Featured Presenters at E-POETRY 2001

Komninos Zervos, one of Australia's leading performance poets, has been a professional poet for 11 years, earning his living by writing, performing and teaching poetry to children and adults all over Australia. His publications include "High Street, Kew East," a children's picture book (Collins/Angus and Robertson, 1990), "The Baby Rap." a collection of poetry for upper-primary-school children (Oxford University Press, 1992), "komninos" and "komninos by the kupful," two adult collections of poetry (University of Queensland Press, 1990 and 1994). His recent work in cyberpoetry employs animated text pieces that produce imagery and evoke emotions by moving words through time and space.

Charles Bernstein, David Gray Professor of Poetry and Letters at UB, is an enormously prolific language artist who is endlessly exhilarating, enormously influential and critically acclaimed. He is the author of 20 books of poetry (including the newest, "Republics of Reality: Poems 1975-1995," (Sun & Moon Press, 2000), and two influential books of essays: "A Poetics" (Harvard University Press, 1992) and "Content's Dream: Essays 1975-1984" (Sun & Moon Press, 1986, 1994). Recent books are "My Way: Speeches and Poems," from the University of Chicago Press, and "Log Rhythms," with illustrations by SU.S.n Bee, from Granary Books. He is the editor of "99 Poets/1999: An International Poetics Symposium," a special issue of boundary 2 (Vol. 26, No. 1) http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/bernstein/cb_res.html.

Giselle Beiguelman of Sao Paulo, Brazil, holds a Ph.D. in history, is a fellow of the NET Foundation and has been researching the cultural impact of the Internet and technology on the arts. She is the curator of "Ex-Libris/Home Page," among other exhibitions, and director of the CD-ROM project "Urban Interventions." She is the author of "For Whom the Bell Tolls? Ernest Hemingway and the Spanish Civil War" (Perspectiva/EDUSP/FAPESP, 1993) and co-author of "Classicism" (1999). Since 1996, she has been working with online publishing and is responsible for the Web site of Arte/Cidade, a non-profit organization devoted to art, architecture and urbanism. Her latest work, "The Book after the Book," is a hypertextual and visual essay where criticism and Web art melt into the context of the Internet.

She writes, "After more than 500 years, we/are facing the development of a/new form of written culture/which is a hybrid of digital and/printed substrata//. The library idea does not/organize knowledge anymore. It/functions as node of a network, a/set of revolving shelves, a new reading machine."

Phillipe Bootz, the French electronic poet and theorist is the editor of the review alire, an electronic publication produced on computer diskette in France since 1989. Bootz claims that alire was the first periodical on disk dedicated to the publication of digital poetry. His own work mixes text with a reader's physical space, producing "telematic, computer animated, interactive and unique-reading, as well as video poems" to be exhibited as installations. His essay, "Poetic Machinations," recalled the historical evolution of the computer in France as it shifted from experimental to cultural entity. He explains, "Today there is a general agreement...that the first programs of computer texts were developed in 1959, in Stuttgart, by Théo Lutz, and in 1964, in Montreal, by Jean Baudot. These programs were text generators." According to Bootz, A.L.A.M.O., a workshop of mathematics and computer-assisted literature, generating texts by 1984 and, within that process explored poetic forms. Bootz has gone on to assess the different contexts in which animated text is read, the role of Web TV vis a vis western literary production and the diminishing differences between television and computer media.

Patrick-Henri Burgaud, is a linguist and visual poet born in France who now lives in the Netherlands. After some years as a teacher, he began in 1992 to devote all of his time to art. He believes that poetry has to come out of the book and into daily life. His poems take various shapes and sizes. Each one consists of two parts. The first part is written using all kinds of tools: brush, pen, chalk, pencil, finger, charcoal, computer-animation programs. The second part is "easy to read." It is machine printed, most often in red. Burgaud's experiences lead to a central focus: letters have a very strong poetical charge. The power of traditional poetry comes from meanings, sounds and rhythms. However, poems are pictures as well. By giving the letters an appropriate form, the words get a new dimension. Contemplating the signs, the reader is taken back to a forgotten time, the innocence of reading as a child. Furthermore, Burgaud became more and more interested in the materiality of poetry.

Burgaud's words are always on or in something. Color, shape, texture are not neutral, but add their poetical sensibility to the poem. By a continuous exchange, the underlying meanings help one to understand the chosen materials and shapes, and these bring new associations to the text. This is why, for example, some of his works look like lamps -- because poetry lights the world. In his computer animations, he uses the machine not as a tool, but as a new medium, requiring specific approaches.

John Cayley is a Canadian-British poet, literary translator and the founder/editor of The Wellsweep Press, which, since 1988, has specialized in the publication of literary translation from the Chinese. He has worked as curator in the Chinese section of the British Library and, more recently, for a specialist bookseller and publisher, Han-Shan Tang Books. He has been developing "machine-modulated poetry" since the 1970s. His background in computing dates from 1978, when he undertook post-graduate work on the linguistic analysis of classical Chinese style.

His original poetry and translations have appeared in numerous magazines, and he has made major contributions to "Looking Out From Death: the new Chinese poetry of Duoduo" (Bloomsbury, 1989) and "Gu Cheng: Selected Poems: an authorized translation" (Renditions, 1990). Recently he co-edited "Abandoned Wine: Chinese Writing Today, 2" (Wellsweep, 1997). A book of more conventional poetic writing and translations, "Ink Bamboo," was published by Agenda Editions & Bellew Publishing, (London, 1996).

Cayley's Web site is http://www.shadoof.net/in/#INTRO. His work also can be found at http://www.ubu.com/contemp/cayley/cayley.html.

Kenneth Goldsmith is one of the country's most fascinating visual/literary artists. His hybrid of poetry, music and visual art, wrote Artforum, "reverses the art-for-art's sake endgame practiced by language artists in the 60's and makes the language-of-power appropriators of the '70s and' 80s seem a little constipated ... By putting a unique spin on the rap technique of sampling, Goldsmith provides a tantalizing snapshot of the zeitgeist." Goldsmith has widely exhibited his work in museums and galleries throughout the United States and Europe and has collaborated widely with fellow poets and artists, including vocalists Joan La Barbara ("73 Poems" CD) and Theo Bleckman, seamstress Sydney Maresca, fashion designer Sylvia Heisel and multi-media artists. Goldsmith is the editor of UbuWeb Visual, Concrete + Sound Poetry, a DJ at 91.1 WFMU in New York City, and a music critic at New York Press. For an analysis of "Fidget," Goldsmith's every movement made during 13 hours on June 16, 1997 (Bloomsday), check out <>. An interview with Goldsmith can be found at <>.

Jennifer Ley is a very prolific author of hypertexts, online collaborator, and e-zine contributor and editor. She is the founder of the internet literary magazine Riding the

Meridian http://www.heelstone.com/meridian/ and the award winning hypertext poetry site The Astrophysicist's Tango Partner Speaks. Ley's newest work is more often in the field of hypertext and hypermedia. Examples can be found on the Web at the April feature and the Valentine Files at the UB Electronic Poetry Center, in the web journals Cauldron and Net, Framed, The Animist, Snakeskin, Conspire, and in the trAce anthology: My Millennium.

Her Web works have been exhibited at Digital Arts and Culture '99, at the Wednesdays at 4 Plus readings series at the University at Buffalo, and in the SIGGRAPH 2000 Art Gallery, the Ink.ubation Salon sponsored by the trAce online writing community, and at digital conferences in South Africa and Eastern Europe.

Ley was a 1998 Pushcart nominee for her text poetry. Her earlier work has appeared in a wide variety of print publications, both on and off line. A limited edition, paper version of her Web work "The Birth of Detachment" is forthcoming from PaperBrain Press in conjunction with its online publication at the Iowa Review Web. She is a founding member of the Internet Literary Editor's Fellowship -- LEF -- and a member of the Literary Advisory Committee for the Electronic Literature Organization.

She has worked as an editor/Web designer on a number of e-zines as well.

Jim Rosenberg is an American poet whose concern with non-linear poetic forms began in 1966 with a series of polylinear poems called Word Nets. By 1968 this concern had evolved into an ongoing series of Diagram Poems, which continues to the present. The diagrams began as an effort to support word clusters, by analogy to the musical concept of tone clusters; because the juxtaposition of words in a cluster disrupted syntax, an alternate channel was necessary for syntax. It has provided a rich ground for experimentation with structural concepts not present in ordinary syntax, including null relationships, feedback loops, and interior links.

Since 1988, his work has consisted of interactive poems developed on a Macintosh computer using HyperCard software and ported to Windows using Oracle Media Objects. In this ongoing work, beginning with Intergrams, the word cluster is at last implemented as words overlaid in the same logical and physical space, with the mouse used to render individual phrases legible. This is combined with the diagram notation using hypertext links to simplify navigating the diagram.

His work has appeared on the Internet and in several small magazines and has been performed at The San Francisco Poetry Center and Intersection, San Francisco; Cody's in Berkeley; St. Mark's Church in New York City, and The Kitchen in New York City. Rosenberg's works for magnetic tape have been performed by radio stations KPFA Berkeley, WBAI New York, and VPRO Amsterdam and by the Stanford New Music Ensemble. "Intermittence," a poem for four simultaneous voices and conductor, has been anthologized in "Scores: An Anthology of New Music," edited by Roger Johnson (Shirmer Books, 1981). He has constructed the word environments Temporary Poetry 10/73, Les Salons Vides, San Francisco, and Permanent & Temporary Poetry 5/75 at The Kitchen, New York. His home page is at http://www.well.com/user/jer/index.html#menu.

Alan Sondheim is considered by many as one of the most imaginative and intellectually brilliant authors in America today. He is a poet and philosopher with a long-standing interest in the implications for humans of modern media and electronic culture. He edited "Individuals: Post-Movement Art in America" (Dutton, 1977), and has published five artist books, a book of poems, and numerous articles and uncategorizeable texts. He lives in Brooklyn and co-moderates four lists on the Internet, including Cybermind and Fop-l (Fiction of Philosophy). His most recent book is "Being On Line," an anthology of Internet writing. His video and filmwork have been widely screened.

Glenn Harper, editor of Art Paper, writes that Sondheim's writing blurs the distinction between self and other, male and female, theory and fiction. He shifts suddenly between his readings of philosophical texts into "realms of metaphor and disassociation, achieving…an allusive writing that produces, rather than reproduces, the slippage and displacement that underlies contemporary theory.

Keith Waldrop called him "a sort of art maniac, whose fixed idea is to read the world in as many different ways as possible -- each reading confounding all the others -- and then to reread it. This is why his best work seems at once tenuous and aggressive."

Janez Strehovec received his Ph.D. in aesthetics from University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, in 1988 and is an independent scholar, as well as a researcher at the project "Theories of Cyberculture." He is the author of five books in the field of cultural studies and aesthetics published in Slovene. They include "Technoculture, the Culture of Techno" (1998), which deals with the subject of techno not just as a lifestyle issue and music movement but as a crucial principle of the recent artificial realities. He has also written in journals such as the Journal of Popular Culture and CTheory and has presented his papers at various international conferences in the Europe and the U.S. His essay "Moving Words," on the theory of Web literary objects, will be published this year in "Cybertext Yearbook 2001" edited by Eskelinen and Koskimaa. Strehovec also is a poet and has published three books of poems in Slovenia.

Loss Pequeño Glazier, director of the Electronic Poetry Center (EPC) at the University at Buffalo, is a significant presence on the World Wide Web, circulating experimental poetry and digital poetry to seven million users a year from more than 90 countries. The EPC is used in the curricula of universities worldwide and serves a broad spectrum of members of the experimental poetry community.

He is an artist who works in visual/kinetic text, hypertext, and poetry in programmable media. His work centers on emergent visual and programmable textualities made possible through the digital medium, topics investigated in his forthcoming "Digital Poetics" (University of Alabama Press, 2001).

Glazier is a native of the Tejano and Mexican-American culture of south Texas, and the author of the poetry collections "Leaving Loss Glazier," "The Parts, Small Press: An Annotated Guide," and the forthcoming "Digital Poetics" (University of Alabama Press). Recent works include "Viz Études," a series of performances that present a reading and projection of visual, kinetic, text, and Java-based compositions for electronic space. A selection of Glazier's works is available online at his author page at http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/glazier/.

Additional participants and their nations of origin are Lucio Agra, Brazil; Jorge Miekal And, U.S.; Jorge Luiz Antonio, Brazil; Derek Beaulieu, Canada; Christian Bök, Canada; Marc Bohlen, U.S.; Chris Cheek, UK; Maria Damon, U.S.; Craig Dworkin, U.S.; George Hartley, U.S.; Neil Hennessy, Canada; Juan Jose Diaz Infante, Mexico; Aya Karpinska, U.S.; Mike Kelleher, U.S.; Bill Kennedy, Canada; Inna Kouper, Russia; Joel Kuszai, U.S.; Deena Larsen, U.S.; Xavier Leton, Belgium; Bill Marsh, U.S.; Tammy McGovern, U.S.; Jonathan Minton, U.S.; Katherine Parrish, Canada; Russ Rickey, Canada; Martin Spinelli, U.S.; Martin Spinelli, U.S.; Brian Kim Stefans, U.S.; Reiner Strasser, Belgium & Germany; Thomas Swiss, U.S.; Lawrence Upton, UK; Barrett Watten, U.S.Darren Wershler-Henry, Canada and Nazura Zahian, Malaysia.

Also the Purkinge Group of the State University of New York at Albany, Sandy Baldwin, Don Byrd, Nancy Dunlop, Chris Funkhouser, Belle Gironda, Thomas Mackey, Christina Milletti and Derek Owens, among others, U.S.