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
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 ...
, 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.netFree Space Comix: the blogPoetry FoundationUCLA 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