My claim to fame:
I am located in New York City, though I am typing this in Oslo right now and will be moving to Toronto shortly if all goes as planned. I am currently finishing my MFA in poetry at Columbia, and my favorite book is (shoot, I hate this question)...Gravity's Rainbow. My favorite authors are Shakespeare, James Joyce, Derrida, and John Ashbery, though I think I owe a lot of my conceptual development to Hegel, Heidegger, Kant, Gertrude Stein, and David Foster Wallace. Oh, and George Saunders is an angel who breaks my heart. And - have you guys read Airships (Barry Hannah): wow.
And Stevens and Eliot...the problem with a question like this is that the answer has no end. It's hard to list your heroes in order of priority. So maybe the last name on the list is the most advanced: Christopher Marlowe, if you're up there looking down on us, you knock my socks off.
I am also very interested in what is being done with television these days. I think there is some real 'genius' there, and that's not a word I feel comfortable just throwing around.
My primary 'vocation' (if you could call it that), I guess, is poetry, or at least that's where I've been most pleased with my own work. But when I first started thinking of myself as a writer it was strictly fiction that I intended to create. Then it seemed to become important to take into account language's potential for complexity and density through a survey of (the closure of) metaphysics: deconstruction, ontology, etc. I guess, right now, what I'm working towards is something like a synthesis of ALL these areas in one self-contained work of art - though fundamentally open-ended collaboration has been primary among the topics about which I theorize. As for that, most of the writing I do takes none of the forms I have mentioned above, but could rather be described as manifesto.
The WeBook experience is new for me. I've always wanted to work in a format like this, but never been too confident of finding one I could actually adapt to. I find the project very inspiring. In fact, it seems almost easier to work on than it is for me to work on some of my own projects, which can cause me great anxiety. So, it's great to be working with you guys, and I look forward to more of the same.
