Publications
What Does It Matter
Brian Kim Stefans
“My “Nineties” is that of the “new economy,” my London is New York City (particularly Williamsburg), my Lionel Johnson is Alan Davies, and my haircuts not the pre-Raphaelite locks of a Dante Gabriel Rosetti or Algernon Swinburne but the practical buzz-cut of, oh, Miles Champion? John Cayley? Darren Wershler-Henry?” —Brian Kim Stefans, from Free Space Comix
£4.00, ISBN 978-1-903488-48-5, June 2005
Author Biography
Brian Kim Stefans is the author of the books of poems Free Space Comix (1998), Gulf (1998) and Angry Penguins (2000). Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics, a mixed-genre collection of poems, experimental essays and an interview, appeared in 2003 from Atelos. Recent chapbooks include “Poem Formerly Known As ‘Terrorism’,” “Jai-Alai for Autocrats,” “Cull,” and “Window Ordered to be Made.” He edits arras.net, devoted to new media poetry and poetics, and is a frequent critic for the Boston Review and other publications. A book of his critical writing, Before Starting Over, is slated to appear in late 2005 from Salt Publishing. He also edited the /ubu series of pdfs at ubu.com, and is now a student of Electronic Writing at Brown University.
More about Brian Kim Stefans»Excerpt
Reviews
Praise for Brian Kim Stefans’ Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics: “Noise is far from being mere linguistic waste or excess. It is many things in Stefan’s text: the stuff and matter of language on the cusp of symbolic meaning, the non- or posthuman aspects of new media writing, algorithm itself and its fragmentary, found, chance-selected sources. This is ‘noise’ as the representation of a downgraded but integral aspect of signification. Noise gains rights in this context because the entire world of language is the poet and writer’s proper (if potential) palette – not those few notes plucked out of the soundscape by convention and tradition, but everything from letters to their dreamlife, from noise to silence. Because new media make poetic noise fashionable, it becomes impossible for artists to ignore these admittedly fashionable ways of ‘making it new’.” —John Cayley, writing in Metamute
“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. 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.” —Publisher’s Weekly, 2003
