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Please join Rodrigo and I in lifting a glass of... something to, uh... ourselves, Tuesday, May 27th, to celebrate the launch of his excellent book of poems, Platform, and my curious book of essays and poems, Fashionable
Noise: On Digital Poetics, both just out from Atelos Press.
Where: Spoonbill and Sugartown bookstore, in the charming, little celebrated gated community of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on 218 Bedford Avenue. It's the L train, stupide! (as zee French might say) -- zee Bedford stop, head south a few blocks.
What time: 7-9 (hours of the "magic light").
There will be wine, cheese, olives and depending on our attitudes toward formalities a brief reading, but I doubt it. I'm planning on selling my book on at a slight discount -- $10 ($3 off) -- don't know what Rodrigo's plans are but he might do the same. Get it while it's cheap. Tell friends to get it while it's cheap. Tell everyone.
Please read (but don't believe) the promo info below to be further persuaded of the necessity of your presence at this event. And there's nothing better than a Tuesday night of loitering on the streets of Wburg!
Cheers,
Brian
***
Rodrigo Toscano's Platform is a political one; his writings are predicated on the political conditions of contemporary life. But his work is not (and will never be) predicted by those conditions; indeed, outwitting, unnerving, and outspeaking the forces and figures clinging to control is one of his signal artistic strategies. It would be correct to read Platform as a triumphant product of precise and complex labor (thus adding to the tradition set by of Louis Zukofsky). But where the spirit of Johann Sebastian Bach informed Zukofsky's work, we would suggest that it is the spirit of the Teatro Campesino that informs Toscano's — his poems carry out brilliantly creative interventions. The works is bitingly inventive and yet delicately meticulous; outrageous, funny, anti-hypocritical, and "unfuckingrightgaggable," Platform is victory for the political intelligence whose exercise is now, more than ever, a human necessity.
Rodrigo Toscano grew up in San Diego. After a few years in the San Francisco Bay Area working as a social worker and an activist within the labor movement, he moved to New York, where he continues this work. He is a nationally influential writer, whose work along the intersections of social and aesthetic activism is adding new dimensions to contemporary poetics.
Platform is Rodrigo Toscano's third book. His first book, The Disparities, was published jointly by Green Integer and O Books in 2002. His second book, Partisans (which, due to a variety of circumstances, came out before his first), was published in 1999 by O Books.
http://www.atelos.org/platform.htm
***
Brian Kim Stefans' Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics eludes any singular description — it is too various. At once, Fashionable Noise explodes with ingredients of essay, games, and poetry, and it is always engaging, always thought provoking. How does limitless replication and change affect a dialogue one might try to have with another poet's words? What's so interesting about the hidden code behind the link Walt Disney that misdirects you, takes you to the wrong site? Stefans confronts these questions, and the ease with which he simultaneously discusses, investigates, and incorporates those elements that might make up a digital poetics is astounding. Generating poetry with a computer program, synthesizing Scots by using an algorithm accompanied by dictionaries, employing an ICQ chat transcript as the conduit for delivering a significant discussion on digital poetics: these are just a few examples of what readers will find in this book. Although "the webwork, unlike the earthwork, can never be photographed from a satellite perspective," Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics is on the forefront of mapping out a rapidly emerging, constantly morphing, virtual terrain.
Brian Kim Stefans is the author of Free Space Comix (1998), Gulf (1998/2000), and Angry Penguins (2000). He has been an active presence on the internet for several years, editing arras.net — a ceaselessly original site devoted to new media poetry and poetics — and creating works such as the acclaimed Flash poem "The Dreamlife of Letters" and a setting of the "e" chapter of Christian Bök's Christian Bök's Eunoia. He is an active literary and cultural critic, publishing frequently in the Boston Review, Jacket, and elsewhere. He lives in New York City.
http://www.atelos.org/fashionable.htm
Posted by Brian Stefans at May 19, 2003 10:02 AM