Brian Kim Stefans

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Biographical note:  Brian Kim Stefans was born in Rutherford, New Jersey in 1969. He has published several books of poetry, including Free Space Comix (Roof, 1998), Gulf (Object Editions, 1998) and Angry Penguins (Harry Tankoos, 2000). Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics, a book of experimental writings that both explored and described the nexus between digital technology and poetry, appeared from Atelos in 2003. He is an internationally recognized digital artist and has run the website arras.net, devoted to new media poetry and poetics, since 1998.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844710881
ISBN-10:  1844710882
ISBN-13:  9781844710881
Author:  Brian Kim Stefans
Title:  Before Starting Over
Series:  Reconstruction
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CSBH
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Sep-06
Extent:  384pp
Height:  228 mm
Width:  152 mm
Thickness:  22 mm
Weight:  576 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 17.99
Price:  USD 24.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  Before Starting Over is an informal chronicle of several important developments in English-language poetry during the nineties and the turn of the century, most importantly Asian American poetry, digital poetics, and the changing face of poetry’s “experimental” wing. There is nothing pious about the approach: one chapter is a distillation of conversations and controversies that occurred on the internet via the author’s blog, Free Space Comix, while another is largely composed of playful and polemical “poetics” statements geared toward a popular – i.e. non-elitist or -insider – audience. Consquently, nothing is taken for granted, whether it be the efficacy of a central literary Tradition, or the primacy of the “marginal” or aesthetic “lineages” that are valorized in smaller writing communities identifying with either the “avant-garde” or ethnic minorities (or both). Included are several book reviews by the author that attempt to create a language for discussing the most “difficult” poetry of the past fifteen years energetically and engagingly, in a manner that is neither sugared up nor requiring a doctoral degree to decipher. Several interviews discuss strands of “digital poetics” that were not discussed in the author’s Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics, especially notions of “hacktivism,” internet publishing and the poetics of the anti-war blog Circulars. All in all, the experience of reading Before Starting Over is in which the reader is invited to disagree, to argue, but most of all to feel as passionate, troubled yet optimistic about poetry as the author, one of the more active and intelligent (uh huh) poets and critics to mobilize both the internet and journalistic print publications to examine and champion emerging strands in writing.

Table of contents:
PREFACES
“Poet-Critic”
I. SIX REVIEWS
Tan Lin, BlipSoak01
Christian Bök, Eunoia
Kevin Davies, Comp.
Bruce Andrews, Paradise & Method; Lyn Hejinian, The Language of Inquiry
Alice Notley, Disobedience
W. S. Graham, New Collected Poems
II. ASIAN AMERICAN POETRY
Voicebox
In Search of Lost Time: Walter K. Lew’s Excerpts from Dikte/Dictee
On the Introduction to The Open Boat
Remote Parsee: An Alternative Grammar to North Asian American Poetry
III. A POETICS OF VIRTUOSITY
A Poetics of Virtuosity
IV. REFLECTIONS IN A GLASS HOUSE
After Language Poetry
Veronica Forrest-Thomson
Fence Letter
Ezra Pound
Open Letter to Brendan Lorber
Frank O’Hara
Bruce Andrews, I Don’t Have Any Paper So Shut Up (Or, Social Romanticism)
A Poem for Tyros
When Lilacs Last in the Door
Jeff Derksen, Dwell
Tim Davis, Dailies
Jennifer Moxley, Wrong Life
Suzanne Dathe of Grenoble, France—Can We Win? (On Carol Mirakove’s Poetry)
Steve McCaffery, Three Books
V. SILLIMAN COMMENTARIES
Blogs, by Marianne Moore
Silliman Commentaries
VI. DIGITAL POETICS
Interview with Sylvia Egger
Statement for Orono, Maine
Iowa Review Web Interview
Statement for Slought
Brooklyn Rail Interview
Towards a Poetics for Circulars
Interview of Albanian Arts Magazine
VII. LITTLE REVIEWS
Jeff Derksen, Transnational Muscle Cars
Bill Luoma, Works & Days
Stacy Doris, Conference
Dan Farrell, Last Instance
Renee Gladman, Juice
Kenneth Goldsmith, Day
Jessica Grim, Fray
Pamela Lu, Pamela: A Novel
Christophe Tarkos, Ma Langue est Poétique: Selected Work
Rodrigo Toscano, Partisans
Jose Garcia Villa, The Anchored Angel: Selected Writings
Darren Wershler-Henry, The Tapeworm Foundry
Harryette Mullen, Muse & Drudge
Susan Wheeler, Source Codes
Joel Kuszai (editor), poetics@
Caroline Bergvall, Goan Atom

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from Before Starting Over: Introduction

My sense is that critics serve some purpose for readers of poetry as being a way of telling time; there are no ticks of the second hand in literary culture, so it’s not always terribly clear that things have changed or are moving forward. This sense of not moving isn’t so much a question of poetic technique—poems almost always have something to do with their own time, even if as a concerted reaction against it—as how one reads poetry. Sometimes a single aspect of a poet’s practice will place her too easily in a “lineage” or other sub–current of the master narrative, and readers will choose, even be encouraged, to read the poet as a symptom of, or argument for, this constructed past, regardless of whatever synthetic aspects—those parts that she absorbed from a unique and wide range of reading and experience, not to mention the peculiarities of her will as she marshaled words to express it—are in the poem.

One could call this a version of Marxist literary discourse, yet the stakes are not grounded in global class warfare so much as the arguments of poets who come from different “schools.” I’m one of those deluded people for whom poetry was my entire life for several years when I was younger, so to have a poem killed this way—neglected because it is a vote for the wrong party, or stupidly praised because it is a vote for the correct one—is pretty depressing. I used to believe there were people in poems; to be told they were mostly proselytes for the National Front was a bit of a blow.

I don’t claim, however, to have my finger on the pulse of poetry; for all of my work in digital technology, for example, I’ve never claimed, like some of my peers, that only artists who deal in digital technology are relevant to today. I have a Hegelian bent that has been born out somewhat by recent developments in the arts—i.e. the more “digital” becomes the vaunted term, the more attractive all things analog appear. But I like to keep my eyes open, with the goal of seeing something that not only challenges my ways of thinking but denies my ideas entirely. I like having opinions, but whenever possible I’ve tried to err on the side of the positive, simply ignoring things that seemed to me largely bad or wrong–headed. Nonetheless, being an internet junkie for some years, and a kind of a literary “activist” in general, I’ve strayed more than a few times from this general approach.

Unpublished endorsement :  Brian Kim Stefans is an animator of poetic intelligence, of seemingly limitless curiosity and with an acuity to match. All channels seem to pass through the Stefans control centre, but the filters are finely engineered and reliable: the output is clear and attuned to the liveliest sources.

John Wilkinson

Unpublished endorsement :  The wit and resourcefulness of Brian Kim Stefans’ poetry has already marked out a new choreography for post-post-Structuralist writing: pivoting and leaping dangerously, the poet on the ice-polisher prepares a gorgeous track through the shavings of Eurocentric modernism, the invisible machine age, politics under a ‘hologram President’ and the virtuosity of the American consumer. In Before Starting Over, Stefans reveals the intense and committed critical practice which gets him in condition for his poetic samba. Whether he is treating Language poets, young Korean writers or the deacons of American literature to one of his searching reviews, Stefans gives both text and reader the gift of an admirably old-fashioned sense of the critic's responsibility – to inform and to delight.

The insights and the range of Stefans’ investigations are constantly surprising. Discussion of Ammons, Williams, Rimbaud, W. S. Graham, Pound and the Situationists show his facility for reconciling contemporary poetic difficulty to an expanded European and American tradition, without constructing the pseudo-lineages which he rightfully distrusts. But he also offers equal consideration to ‘Creep Poetry', writing by his contemporaries where ‘the "I" is often situated beneath the economic stratum of commercial micro- and hyperactivity that digital technology has made possible.’ Stefans is well-known as a critic of digital art and writing, and as the keeper of several essential blogs (including the now defunct anti-war resource Circulars, whose logic he describes at length). In this book, he investigates the consequences for writing of technology: not only the computer and the internet, but also typewriters, paper and sound. In his close readings, he reasserts the expressive potential of gaps, space, diction and assonance alongside the graphic innovations made possible by Flash and Quark. Though his own work might sometimes be assimilated into the Language movement, Stefans’ alertness to the ‘minority issues’ which complicate Language poetry's critique of identity reminds us of the healthy pluralism of the younger generations operating in and on America's power infrastructures. Moreover, his approach to the ideological and formal challenges of anthologising Asian-American writing combines a sympathetic historical awareness with exemplary critical rigour.

Before Starting Over is a capacious, funny and provocative book, a model of versatility and committed reading. It is proof of the vitality of criticism, and of the critic's role in sustaining communities and the intensities of the labours of poetry.

Andrea Brady

Unpublished endorsement :  This book may be the only reliable guide to recent poetry in English. Brian Kim Stefans's essays are erudite, stylish, sensitive, curious, never provincial, unintimidated by difficulty, full of statements that are both effortlessly elegant and provocative of serious thought. His range is astonishing. His "little reviews" are models of the form. I have learned a lot from reading these essays, and will continue to do so.

Aaron Kunin