THESE POEMS STRUGGLE TO BE DIRECT, Brian Kim Stefans
October, 2027
152 pages
Brian Kim Stefans writes as if the lyric poem had been left running with the television on and a cat asleep on the couch. These poems move without apology between registers — Rilke and Baudelaire sit down with Netflix, Sharknado, and boneless cooked ham — and the forms are as promiscuous as the diction: free verse, sonnets, haiku, American sijo, a Brechtian sequence of Hollywood elegies, a poem that renders Spring and All as text messages. Behind all of it stands the experimental line running from Pound to Bernstein — the torqued syntax, the suspicion of a settled speaking voice, the sentence caught turning against itself — here put in the service of directness rather than against it. The politics are sardonic more often than earnest, and sharper for it. What holds it together is the love poetry: for lovers, for friends, for Los Angeles at its least photogenic, for cats.
Brian Kim Stefans is a poet, digital media artist, and critic. His most recent book of poems is For Trapped Things (Roof Books, 2023), and his translation Festivals of Patience: The Verse Poems of Arthur Rimbaud appeared from Kenning Editions in 2021. He is also the author of the critical book Word Toys: Poetry and Technics (University of Alabama Press, 2017). His electronic literature, beginning with The Dreamlife of Letters (2000), is collected in the Electronic Literature Collection. He currently edits Extremes and Moderations (extremes-and-moderations.arras.net), an online archive of Los Angeles and Southern California poetry publishing downloadable reading editions of poets, journals, and documents, and runs BRAIN SCAM, a channel and Substack on poetry, philosophy, art, and technology. He is Professor of English at UCLA, where he teaches poetry, new media, and screenplay studies, and he has kept the website arras.net since 1998. He lives in Los Angeles.