Karl Young

Karl Young thinks of himself as a pluralist, and that poetry makes the best use of its potentials when it interacts with other forms of poetry, other arts, and other activities not usually considered arts. He began publishing books in 1966 as part of what people now call the mimeo revolution. He began his Light and Dust anthology on the web as soon as the web opened up, after preparing with cruder electronic technologies such as BBS and FTP archives. At present, he continues checking out new approaches to editing and new avenues to pursue in his poetry, though he concentrates his main efforts on writing hybrid analyses of arts and their contexts.

He finds author bios in magazines awkward and of limited use. Hence he is setting up web pages specifically for Bio Notes for On-Line Publications. For an interested reader, this includes bibliographies, of Young and others, biographies (brief and extensive) of Young, extensive work by him, including some related to his essay on John Taggart, and biography, again, in capsule or extended form. And it won’t end with this publication in Jacket2, but be updated as may be useful. In this instance, Young intends to write more about acoustic memory. What prosody means when reading goes silent is an issue he has worked with for decades. It is one of the major issues of his “big arc” work, Bringing the Text Back Home, begun in the early 1970s and finished in 2011 (see Karl Young, Bringing the Text Back Home: What Alphabets Have Made of Us From Papyrus Fragments to Cyberspace, Light and Dust Anthology of Poetry, 2011). He will continue writing about it.