Brian Kim Stefans (born 1969) is an American

poet A poet is a person who studies and creates poetry. Poets may describe themselves as such or be described as such by others. A poet may simply be the creator (thought, thinker, songwriter, writer, or author) who creates (composes) poems (oral t ...

known for his work in experimental poetry and

electronic literature Electronic literature or digital literature is a genre of literature where digital capabilities such as interactivity, multimodality or Generative literature, algorithmic text generation are used aesthetically. Works of electronic literature ar ...

. He is a professor of poetry, new media and screenplay studies in the English department of

UCLA The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Its academic roots were established in 1881 as a normal school then known as the southern branch of the C ...

. Stefans was born in Rutherford, New Jersey and earned a bachelor's degree from

Bard College Bard College is a private college, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. The campus overlooks the Hudson River and Catskill Mountains within the Hudson River Historic District ...

and a

Master of Fine Arts A Master of Fine Arts (MFA or M.F.A.) is a terminal degree in fine arts, including visual arts, creative writing, graphic design, photography, filmmaking, dance, theatre, other performing arts and in some cases, theatre management or arts admi ...

degree in

Electronic literature Electronic literature or digital literature is a genre of literature where digital capabilities such as interactivity, multimodality or Generative literature, algorithmic text generation are used aesthetically. Works of electronic literature ar ...

from

Brown University Brown University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. It is the List of colonial colleges, seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the US, founded in 1764 as the ' ...

Digital poetry

A resident of New York from 1992-2005, Stefans was an active participant in the poetry culture of the city as an editor and organizer, publishing numerous reviews in outlets such as ''Publishers Weekly'', '' The Boston Review'', ''St. Mark's Poetry Project newsletter'', ''Shark'', ''Rain Taxi'', ''Verse'', ''Tripwire'' and other small journals in the United States and abroad. He was an early contributor to

UbuWeb UbuWeb is a "a pirate shadow library consisting of hundreds of thousands of freely downloadable avant-garde artifacts." It offers visual, concrete and sound poetry, expanding to include film and sound art mp3 archives. The site was created by ...

, a digital journal for "avant-garde poetry and sound art" founded in 1996. He established his website arras.net in 1998, a site devoted to new media poetry and poetics where his interactive art and digital poems such as "Suicide in an Airplane (1919)", “Star Wars (one letter at a time)”, “The Dreamlife of Letters” and “Kluge: A Meditation” can be found. ''The Dreamlife of Letters'' (2000) is one of Stefans' most cited works. It was first published on Stefans' website ''arras.net'' in 2000, and was anthologised in the ''Electronic Literature Collection'''s first volume in 2006. In his book ''Electronic Literature'', Scott Rettberg describes how Stefans first wrote a series of concrete poems using an alphabetised list of words from an essay by the poet and feminist theorist Rachel Blau DuPlessis. Stefans then animated the poems using the now discontinued platform Flash, and presented the animations as a non-interactive 11 minute video shared on the web. Although ''Dreamlife'' is neither technically nor stylistically complex, Rettberg argues that it successfully demonstrates how the spatial positions and movements of words can carry as much semantic meaning as the word itself. In his "Introduction to American Poetry between 2000-2009", Michael Davidson describes how ''Dreamlife'' "expands concrete poetry into a dynamic, tensile exploration of alphabetic characters".

Print poetry

Stefans' print books of poetry include ''Viva Miscegenation'', ''Kluge: A Meditation and other works'',''What Is Said to the Poet Concerning Flowers'', ''Angry Penguins'', ''Gulf'', and ''Free Space Comix''. Along with several chapbooks of poetry, his other books include ''Before Starting Over: Selected Interviews and Essays 1994-2005'' (Salt Publishing, 2006) and ''Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics'' which includes experimental essays on the role of algorithm in poetry and culture.

Critical work

Previous critical writings include “ Conceptual Writing: The L.A. Brand”, the series “Third Hand Plays” for the website of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art concerning

, and "Terrible Engines: A Speculative Turn in Recent Poetry and Fiction” that inaugurates his recent interest in applying concepts from recent

Continental philosophy Continental philosophy is a group of philosophies prominent in 20th-century continental Europe that derive from a broadly Kantianism, Kantian tradition.Continental philosophers usually identify such conditions with the transcendental subject or ...

to new forms of literature. Writing on

Asian American Asian Americans are Americans with ancestry from the continent of Asia (including naturalized Americans who are immigrants from specific regions in Asia and descendants of those immigrants). Although this term had historically been used fo ...

art and literature include “Remote Parsee: Asian American Poetry Since 1970” and “Miscegenated Scripts: A Theory of Asian American New Media.”

References

External links

Arras.net

Free Space Comix: the blog

Poetry Foundation

UCLA Department of English Faculty page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Stefans, Brian Kim 1969 births Living people American male poets Bard College alumni Brown University alumni CUNY Graduate Center alumni Writers from Rutherford, New Jersey 21st-century American poets 21st-century American male writers American electronic literature writers University of California, Los Angeles faculty