What is Said to the Poet Concerning Flowers (a new blog) & Fashionable Noise promo blitz

Announcing my most recent spate of silliness:

What is Said to the Poet Concerning Flowers

a new blog that is just a bunch of poems and photos that are supposed to
eventually have to do with each other – you laugh!

http://www.arras.net/whatis/

also, Free Space Comix: The Blog has a new design and lots of new materials
on it –

http://www.arras.net/weblog/

Highlights:

reviews: Little Review: Robert Lowell, Collected Poems
digressions: Haroldo de Campos 1929-2003
links: The Monkey Shakespeare Simulator
reviews: Little Review: Please Pay Attention Please: Bruce Nauman's Words
reviews: Little Review: Ezra Pound, Poems and Translations
reviews: Little Review: Jeff Derksen, Transnational Muscle Cars
poems: Sonnet: On Literary Criticism
skids: Skid 29
links: Eigenradio / Dublab
chatter: Requests for Porno / Silliman on the English
poems: The Window Ordered To Be Made
chatter: HP rips off The Dreamlife of Letters
reviews: Little Review: Michael Magee, MS
links: Acronym Blog
open letters: Email to the New York Review of Books re: Comics for Grown-Ups
exchanges: Exchange with Darren Wershler-Henry on Circulars: final version
links: The dullest blog in the world
links: Combo: new issue and website

Lastly – Fashionable Noise is now available from Small Press Distribution
(http://spdbooks.org), amazon.com, and barnesandnoble.com.

It was recently reviews in Publisher's Weekly – starred review – and I
also received this great blurb from Adelaide Morris:

PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY

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 Tapeworm
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) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

GREAT BLURB FROM ADALAIDE MORRIS, editor of Sound States: Innovative Poetics
and Acoustical Technologies

In Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics, Brian Kim Stefans does for digital
poetry what Lev Manovich's Language of New Media does for contemporary media
art. Starting from dynamics peculiar to the computer poem-its algorithms,
source files, and flows of digitized information-Stefans imagines the
computer poem from the bottom up. Instead of aligning it with or against
conventional verse or avant-garde texts, he situates it in the larger field
of digital art and new media. The book's major essay-construction-"Stops
and Rebels: a critique of hypertext"-is an annotated computer poem that
provides not only a canny mix of poetic and critical source files but a
lexicon of critical terms, a history of digital experiments, and a series of
brilliant meditations and riffs on new media creations. The result is
essential reading for anyone interested in new media art and poetics. – Dee
Morris

More here from the Atelos site: http://atelos.org/fashionable.htm

My new play – for those of you who care – is called "Kinski in Kanada" –
sick – premieres Nov. 6th at the Bowery Poetry Club.

And I'll be teaching a poetry workshop at the Poetry Project starting
October called (tentatively) "Jai-Alai for Autocrats." Sign up!

http://poetryproject.com/

Bah-b-b-bah-bah-bah – that's all folks!

love,
your local (scottish) spammer

\_\_\_\_

A R R A S: new media poetry and poetics
http://www.arras.net

Hinka cumfae cashore canfeh, Ahl hityi oar hied 'caw taughtie!

"Do you think just because I come from Carronshore I cannot fight? I shall
hit you over the head with a cold potatoe."