Thu 30 Oct 2008
Here are some recent, and not so recent, things written about my books and chapbooks over the past years.
I try to keep track of this stuff once in a while, since these books and things often seem to disappear into oblivion, and I like to think my poems and things are meaningful to someone… sigh. I’ve also moved four times in four years, now, and feel pretty out of touch with readers and writers, though finally settling in LA and meeting the poetry folks here and in San Francisco has been pleasurable (and a relief). “Stabilizing” might be more therapy-session way of putting it.
There are two interesting shout-outs tacked on at the end. First, is a poem by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, in which my Flash animation “The Dreamlife of Letters,” which borrowed liberally from a text of hers, is discussed at length in the footnote and poem itself. (She didn’t like the project at all, from what I understand, when she first heard about it and saw the poem, but I think she’s ok with it now. Maybe.)
The second is from the intro to the Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry, in which my playful co-option (or “liberal borrowing”) of Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell” (along with other works by other poets like Ashbery, Muldoon and Lisa Robertson) is given as proof that British Romantic poetry is still very much alive and useful to poets of today (or something like that). Anyway, I thought it was funny.
Noah Eli Gordon
Boston Review
microreview of Kluge: A Meditation, and other works
Clive Thompson
Collision Detection (blog)
“Why Interactive Poetry Beats Interactive Fiction”
C St Perez
Tarpaulin Sky
review of What is Said to the Poets Concerning Flowers
Jason Morris
Jacket Magazine
“The Time Between Time: Messianism & the Promise of a ‘New Sincerity'” (general aesthetics essay discussing a number of poets)
Michael McDonough
Electronic Book Review
review of Before Starting Over: Selected Essays and Interviews
Michael McDonough
Econoculture
review of Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics
Stan Mir
Fascicle
“Matter Ordered to be Made” (review of several chapbooks)
Ben Basan
Luminations (blog)
notes on Fashionable Noise and some digital work
Mark Mendoza
Verse Magazine
review of “The Window Ordered to be Made”
Ron Silliman
Silliman’s Blog
review of “Jai-alai for Autocrats”
Jack Kimball
Talisman (print edition)
“Review of Carter Ratcliffe’s Arrivederci Modernismo, Laynie Browne’s Daily Sonnets, Brian Kim Stefans’s Kluge: A Meditation and Other Works”
Mark Wallace
Verse (print edition)
review of Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics
K. Silem Mohammed
The Consequence Of Innovation: 21st Century Poetics (ed. Craig Dworkin, print)
“Creeping It Real” (this might be on his blog, Lime Tree, somewhere)
Rachel Blau Du Plessis
P.F.S. Post (blog)
Draft 59: Flash Back
James Chandler and Maureen N. McLane
“Introduction: The Companionable Forms of Romantic Poetry”
October 31st, 2008 at 2:41 am
& then there was this from one of the raintaxi issues:
“Part erudite camp a la “Biothermâ€-era O’Hara, part neo-Situationist rhetorician “dropping a scene into the non-linear prestidigitator,†part pun, poignancy and parataxis, and always accenting its wit with a wink, Brian Kim Stefans’s The Window Ordered to be Made, is an exemplary model for the way in which a well designed chapbook serves to deepen one’s engagement with the work therein. The cover features a cutout of a four-panel window framing bits of text from an orange page beneath; although this page is covered with the title of the chapbook reiterated ad infinitum, the act of reading and then opening the cover creates a sort of tactile hypertext poem. This is fitting, as Stefans is perhaps best known for his work in the realm of digital poetics, as both theoretician and practitioner; however, the fun intelligence here never fails to enliven the printed page.”
xoxo, neg