Rena J. Mosteirin and John Cayley: The William Corbett Poetry Series

Rena J. Mosteirin is the author of Nick Trail’s Thumb (Kore Press, 2008) chosen by Lydia Davis for the Kore Press Short Fiction Award; half-fabulous whales (Little Dipper, 2019), a book of Moby-Dick erasure poetry; and the co-author of Moonbit (punctum books, 2019), a poetic and academic hybrid work comprised of experimental poetry and a critical theory of the poetics and politics of computer code. Mosteirin is a lecturer at Dartmouth College, editor at Bloodroot Literary Magazine, and owner of Left Bank Books, a bookstore in Hanover, New Hampshire.

In the Corbett series, Rena’s reading will include poems from Experiment 116 (Counterpath, October 2021).

John Cayley is a writer, theorist, and pioneering maker of language art in programmable media. Apart from more or less conventional poetry and translation (Ink Bamboo, 1996 and Image Generation, 2015), he has explored dynamic and ambient poetics, text generation, transliteral morphing, aestheticized vectors of reading, and transactive synthetic language. Today, he composes as much for reading in aurality as in visuality. Cayley’s selected essays are recently published by Bloomsbury Academic as Grammalepsy: essays on digital language arts (2018). The book is also available Open Access from Bloomsbury Collections.

In the Corbett series, John will be launching the new, expanded edition of Image Generation published by Counterpath (April 2023).

Both of the poetry books featured are part of Using Electricity, a series of computer-generated books meant to reward reading in conventional and unconventional ways. The series title takes a line from the computer generated poem “A House of Dust,” developed by Alison Knowles with James Tenney in 1967. This work, a FORTRAN computer program and a significant early generator of poetic text, combines different lines to produce descriptions of houses. The series is edited by CMS/W Professor Nick Montfort.

Copies of the authors’ books will be available for sale on-site from the MIT Press Bookstore.