The Consequence of Innovation : 21st Century Poetics

In The Consequence of Innovation, Dworkin has edited a collection of amazing new essays on poetics, summarizing the variety of poetries that have arisen in innovative writing during the first decade of the 21st century. Filling the gap that has arisen in publishing writing on new poetry, there are essays on computer programs as poems by Brian Kim Stefans, flarf poetics by Gary Sullivan and Michael Gottlieb, uncreative poetry by Kenneth Goldsmith, and ecological poetry by James Sherry. There are essays on playwright Fiona Templeton and a groundbreaking piece by Sianne Ngai centered on Gertrude Stein. There is also an important group of general essays on the poetry marketplace by Steve Evans, Charles Bernstein, and Marjorie Perloff. If you buy one book this year, buy this one.

Craig Dworkin is a poet, critic, editor, and professor of English at the University of Utah. He is the author of several volumes of poetry and scholarly monographs, most recently  Helicography, in which he examines questions of scale in relation to Robert Smithson’ s  Spiral Jetty. He is founding senior editor of Eclipse, an online archive of 20th-century small-press writing and 21st-century born-digital publications.