Salt Modern Poets Series

"The Wayward" is an exploration into virtual life and theory. It uses tools from codework to traditional genre; much of its work is the result of programming intended to create systems of circulating texts. Think of "The Wayward" as a poetics of the imaginary, stumbling over the grounds of the real constantly questioning linguistic referents and meaning in general. The work is a ground-breaking exploration of the roots and structures of online and offline life, in which language simultaneously explodes and implodes. Conversations among emanents' dominate inconceivable landscapes; sexualities are constructed and deconstructed. There's not another work like it.

Deep Language

by Alan Sondheim

Published 30 July 2010

In Sondheim’s Deep Language, writing detours through digital and other media, returning with new forms and genres, new ways of thinking philosophy, the body, religion, and everything else. This is a series of poems that revel in structured and unstructured language, with all the gaps and excitement that happens when language is stressed to the limit.

These pieces cohere, interrelate, interpenetrate; they develop the concept of deep language in any number of fascinating ways, ranging from intuitive writing to the use of scripts, code, and programming to elucidate hidden meanings – where none may have existed before.