Seth Abramson, assistant professor of Literary Arts & Studies, has published his fifth book of experimental poetry, DATA.
"DATA brings the experience of the Internet to the printed page. Full of literary remixes, mash-ups, 'found' poetry, and texts appropriated from pop-cultural and online sources, DATA crosses back and forth between poetry and prose in an effort to perform the way we experience and process data in the Digital Age.
Included in the pages of DATA are poems composed entirely of language from Facebook, Twitter, comic books, poems published by others, pop songs, album covers, university lectures, half-glimpsed computer screens, Google searches, news stories, and many other touchstones of contemporary living. One text remixes the poetry of James Franco in an effort to make it palatable and emotionally astute.
Unlike other attempts to integrate High Art and the Information Age, the texts of DATA aim to be coherent and transparent rather than abstract and obtuse. These are poems, prose poems, and prose blocks that have something optimistic to say about self-identity, culture, and knowledge transfer in digital environments; at a time when our tech-driven environments threaten to throw language into a death spiral of degradation and decay, DATA submits that there is no better time than the present to use the abundance of information we encounter daily to create.
The concept-driven, often 'metamodern' experiments found in DATA are intentionally of the sort non-authors and working writers alike can use to both express themselves and engage increasingly bewildering virtual spaces. By turns funny, profane, profound, and dizzying, the wildly diverse texts of DATA seek to challenge our notion of what art is and how far we must actually hold it from the trials and vagaries of our daily experience."
Abramson is the author of six books, including Metamericana (BlazeVOX Books, 2015); Thievery (University of Akron Press, 2013), winner of the 2012 Akron Poetry Prize; and Northerners (Western Michigan University Press, 2011), winner of the 2010 Green Rose Prize.
A columnist for The Huffington Post and Indiewire, Abramson is also Series Editor for Best American Experimental Writing, whose next edition will be published by Wesleyan University Press in December of 2016. Between 2000 and 2007, he worked as a public defender for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the State of New Hampshire.
