Photo of Steven Seidenberg (right) courtesy of Seidenberg.
Steven Seidenberg’s Anon is a textual mountebank — a term that Seidenberg defines in the collection’s lavish glossary as “a person hawker of quack medicines in public places, attracting an audience by tricks, storytelling, and jokes.”[1] It’s not common for poetry collections to have their own glossaries — and even less common for them to feature words that don’t appear anywhere in the text.
Kim Rosenfield and Kristen Gallagher performing in "The Bedbug Variations"
Kristen Gallagher: So this started because we were talking about how we wanted a more historical understanding of the lyric. And so I made you a copy of this essay by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young summarizing Friedrich Kittler’s revolt in German literary criticism, his move from hermeneutics to discourse-analysis, because it leads him to some provocative conclusions about lyric poetry in Germany as a disciplinary effect.
Not knowing entirely how to live
Kristen Gallagher in conversation with Kim Rosenfield
Kristen Gallagher: So this started because we were talking about how we wanted a more historical understanding of the lyric. And so I made you a copy of this essay by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young summarizing Friedrich Kittler’s revolt in German literary criticism, his move from hermeneutics to discourse-analysis, because it leads him to some provocative conclusions about lyric poetry in Germany as a disciplinary effect.