The Future of Poetry
Moderated by Bob Kasher
Fri., March 14, 2014
10:30 AM
Adeena Karasick, bill bissett, Bill Kennedy, Margaret Christakos and moderator Bob Kasher
Poetry has been at the forefront of change and transformation in publishing for decades now. New media and technologies are causing further transformations from the concept of what a poem is to the way they are created. This panel looks at some practical applications of these experiments from neo-formalist multi-media reproductions like Pecha Kucha, through new approaches like Flarf and Conceptual Poetry to poetry produced by DNA self-replication. Poetry remains in the forefront of the transformation of the book. Panelists include poets, publishers and critics looking at poetry's future.
Moderator:
Bob Kasher—VP Business Development, First Source/Digi-Rights.
Panelists:
bill bissett—poet, painter, media artist.
Margaret Christakos—poet, fiction writer, critic and educator.
Adeena Karasick—poet, video and media artist, Professor of Media and Communications, Fordham University.
Bill Kennedy—a Canadian writer, editor and software developer. He has written two books of poetry in collaboration with Darren Wershler and a team of trusty robots. Apostrophe (ECW, 2006) was written using a software engine of the same name, harvesting text from the internet and creating a series of list poems written entirely in the second person. Update (Snare, 2010) also mines data, this time from the authors' Facebook feeds. Status updates were surreptitiously taken from friends and attributed to dead poets, creating a literary anthology of sorts. The Apostrophe Engine was recently featured at the Denver Museum of Modern Art and the Powerplant Gallery in Toronto as part of the group show Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art.
Bill was the longtime director of the local alt-lit Scream Literary Festival, and has edited several collections of poetry for Coach House Books. He is a founding partner and development director of Intelligent Machines, www.intelligentmachines.ca, a strategic consultancy and digital fulfilment firm that works heavily in the publishing sector. He also speaks extensively on digital publishing, conceptual writing and information theory.
