Source Codes is a collection about how we represent the world to ourselves and to each other in an era when the images and words we receive are often generated and received without being marked by even a trace of author or consumer. The poems are linked one to the next only by the words that begin and end each; otherwise, there is no stylistic or (on a specific level) thematic connection. They function, then as a "miscellany," an approximation of the paradoxical finitude in the rush of information and images we believe we experience, hour by hour.
The poems and images are not titled except by numbers, by which the reader navigates a key to their sources in the table of contents.
"In the fast flow of capital, we need slow space," and "Information is dark, not light," the Dutch design group, NL.Design, writes, and in similar spirit, Source Codes is not neutral in intent. Its appendices - HTML code framed by typescript and longhand drafts of poems from this book and poems from the author's first book, Bag `o' Diamonds - attempt to highlight the idiosyncratic imprint of an individual in the drafting of the HTML. Intended, likewise, is the loss of some authorial romance in the typescript poems and handwritten notes without their losing that quality of like imprint.
Many of the individual poems and images seem to treat a bridge - between the homogenous plethora emitting from the fast flow of capital and the individual gesture from within "slow space" - skeptically, and gravely. In this sense, too, it is not a neutral book.
- ISBN10 6611172866
- ISBN13 9786611172862
- Publish Date 1 January 2001
- Publish Status Active
- Out of Print 18 May 2011
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Salt Publishing
- Format eBook
- Pages 120
- Language English