cover image FASHIONABLE NOISE: On Digital Poetics

FASHIONABLE NOISE: On Digital Poetics

Brian Kim Stefans, . . Atelos, $12.95 (298pp) ISBN 978-1-891190-14-8

Less a programmatic critical volume than an improvisatory, searching look at a still-nascent form, Stefans's ruminations, exhortations, gags ("Th plug may be puld any day on cultur; th poem must be prepared") and excitations comprise a print take that is closest to the online world's free-wheeling sense of formal inquiry, semi-disposable experimentation and ardently utopian possibility. The eight longish pieces here are mostly concerned with screen-based poetry, but are utterly 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, as is his multi-author political blog, Circulars. With more ideas per page than most poets put into entire books, Stefans (Free Space Comix) provides a provisional, wickedly smart and goofily joyous lay of a land that is still being discovered—and created from scratch. (June)