Kluge: A Meditation, and Other Works - Softcover

Stefans, Brian Kim

Softcover

ISBN 10: 193182424X ISBN 13: 9781931824248

Publisher: Roof Books, 2007

Synopsis

Poetry. "Brian Kim Stefans' KLUGE is cultural karaoke. It takes the last two decades, two centuries, of poetry making strategies and super-texts them under our live dramas of the original language. KLUGE programs the pulleys and levers in the wings of our cultural machinations. KLUGE "Track[s] this spot to th/e edge of tow/n to a hut/with windo/ws." KLUGE, like Ashbery's THE SKATERS, glides us through the snow of discord and arrives at a new general understanding: "I am a, uh, a situation, and I am only, uh, also, a byproduct." KLUGE will give you faith in poetry as a culture-making tool, even if you don't know the words...hum." Robert Fitterman

About this title

About the Author:

Brian Kim Stefans' most recent books are What is Said to the Poet Concerning Flowers (Factory School, 2006), Kluge: A Mediation, and other works (Roof, 2007) and Before Starting Over: Selected Writings and Interviews (Salt, 2006). He is professor of English and Digital Humanities at UCLA.

From Publishers Weekly:

Stefans (Fashionable Nose) remains the most radically experimental of poets who began publishing in the late 1990s, a fact these seven beautiful new longer works affirm. Most immediately arresting is the title piece, set in three sections of 12 blocks of justified text. As the reader proceeds from block to block, an aching first-person addressrepeats almost verbatim, but with subtle—and sometimes not so subtle, and often very funny—homophonic or semantic substitutions, which then alter the unfolding story's course precipitously. Where Stones Gather is a play featuring a character named Kate Valk (who was played in a New York production by acclaimed New York theater actress Kate Valk), who is directed to nod into a telephone repeatedly. Sehnsucht consists, at least partially, of blenderized reconfigurings of Stefans's own early poems, and promises to disinte/ grate you with/ a ray-gun, or/ Reaganomics. Two Introductory Essays enumerate on the techniques of electronic writing (of which Stefans is at the forefront). Stefans works almost feverishly to fulfill Pound's dictum to make it new, and sees clearly that satire, even of poetic forms themselves, is the preserver much more than the destroyer—a list of the dotted lines you've not yet signed. (Sept.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Roof Books
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 193182424X
• ISBN 13: 9781931824248
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 126