COMIX is also available from SPD.

What is Said to the Poet Concerning Flowers

Nick Montfort

David Baker

Harryette Mullen

Jennifer Scappettone

John Taylor

Philip Levine

Gary Snyder

Johanna Drucker

Bruce Bond

Curzio Malaparte

Alice Notley

Lyn Hejinian

Charles Wright

Jerome Rothenberg

Ilya Kaminsky

Rita Dove

Dana Levin

David Huerta

Martin Woodside

Fady Joudah

Juana Adcock

Rachel Galvin

Marc Vincenz

Alan Sondheim

MARGENTO

mIEKAL aND

David Jhave Johnston

Chris Funkhouser

Maria Mencia

John Cayley & Daniel C. Howe

Jim Carpenter

Sandy Baldwin

JD McClatchy

GC Waldrep

Page Hill Starzinger

Șerban Foarță

Stephanie Strickland & Ian Hatcher

Babylonians as Americans as Babylonians

Jared Pierce

A Computationally Assembled Anthology / Antologie asamblată computațional

"US" Poets Foreign Poets / Noi poeți "americani" poeți străini

Brian Kim Stefans

About

Books

Join the club