Stephanie Strickland

Stephanie Strickland
photo by Star Black
Born	February 22, 1942 Detroit, Michigan
Occupation	Author, Poet
Education	Harvard University; Sarah Lawrence College; Pratt Institute
Genres	Poetry, Non-Fiction, Fiction

Stephanie Strickland (born February 22, 1942) is a poet living in New York City.

Life

She was born in Detroit, lived for five years in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, and attended Horace Greeley High School in Chappaqua, New York. She studied at Harvard University (A.B. 1963), Sarah Lawrence College (M.F.A. 1979), and Pratt Institute (M.S. 1984).^[1]

Strickland held the 2002 McEver Chair in Writing at the Georgia Institute of Technology.^[2] While there, she founded and curated the TechnoPoetry Festival 2002.^[3]

Strickland spoke at the &NOW Festival in 2004,^[4] 2006, 2008, 2009, and 2011. She is on the Board of the Electronic Literature Organization^[5] and served as a co-editor of volume 1 of its Electronic Literature Collection and the Fall 2007 issue of the Iowa Review Web.

Career

Strickland describes some of her work as born-digital: "E-poetry relies on code for its creation, preservation, and display: there is no way to experience a work of e-literature unless a computer is running it—reading it and perhaps also generating it. ... What is meant by e-literature, by works called born-digital, is that computation is required at every stage of their life. If it could possibly be printed out, it isn’t e-lit."^[6]

Printed collections of Strickland's work include Beyond This Silence (State Street Press, 1986), Give the Body Back (University of Missouri Press, 1991), The Red Virgin: A Poem of Simone Weil (University of Wisconsin Press, 1993, awarded that year's Brittingham Prize in Poetry), True North (University of Notre Dame Press, 1997, awarded the Ernest Sandeen Poetry Prize^[7] and the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award^[8]), V: WaveSon.nets / Losing L’una (Penguin Poets, Penguin Books, 2002, awarded the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award^[9]), Zone : Zero (Ahsahta Press, Boise State University, 2008), and Dragon Logic (Ahsahta Press, Boise State University, 2013).

Strickland's notable born-digital works include the hypertext True North (Eastgate Systems, 1997, awarded the Salt Hill Hypertext Prize^[10]), The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot (Word Circuits, 1999, awarded a Boston Review Poetry Prize^[11]), slippingglimpse (with Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo and Paul Ryan, 2007), Sea and Spar Between (with Nick Montfort, in Dear Navigator issue 1:3, Winter 2010), and born-digital versions of the poems in Zone : Zero (Ahsahta Press, Boise State University, 2008) included on a CD-ROM.

Strickland's papers are being collected by the library at Duke University.^[12]

Projects in multiple media

Strickland has written, "The same poetic material can be treated as electronic literature and as print literature. I have made six such poems, either alone or with collaborators... The resulting poems are very different, and just how they are different is a matter of great interest to me."^[13]

In addition to works in Zone : Zero, born-digital works linked with Strickland's printed poetry include To Be Here as Stone Is (with M.D. Coverley), Errand Upon Which We Came (with M.D. Coverley), and V : Vniverse (with Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo). The first of these works relates to portions of True North and the latter two are related to V: WaveSon.nets / Losing L'una.

Critical Reception

In a speech at the Library of Congress in 2013, Stuart Moulthrop called Sea and Spar Between, "possibly the greatest example of electronic literature yet attempted -- measured by volume, at least -- but arguably also on a scale of importance."^[14] Michael Leong wrote, of Sea And Spar Between, "The output ... is a rich, combinatorial poem in its own right, but it also offers the productively defamiliarizing experience of reading Melville and Dickinson 'at a distance,' giving us a 'slant' perspective on two very familiar, canonical authors. ... We can say that Montfort and Strickland's poetics privileges neither the sea nor the spar but the between."

Reviewing Zone : Zero, Djelloul Marbrook wrote, "For exploring the outer spaces of poetry Zone : Zero is practically a handbook. Placement is everything here. ... recalling as it does the profound commitment of so many medieval Arab, Berber and Jewish poets to mathematics and science. There is no earthly reason to segregate these disciplines other than for the convenience of popularizers who write about them." Rachel Daley's review described how, "poetry as a practice is renewed as relevant, applicable, accessible, and understandable ... when it opens readers’ own mechanisms for reading language to a slightly unprecedented but shared capability. Stephanie Strickland's Zone : Zero enacts and constitutes this shift." ^[15]

In an essay citing slippingglimpse an example of socially distributed cognition, N. Katherine Hayles has described how slippingglimpse "is located within philosophical, technical, and aesthetic contexts that create a richer sense of information than the disembodied version that emerged from early cybernetics. Moreover, it both requires and meditates upon multimodal reading as a whole body activity."^[16]

In reviewing V: Wave.Son.Nets/Losing L'Una, Edward Falco described Strickland as, "urging readers to listen carefully, with body as well as mind, to see through the constructs the mind establishes to see into the world, to see what may be beyond mind, what the mind is not wired to see; and most of all to resist the static and hierarchical while accepting the fluid and enmeshed. In this sense, Strickland, like Dickinson before her, is a deeply spiritual poet, and one who, incidentally, is genuinely exploring the possibilities of digital writing to reshape the conventions of literature."^[17]

Writing for The Iowa Review Web, Jaishree Odin analyzed The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot as follows: "Thematically, The Ballad is about unrequited love between Sand and Soot; at another level, it is about the art of navigation through multiple discourses that constitute human experience. In some ways, it also alludes to the computer-generated electronic spaces and humans who interact with these spaces. The sophisticated conception and design of this hypermedia work brings together a variety of discourses from art, science, mathematics, philosophy, and even mythology to create a weave of texts."^[18]

Joseph Tabbi has written extensively on True North, both in Cognitive Fictions^[19] and in electronic book review: "Strickland's poetics of indirect citation, annotation, and recombination creates affinities with a distinctive (and mostly American) tradition that reaches back through Dickinson to Jonathan Edwards. Her willingness to court abstraction and a minimalist language (at the risk of occasional unreadability) opens what should be a fruitful conversation with the Language Poets, while the recognition awarded True North by the judges for the Sandeen Prize ensures that her work will be welcomed into the domestic spaces of contemporary social realism no less than the more public-minded collectivities represented at meetings of the Modern Language Association and the Society for Literature and Science^[20] (where Strickland has given readings)."^[21]

Works

• Dragon Logic. Ahsahta Press. 2013. ISBN 978-1934103456. 
• Sea and Spar Between. 2010.  In Dear Navigator issue 1:3, Winter 2010.
• Zone: Zero. Ahsahta Press. 2008. ISBN 978-1-934103-01-2. 
• V : Vniverse. 2002.  With Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo.^[22] Included in The Electronic Literature Collection Volume 2 (2011).
• slippingglimpse. 2007.  Included in hyperrhiz: new media cultures no. 4 (2008) and The Electronic Literature Collection Volume 2 (2011).
• V: WaveSon.nets/Losing L’una. Penguin Poets. 2002. ISBN 978-0-14-200245-2. 
• Errand Upon Which We Came. 2000.  (with M.D. Coverley^[23]). Included in Cauldron & Net 3, 2000-2001.
• The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot. Word Circuits. 1999. 
• To Be Here as Stone Is. 1999.  (with M.D. Coverley^[24]). Included in Riding the Meridian volume 1 no. 2, 1999.
• True North (hypertext). Eastgate Systems. 1997. ISBN 1-884511-36-8. 
• True North. University of Notre Dame Press. 1997. ISBN 978-0-268-01899-3. 
• The Red Virgin: A Poem of Simone Weil. University of Wisconsin Press. 1993. ISBN 978-0-299-13994-0. 
• Give the Body Back. University of Missouri Press. 1991. ISBN 978-0-8262-0809-5. 
• Beyond This Silence. State Street Press. 1986. 

Essays

• "Born Digital", Poetry Foundation, 2.13.09
• "Poetry in the Electronic Environment", electronic book review, 07-26-2005
• "Moving Through Me as I Move: A Paradigm for Interaction", First Person: New Media as Story, Performance and Game. Wardrip-Fruin, N. and Harrigan, P., editors. MIT Press. 2004.

Anthologies

• Sarah Glaz, ed. (2008). "True North 1; Who Counts, Counts". Strange attractors: poems of love and mathematics. A K Peters, Ltd. ISBN 978-1-56881-341-7. 
• John Bradley, ed. (1995). "Shadow". Atomic ghost: poets respond to the nuclear age. Coffee House Press. ISBN 978-1-56689-027-4. 

Collections

Strickland's poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Grand Street, New American Writing, Ploughshares, jubilat, Chicago Review, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Fence, LIT, Chain, Harvard Review, 1913 a journal of forms, The Iowa Review, Colorado Review, American Letters & Commentary, Black Clock, Bird Dog, Notre Dame Review, Dandelion Magazine (Canada), Volt, Vlak, The Kenyon Review, Zoland Poetry, Court Green, Prairie Schooner, DoubleTake, Pequod, Western Humanities Review, Barrow Street, Salt Hill, Women’ s Studies Quarterly, P-Queue, Connecticut Review, Chelsea, Seneca Review, Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion, Agni, Gulf Coast, big allis, America, Poet Lore, Meridian, Indiana Review, Mid-American Review, Isotope, Poetry New York, The American Voice, 5 AM, Columbia Poetry Review, The Little Magazine, Many Mountains Moving, Samizdat, Calyx, Ironwood, Bellingham Review, West Branch, Tinfish, Pig Iron, Southern Poetry Review, Calapooya Collage, Ekphrasis, Tendril, Conditions, State Street Reader, Lumina, Controlled Burn, New Virginia Review, Synaesthetic, Black Buzzard Review, Dark Horse, Porch, Poets On:, Iris, VIA, Soundings East, Slant, Poetry Now, Croton Review, Small Moon, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, and The Chowder Review.^[25]

Online, Strickland's poems have appeared in The Poetry Foundation, The Iowa Review Web, MiPOesias, Octopus, Drunken Boat, Poetry Daily, Sous Rature, Mad Hatters’ Review, Saint Elizabeth Street, Electronic Poetry Review, Critiphoria, La Fovea, Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures, Riding the Meridian, Cauldron & Net, Web Del Sol Editor’ s Picks, electronic book review, Word Circuits Gallery, Blue Moon, New River, Furtherfield, Poets for Living Waters, Codex: A Journal of Critical and Creative Writing for your Mobile Device, and Big Other.^[25]

References

External links

• "Webliography: Stephanie Strickland", Sara Herbert, Virginia Commonwealth University
• Poet's website
• "An Interview with Stephanie Strickland", Bookslut, October 2008
• Author Q&A for Dragon Logic, Ahsahta Press