Among the Cynics

Literature & Fiction

Fitterman, Robert

Poetry

Small Pr Distribution

Sprawl

Make Now Press

Poetry. In NOW WE ARE FRIENDS, Robert Fitterman takes on some of the prime features of our intensively-networked present—the broad, continual scatter of personal information through blogs, databases, and social networking sites; and its (frequently uncomfortable) return as the stray filaments find their way back to us and "that me" trumps "me me" in other social contexts. NOW WE ARE FRIENDS blows these effects up to archival proportions, replacing the momentary slip (that terrible drunken photo) with raw scale by pulling together all findable traces of an identity online or the adventures of a name: "Ben Kessler," circa 9/2010. (With "Coda: Following Rob," by Steven Zultanski.)

Now We Are Friends

Truck Books

Winner of the New American Poetry Competition 1997, chosen by Bruce Andrews. The selector for the 1997 New American Poetry Competition, Bruce Andrews, writes of this exciting book of poetry: "The citya'any city, your citya'comes alive in all its maximal, flash-frame, cut 'n' paste glory in Robert Fitterman's Metropolis. Book I (1-15) launches this open-ended project, resuscitating the Long Poem tradition with a fluxy, ambient splash of border crossings, of social life way beyond the narrowly literary or the possessive lyric's 'merely personal.' Here we're 'coming down from the repro...,' with hairpin turns through a multiplicity of style, into an everyday sensory hologram, a porous yardsale of coming attractions." Robert Fitterman, with his wife, the poet Kim Rosenfield, lives and works in New York City.

Metropolis 1-15 (National Poetry Series)

Sun & Moon Press

Poetry. Fitterman's newest book drags Edward Gibbon's historical explorations into the parallel morass of today's mass marketing and consumerism, where Roman Art becomes Airbrush, Roman transportation becomes Bubble Wrap. The third book of Fitterman's long poem Metropolis, METROPOLIS XXX is composed of "found" text, but unlike many poems of that type it also achieves a sustained and consistent critique of contemporary culture. "Instead of restating the fall of the Roman state in words of his own, Fitterman speaks only in the readymade discourse, found by chance, verbatim, amid the ruins of the imperial, American marketplace"--Christian Bök.

Metropolis XXX: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Edge Books

Poetry. "I had a suspicion about this work. I mistrust all frank and simple poetry. This book makes me feel like my trust was wasted. I finally had somebody verify the story. I thought it was accidental. I lost the disgusted feeling and was happy. This book makes me feel like I end up with nothing, but somehow it makes me feel better. I rather liked it. The soft, brushed covering is removable and easy to clean. Adjustable strap holds poems in desired position. New bolder and larger print is easier to see and read. Casing made of 50% post-consumer content. PMA certified nontoxic. Featuring an outstanding one-of-a-kind circle design, this eye-catching creation is certain to become a topic of conversation"--Charles Bernstein.

Rob the Plagiarist

Roof Books

Literary Nonfiction. Poetics. "In NOTES ON CONCEPTUALISMS, Place and Fitterman erect the first critical framework toward the understanding of conceptual writing, an emergent early twenty-first century literary movement. Elegantly parsed and carefully dissected, this work fleshes out many of the missing details proposed thus far regarding the methodologies and strategies of how to proceed with innovative writing. Both direct and oblique, NOTES is itself a self-reflexive work of conceptual writing in the guise of theory; or is it a work of theory in the guise of conceptual writing? By smartly straddling the creative and the critical, this book does twice the work toward our understanding of what it means to be contemporary"--Kenneth Goldsmith.

Notes on Conceptualisms

Place, Vanessa

History & Criticism

Ugly Duckling Presse

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. HOLOCAUST MUSEUM reframes the captions of holocaust photographs from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. These captions—without their photographic images—are arranged loosely in the order or narrative constructed by the museum. There are many purposes to this project, but, for the author, the genesis is in articulating a cultural shift from image to text. Primarily, the author chose this particular subject, this particular holocaust, because the images are shared in our collective memory—by presenting only the text, the reader is, hopefully, consigned into a more complicit experience. "According to a dictionary, a museum is a site where objects of permanent value are kept and displayed. The permanent value of the objects captured in Robert Fitterman's HOLOCAUST MUSEUM is that they prove the cut an image can make. The image of a Jew, a gypsy, a desecration, a desire. We have seen the pictures of our past, but the point is the caption. For it is through the language of this museum that we can see how permanent, how precious, is our love of hate."—Vanessa Place

Holocaust Museum

Counterpath Press

Poetry. Cover illustration by Natalya Lobanova. Robert Fitterman's new book- length poem borrows its poetic form, loosely, from James Schuyler's The Morning of the Poem, to orchestrate hundreds of found articulations of sadness and loneliness from blogs and online posts. A collective subjectivity composed through the avatar of a singular speaker emerges. But the real protagonist of NO WAIT, YEP. DEFINITELY STILL HATE MYSELF. is subjectivity as a mediated construct—the steady stream of personal articulations that we have access to are personal articulations themselves already mediated via song lyrics, advertising, or even broadcasters. NO, WAIT... blurs the boundary between collective articulation and personal speech, while underscoring the ways in which poetic form participates in the mediation of intimate expression.

No, Wait. Yep. Definitely Still Hate Myself.

Poetry. Written in the long shadow of 9/11, THIS WINDOW MAKES ME FEEL replaces the individual poet's response to catastrophe with a collective, multi-vocal chorus of everyday articulations. Never before published in its entirety, THIS WINDOW MAKES ME FEEL is one of the earliest examples of a long poem solely composed with repurposed web language.

This Window Makes Me Feel

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Books by Fitterman, Robert