./code --poetry is a colourful cacophony of computer languages. Authors Daniel Holden and Chris Kerr have created a collection of code poems - poems written in the source codes of a variety of programming languages. Inside, code and poetry are presented alongside visual artwork with the poetry itself embedded in the source code of a number of programs. Every program is entirely valid, and when compiled and run these programs produce the visual artwork presented alongside the individual poems in the collection. Lavishly formatted and bursting with colour, this unique book is essential for anyone passionate about visual art, poetry or programming. ./code --poetry is a Rosetta Stone for programmers, restored and rendered for the digital age, highlighting the intersection of three classic art forms.

In his most expansive and unruly collection to date, the acclaimed poet Charles Bernstein gathers poems, both tiny and grand, that speak to a world turned upside down. Our time of “covidity,” as Bernstein calls it in one of the book’s most poignantly disarming works, is characterized in equal measure by the turbulence of both the body politic and the individual. Likewise, in Topsy-Turvy, novel and traditional forms jostle against one another: horoscopes, shanties, and elegies rub up against gags, pastorals, and feints; translations, songs, screenplays, and slapstick tangle deftly with commentaries, conundrums, psalms, and prayers. Though Bernstein’s poems play with form, they incorporate a melancholy, even tragic, sensibility. This “cognitive dissidence,” as Bernstein calls it, is reflected in a lyrically explosive mix of pathos, comedy, and wit, though the reader is kept guessing which is which at almost every turn. Topsy-Turvy includes an ode to the New York City subway and a memorial for Harpers Ferry hero Shields Green, along with collaborations with artists Amy Sillman and Richard Tuttle. This collection is also full of other voices: Pessoa, Geeshie Wiley, Friedrich Rückert, and Rimbaud; Carlos Drummond, Virgil, and Brian Ferneyhough; and even Caudio Amberian, an imaginary first-century aphorist. Bernstein didn’t set out to write a book about the pandemic, but these poems, performances, and translations are oddly prescient, marking a path through dark times with a politically engaged form of aesthetic resistance: We must “Continue / on, as / before, as / after.” The audio version of Topsy-Turvy is performed by the author.

Every major airport has a three-letter code from the International Air Transport Association. In perhaps history's greatest-ever feat of armchair travel, Nasser Hussain has written a collection of poetry entirely from those codes. In a dazzling aeronautic feat of constraint-based writing, SKY WRI TEI NGS explores the relationship between language and place in a global context. Watch as words jet-set across the map, leaving a poetic flight path. See letters take flight (and leave their baggage behind).

Engages in a critical reanalysis of historical Ibero-American experimental poetry in order to demonstrate how the contemporary digital vanguard owes much to this tradition. With a broad geographic and linguistic sweep covering more than one hundred years of poetry, this book investigates the relationships between and among technology, aesthetics, and politics in Ibero-American experimental poetry. Eduardo Ledesma analyzes visual, concrete, kinetic, and digital poetry that questions what the “literary” means, what constitutes poetry, and how, if at all, visual and verbal arts should be differentiated. Radical Poetry examines how poets use the latest technologies (cinematography, radio, television, and software) to create poetry that self-consciously interrogates its own form, through close alliances with conceptual and abstract art, performance, photography, film, and new media. To do so, Ledesma draws on pertinent theories of metaphor, affect, time, space, iconicity, and cybernetics. Ledesma shows how José Juan Tablada (Mexico), Joan Salvat-Papasseit (Catalonia), Clemente Padín (Uruguay), Fernando Millán (Spain), Décio Pignatari (Brazil), Ana María Uribe (Argentina), and others turn words, machines, and, more recently, the digital into flesh, making word-objects “come alive” by assembling text to act and seem human, whether on the page, on walls, or on screens. “This book is extraordinary. It is truly original in its conception and deeply grounded in its knowledge, and it communicates a passion for its topics, especially the digital age. This is a major contribution that surely will be a new model for literary critique in these languages.” — Gwen Kirkpatrick, Georgetown University

An acute and deeply insightful book of essays exploring poetic form and the role of instinct and imagination within form—from former poet laureate, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning author Robert Hass. Robert Hass—former poet laureate, winner of the National Book Award, and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize—illuminates the formal impulses that underlie great poetry in this sophisticated, graceful, and accessible volume of essays drawn from a series of lectures he delivered at the renowned Iowa Writers’ Workshop. A Little Book on Form brilliantly synthesizes Hass’s formidable gifts as both a poet and a critic and reflects his profound education in the art of poetry. Starting with the exploration of a single line as the basic gesture of a poem, and moving into an examination of the essential expressive gestures that exist inside forms, Hass goes beyond approaching form as a set of traditional rules that precede composition, and instead offers penetrating insight into the true openness and instinctiveness of formal creation. A Little Book on Form is a rousing reexamination of our longest lasting mode of literature from one of our greatest living poets.

At the beginning of the 21st century, there is still no generally accepted comprehensive definition of the lyric or differentiated modern toolkit for its analysis. The reception of poetry is largely characterised either by an empathetic identification of critics with the lyric persona or by exclusive interest in formal patterning. The present volume seeks to remedy this deficit. All the contributors ‘theorise’ the lyric to overcome the impasse of an impressionistic and narrowly formalistic critical debate on the genre. Their papers focus on a variety of different questions: the problem of establishing a framework for definition and classification; the search for dynamic and potent critical approaches; investigations of poetry's cultural performance and its fundamental relevance for the construction of group cohesion. The essays collected in this volume offer a consciously polyphonic range of theories and interpretations, suggesting to the reader a variety of theoretical frameworks and practical illustrations of how a discussion of poetry may be firmly grounded in modern literary theory.

A war and spy novel as well as a mystery, this is the story of a poet recruited in the spring of 1943 to write poetry for coding and decoding messages in the OSS. Jake Finny, a college senior in the reserves, finds himself dealing with a series of unexplained deaths in the Message Center. As he moves from Washington to Algiers to Italy, fearing for his life. He goes AWOL and seeks those committing these crimes, aided by the Italian girl his friend wanted to marry. As the pressure on him intensifies, he is haunted by the head of Counterintelligence, a famous poet whom he can't determine whether he is sympathetic to him or thinks he is implicated in these deaths. He has talked to him about the connection between poetry and counterintelligence and only later realizes to his sorrow what an important part the man has played in his life. The novel is not only about Jake and his situation but also about the workings of OSS and the conditions in Italy during the war. 4 photos. A Merriam Press World War II Novel.