Word Toys: Poetry and Technics is an engaging and thought provoking volume that speculates on a range of textual works—poetic, novelistic, and programmed—as technical objects. With the ascent of digital culture, new forms of literature and literary production are thriving that include multimedia, networked, conceptual, and other as-yet-unnamed genres while traditional genres and media—the lyric, the novel, the book—have been transformed. Word Toys: Poetry and Technics is an engaging and thought-provoking volume that speculates on a range of poetic, novelistic, and programmed works that lie beyond the language of the literary and which views them instead as technical objects.   Brian Kim Stefans considers the problems that arise when discussing these progressive texts in relation to more traditional print-based poetic texts. He questions the influence of game theory and digital humanities rhetoric on poetic production, and how non-digital works, such as contemporary works of lyric poetry, are influenced by the recent ubiquity of social media, the power of search engines, and the public perceptions of language in a time of nearly universal surveillance.  Word Toys offers new readings of canonical avant-garde writers such as Ezra Pound and Charles Olson, major successors such as Charles Bernstein, Alice Notley, and Wanda Coleman, mixed-genre artists including Caroline Bergvall, Tan Lin, and William Poundstone, and lyric poets such as Harryette Mullen and Ben Lerner. Writers that trouble the poetry/science divide such as Christian Bök, and novelists who have embraced digital technology such as Mark Z. Danielewski and the elusive Toadex Hobogrammathon, anchor reflections on the nature of creativity in a world where authors collaborate, even if unwittingly, with machines and networks. In addition, Stefans names provocative new genres—among them the nearly formless “undigest” and the transpacific “miscegenated script”—arguing by example that interdisciplinary discourse is crucial to the development of scholarship about experimental work.

Word Toys: Poetry and Technics (Modern and Contemporary Poetics)

Literature & Fiction

Stefans, Brian Kim

History & Criticism

University Alabama Press

Poetry. Asian American Studies. "These poems remind you of everything possible...They are, at the same time, self-organizing systems, flipping into unforeseen forms of invention that first define, then defy their own dalliance with stability. Brian Kim Stefans' work is smart, wise-cracking, sweet, energetic, brand new, and thoroughly brilliant"-Stacy Doris. Brian Kim Stefans poems have appeared in The APA Journal, The Impercipient, Object, Chain, and Premonitions: The Kaya Anthology of New North Asian American Poetry. He is a graduate of Bard College.

Free Space Comix

Poetry

Roof Books

Poetry. ANGRY PENGUINS is Stefans's third full-length collection of poems and includes The Overtures of Holograms: Poems by Roger Pellett ("Punks of Diderot/ are smoking by the John/ door, aware of their historical deterrence;") and Dawns of the B-Machine. The latter section includes "This is Orson Welles" ("the abundance, the dancing, the cowardices, indices/ of a carnival described within its profusion"), "3rd Thoughts on the Tarmac," and "The Straw Camel," a long poem ("Progress 'monstrous',...That's not final, by the way").

Angry Penguins

Harry Tankoos

Gulf is Stefans's second full-length book, published by Object/Poetscoop in 1998, and now reprinted for Harry Tankoos Books. In the great New York samizdat tradition, Gulf takes the dramas, drones and abysses of the letter-sized page to the max. It includes "Organelles, a script," "Terms of the Anglo-Saxon Ritual," the long, serial "Gulf" and 29 other lyrics and lysergencies.

Gulf

Harry Tankoos Books

Poetry. "65.3% urbanity, neoclassical wit, critical detachment, epigrams, and sestinas; 34.7% curses, farts, and terrible jokes. Like modernist poetry, but with adulterations. I am in awe of the range of styles, the wealth of invention. The title is true: this is a living book."&mdash;Aaron Kunin "These poems are about as much furious thunder (lightning's or gunpowder's) as the lyric can carry now, well into the 21st century. Ranging, ambitious, messy here, elegant there&mdash;they sprawl with winning abandon like poetry's equivalent to a Franzen novel, sacrificing no wit but also no genuine gravitas. Look, they seem to say, at what poetry could do!"&mdash;Susan Wheeler

Viva Miscegenation

Make Now Press

Poetry. Following on the diverse, ambitious FASHIONABLE NOISE: ON DIGITAL POETICS, Brian Kim Stefans' WHAT IS SAID TO THE POET CONCERNING FLOWERS collects an equally varied set of small projects written over the past six years. Ranging from the spare lyrics of "Les Assis" and "Like the Corn Laws" to the socially engaged thought experiments of "The Screens" (which features, among other work, explorations of italics, a poem about ideas for poems, a piece in which every vowel has been replaced with a U, and a sardonic look at "social cripples"), Stefans' work is densely and rewardingly packed with fascinating language and plenty of provocative ideas. Here we have conceptual poetry at its best. Brian Kim Stefans is the editor of the /ubu series of e-books and the creator of arras.net, a website devoted to new-media poetry and poetics. He lives and works in Brooklyn. His book FREE SPACE COMIX is also available from SPD.

What Is Said To the Poet Concerning Flowers

Factory School

Poetry. "What do Hugh MacDiarmid, Donkey Kong and the algorithms of pornolize.com have to do with each other? Was Wordsworth all wrong, and is the democratization of language to be found in the work of a whiz kid's Commodore 64? Is it healthy to read the letters of a supermarket receipt for its lyrical soul? What is a `digital poetics' and where can I get one? Does it hurt? Can I still write `normal' poems afterwards?"--from FASHIONABLE NOISE. Brian Kim Stefans is also the author of FREE SPACE COMIX, GULF, and ANGRY PENGUINS, all carried by SPD.

Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics

Atelos

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

Kluge: A Meditation, and Other Works

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Books by Stefans, Brian Kim