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”

The irony of Silliman’s post about wanting to sue the creators of Issue 1 is that he posted the entire list of “contributors” to the volume on his blog. Of course, he merely cut-and-pasted it, but he doesn’t say that, and the implication is that he typed the list himself.

http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2008/10/one-advantage-of-e-books-is-that-you.html

The most “creative” aspect of Issue 1 was the collection of author’s names. One of Silliman’s favorite critical tactics (see the introduction to the In The American Tree and Art of Practice) is the list of excluded poets. By cutting-and-pasting this list on your blog without clear attribution, within the context of understanding that the mere list of poet names is a form of criticism, you are committing a sort of plagiarism not unlike the — whatever it is that Silliman is accusing the creators of Issue 1 of havng done.

He should redo the post and type the names in from scratch (the difference in typeface is the dead giveaway that it was pasted in). Or at least include the list author’s names (which, I suppose, he really can’t).

Or something like that — I’m really just pointing out an irony. Don’t ask me why I’ve decided to comment on this now, but Kenny Goldsmith gave a very interesting presentation at Untitled: Speculation of the Expanded Field of Writing conference here in Los Angeles that ended with a great discussion of the project — though, strangely, Kenny neglected to include the list in his excerpt from the blog post.

Friday October 24th to Saturday October 25th
At REDCAT, The Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater
631 West 2nd Street, Los Angeles CA 90012

http://redcat.org/season/0809/cnv/untitled.php

FRIDAY October 24th

12.30: Opening Addresses

1.00-3.00: Litterality 1.
Writing is not speech, it is letters on a page. What do we make of the inclusion in writing of non-alphabetic signs, symbols, diagrams; writing as map or score; invented writing notations; or the book as object?
Johanna Drucker, Salvador Plascencia, Latasha Diggs, Shanxing Wang

3.30–5.00: The Meaninglessness or -fulness of Language.
As a vehicle, is language empty, saturated with meaning, both, or something else?
Jessica Smith, Bob Grenier, Christine Wertheim

5.00-6.00: Drinks at REDCAT with participants and audience

8.30-10.30: Evening Readings/Performances

SATURDAY October 25thMorning

10.30-12.00: Appropriation and Citation.
Whose work and what material gets appropriated, cited and resurrected? Who owns texts? Is there a difference between appropriation and citation?
Steve McCaffery, Doug Kearney, Kenneth Goldsmith

12.30–2.00: Litterality 2.
Writing is not speech, it is letters on a page. What do we make of the inclusion in writing of non-alphabetic signs, symbols, diagrams; writing as map or score; invented writing
notations; or the book as object?
Brian Kim Stefans, Julie Patton, Vincent Dachy

3.30–5.00: The Concept of Conceptual Writing.
What is the relation between conceptual writing and the trajectory of conceptual art?
Stephanie Taylor, Heriberto Yepez, Young-Hae Chang+ Marc Voge

5.00-6.00: Summary Discussion with all panelists

8.30-10.30: Evening Readings/Performances