by Sam Rowe

Uncreative Writing, Creative Reading

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By forcing us to confront the unintelligible, the boring, the insipid, and the illegible, conceptual poetics gives us no choice but to circumvent unreadability and discover new modes of reading and new spaces for interaction with literary texts.

Cloud of Ink – L.S. Klatt

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Cloud of Ink, one of the two winners of the 2010 Iowa Poetry Prize, is a solid volume of eccentric, dense, whimsical, occasionally inscrutable and occasionally gorgeous poetry. Though the collection is somewhat eclectic and adopts a number of different approaches, Klatt’s talent for imagining bizarre, dreamlike scenarios is certainly one of his greatest strengths.

The (Re)birth of the Author: derek beaulieu’s Experimental Poetics

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beaulieu’s recent work, which encompasses visual poetry, graphic “translations” of other literary works, and conceptual or process-based prose, hardly presents a unified front. It is, however, bound together by its persistence in forcing the use of scare quotes around the word “writing”, in imagining alternative ways of creating and reading literature.