KLUGE: A MEDITATION
by Brian Kim Stefans
“Sehnsucht” and “Kluge: A Meditation” have my attention: the former, because it re-allocates sense in favor of the letter, and in the process of pulverizing the word makes the most of material and textual concreteness; the latter, because it transmogrifies the sentences usurped from elsewhere. It's an open secret that Stefans' Neo-Pop sensibility is the flip side of a dedicated, experimental, procedural praxis.
- Marjorie Welish
Brian Kim Stefans’ Kluge is cultural karaoke. Kluge 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 Fitteman
Brian Kim Stefans is all of the things a poet has always needed to be: a good listener, a precise synthesist, a clever mimic, an erudite critic, and, on occasion, a shameless thief. Brian Kim Stefans is Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy). Brian Kim Stefans is in ur house, eatin ur foodz.
- Darren Wershler-Henry
Brian Kim Stefans’ most recent books include “Viva Miscegenation” (MakeNow, 2013), What Is Said to the Poet Concerning Flowers (Factory School, 2006), Before Starting Over: Selected Writings and Interviews 1994-2005 (Salt, 2006) and Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics (Atelos, 2003). Among other web activities, he is the creator of arras.net, devoted to new media poetry and poetics, where his interactive art and digital poems such as "Suicide in an Airplane (1919)," “The Dreamlife of Letters” and “Kluge: A Meditation” can be found. He is also a video artist, graphic designer and publisher of Arras Books. His blog is Free Space Comix (www.arras.net/fscIII). He lives in Los Angeles where he teaches poetry, new media and theory in the English department of UCLA.