Fashionable Noise on Digital Poetics
Description:... Less a critical volume than an improvisatory look at a still-nascent form, Stefans's ruminations comprise a print take that is closest to the online world's free-wheeling sense of formal inquiry, semi-disposable experimentation and utopian possibility. The eight longish pieces here are mostly concerned with screen-based poetry, but are different from one another. A real-time, online interview with poet Darren Wershler-Henry (The Tapeword Foundry) kicks things off, covering everything from the Toronto Concrete poetry scene to Situationism, Prynne, Eno, Hakim Bey, the launch party for Cabinet magazine and Frampton Comes Alive. "Reflections on Cyberpoetry" offers a tight series of straight-faced pronouncements ("`Mauberley is a cyberpoem; The Cantos, not.") and insights into algorithmic composition; "Stops and Rebels" unwinds into a dense, rewarding essay that manages to proceed via footnotes without invoking banal postmodernist tropes; "Proverbs of Hell" riffs Blake-wardly ("Condemn not Flash because it is `slick' "), while "A Poem of Attitudes," a long, beautiful abecedarian work composed with the aid of splicing programs, comes on like Bruce Nauman emptying out his neon tool box: "Not a curse. Not all the songs,/ no gimmick. Not be. Not in my poem./ Not like a room. Not mix the beans." Stefans's two major cyberworks, "The Naif and the Bluebells" and "The Dreamlife of Letters," are easily locatable online.
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