Reading Experimental Writing Edited by Georgina Colby Edinburgh University Press (2020): NOW OUT in cloth Paperback will be published in August 2021
The essays comprising this conceptually rich and astutely edited volume read contemporary experimental writing in terms of its engagement with a genuinely historical present moment, unfolding at manifold sites of turbulence. The result is a set of extraordinarily timely essays on aesthetic activism, reflecting an array of perspectives while sharing a sense of the contemporary as emergent and still incomplete. This is a powerful contribution to the moment, and one with long term significance. - Lyn Hejinian
“Firewood/Foreword,” Charles Bernstein (full text below) “Introduction: Reading Experimental Writing,” Georgina Colby 1. “‘Fog is My Land’: A Citizenship of Mutual Estrangement in the Painted Books of Etel Adnan,” Jennifer Scappettone 2. “Reading Happily with John Cage, Lyn Hejinian, and Others,” Alex Houen 3. “Experiment, Inscription and the Archive: Kathy Acker’s Manuscript Practice,” Georgina Colby 4. “Rereading Race and Commodity Form in Erica Hunt’s ‘Piece Logic,’” Chris Chen 5. “Contemporary Experimental Translations and Translingual Poetics,” Sophie Seita 6. “On Joan Retallack’s Memnoir: Investigating ‘the Experience of Experiencing,’” erica kaufman 7. “A Queer Response to Caroline Bergvall's Hyphenated Practice: Toward an Interdependent Model of Reading,” Susan Rudy 8. “Reading Language Art in Digital Media: Reconfigurations of Experimental Practices,” John Cayley 9. “Charles Bernstein’s Walter Benjamin, Among Other Things,” Peter Jaeger
This image is from Atkins’s unpublished score “Objects for Orchestra.” The dedication is to Aunt Mae, Atkins’s mother’s sister with whom he lived for many years. Image courtesy of Russell Atkins.
The poet Russell Atkins falls through all of the cracks of postwar art history.[1] Living in Cleveland, outside the geographic centers of the art and publishing worlds; caught between modernism and the postwar avant-garde; publishing in small press journals; writing generically indeterminate concrete poems, essays, and operas.
