Deep Language

Synopsis

In Sondheim’s Deep Language, writing detours through digital and other media, returning with new forms and genres, new ways of thinking philosophy, the body, religion, and everything else. This is a series of poems that revel in structured and unstructured language, with all the gaps and excitement that happens when language is stressed to the limit.

These pieces cohere, interrelate, interpenetrate; they develop the concept of deep language in any number of fascinating ways, ranging from intuitive writing to the use of scripts, code, and programming to elucidate hidden meanings – where none may have existed before.

Praise for this Book

‘Alan Sondheim is one of the precious few who joyfully – and in abject misery – risks these terrors of writing for us, for our pleasure and our undoing. What happens? Language disposes of us.

As if that were not all that is required of any writer, Alan Sondheim is also the poet, the artist, the maker who has most profoundly immersed himself and his work in the life-changing code-forms – of networked computation – that have the world and its 'genesis redux' in their grip.’ —John Cayley

‘Pioneer of experimental sensibility in multiple performance media Alan Sondheim tangles us up in these hypnotically repetitive, abject, slyly humorous and childishly gleeful, philosophically, aesthetically, theoretically and psychologically dense and insightful poems that are also essays, diasporic riffs and incantations, true confessions, Platonic dialogues, shtick, tantrums, aphorisms and manifesti. And that’s just the first 5 pieces!’ —Maria Damon