Wordworks Poems Selected & New

Visual Poetry. Concrete Poetry. Concrete Fiction. WORDWORkS collects from Richard Kostelanetz's vast and varied experiments in concrete and visual writing. Covering his early typographic compositions, the Duets, Trios and Choruses series, his surprisingly readable concrete number sequences, as well as word pieces composed for video and holography, each section is prefaced by a short illuminating statement concerning the process involved and the cultural lessons behind it.

For more than twenty years, Richard Kostelanetz has been a consistent iconoclast and advocate of the avant-garde in American poetry. His visual (or "concrete") poems, his numerical, audio and video poems, as well as the more recent holographic poems, challenge the audience to expand traditional boundaries of time, space, language and genre, to ask more the "how" than the "what."

Individual entries on Richard Kostelanetz's work in several fields appear in various editions of Readers Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers, Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature, Contemporary Poets, Contemporary Novelists, Postmodern Fiction, Webster's Dictionary of American Writers, The HarperCollins Reader's Encyclopedia of American Literature, Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, Directory of American Scholars, Who's Who in America, Who's Who in the World, Who's Who in American Art, NNDB.com, Wikipedia.com, and Britannica.com, among other distinguished directories. Otherwise, he survives in New York, where he was born, unemployed and thus overworked.