Brooklyn Rail Interview

September 18, 2004

For those who like to be drowned in unbridled, drunken Williamsburg self promotion, here is a new interview with me in the latest issue of Brooklyn Rail about the /ubu series-- actually a fun thing to do with Monica de la Torre, one of my favorite impresarios of the new/old scene (and Mexican to boot), editor of Reversible Monuments, a great anthology of new Mexican poetry in translation -- yadda yadda -- she's somone to know about. Accompanied by a photograph attributed to the great Racquelli but which, in fact, is a self portrait with a $120 Canon digital camera:

http://brooklynrail.org/books/sept04/stefans.html

Mónica de la Torre (Rail): The first time I heard about /Ubu books was after a reading by Mike Scharf at the Bowery Poetry Club. I paid $5 for Verité, a printout of the pdf on UbuWeb. It was only later I realized that all books could be downloaded for free—I felt like an idiot for spending those five bucks!

Anyhow, knowing your work and a piece like your Flash poem "The Dreamlife of Letters," I thought that what I would encounter at /Ubu editions would be cyberpoetry, or works exploring the full potential of the computer medium—animation, sound, stuff like that. I was struck by the fact that all the works that I downloaded as pdf files had a book format.

Brian Kim Stefans: The whole idea of so-called digital poetry is broad. You could think of the computer as a medium such as paint, where people do individual artworks using a standard set of identifiable tools, and certainly innovative poems are taking full advantage of new digital technologies to make words do hitherto unknown, acrobatic things.


People are always making a big deal of how things on the Internet are free—poetry on the Internet used to be seen as the second coming of the mimeo-revolution in the ’70s, when people started publishing their own poetry in staple-bound "dittos." The St. Mark’s Poetry Project was key in that, if only because they owned a machine, and mimeo zines were influential on the DIY aspects of early punk. Ted Berrigan’s sonnets were published like that—25-odd years later, they’ve been republished by Penguin. The Internet, even back when it didn’t permit images and was strictly HTML, was seen as something comparable to this.

Read the rest at Brooklyn Rail