Commentaries - March 2021

Jerome Rothenberg, with Javier Taboada

From 'The Book of Voices,' 'I Heard the Voices of the Dead'

Cover of the Lithuanian edition of Khurbn by Algimantas Černiauskas
Cover of the Lithuanian edition of Khurbn by Algimantas Černiauskas

[The following continues an interview and conversation with Javier Taboada in El Libro de las Voces, just published in Mexico by Mangos de Hacha. The publication of course is in Spanish and includes a selection of poems and essays along with the extensive series of interviews. Still in my possession and unpublished is the entire book in English, from which the following excerpt is taken. (j.r.)]

 

Ephemeral radical acts

Bridging the digital and textual in the poetics of Nick Montfort

The rules of language — coding and poetics — occupy our current moment of automated poetics, and Nick Montfort, as a poet and a scholar, a theorist of the future, and an artist, creates the future through his computer-generated poetics, bending the rules of these languages. With multiple dimensions to his wide-ranging and innovative poetic practice, he is the author of over fifteen books of poetry and theory on digital media such as The New Media Reader (2003), Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (2003), Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (2009), 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 (2010), Exploratory Programming for the Arts and Humanities (2016), and The Future (2017), all from MIT Press.