This Poem

Description

This Poem is an ironic investigation of contemporary culture and the technomedia-saturated world in which we are enmeshed. Composed in the style of Facebook updates and extended Tweets, each section infuses itself with continuous shifting tones, styles, and commentary, which are in turn provocative, emotive, and deeply satiric. Mashing up the lexicons of Stein, Zukofsky, Shakespeare, Whitman, the recent financial meltdown, semiotic theory, Lady Gaga, Derrida, and Flickr streams, This Poem is a self-reflexive romp through the fragments of post-consumerist culture. Both celebrating and poking fun at contradictory trends, threads, webbed networks of information and desire, and the language of the "ordinary," it opens itself with immediacy to the otherness of daily carnage. This Poem interrogates the tradition of the Canadian long poem, systematically and systemically accusing it of being a multi-platform interdisciplinary repository, an archive of fragments, updates, analysis, aggregates, treatises, advice, precepts, echoes, and questions, unravelling into itself, in an ever-enfolding, luminous text of concomitance. Karasick's serial poem textually proceeds in the tradition of such poets as George Oppen, bpNichol, Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer.

Adeena Karasick is a poet, cultural theorist and the critically acclaimed author of seven books of poetry and poetic theory. She is currently Professor of Global Literature at St. John's University. Her writing has been described as "electricity in language" and noted for its "cross-fertilization of punning and knowing, theatre and theory"; it is marked with an urban, Jewish and feminist aesthetic that continually challenges normative modes of meaning production and blurs the lines between popular culture and scholarly discourse. Karasick has lectured and performed worldwide, participating on an international scale at conferences, telepoetic colloquia and literary festivals. She regularly publishes articles, reviews and dialogues on contemporary poetry, poetics and cultural / semiotic theory. She also produces videopoems and sound recordings of her work, which highlight its radical performativity.