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Jim Rosenberg

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Bio

I was born in 1947 in Denver, Colorado, USA, and received my undergraduate education at Pomona College and my graduate education at the University of California at Berkeley — both degrees being in mathematics. My poetry has appeared in several small magazines, including This, Tyuonyi, Interstate, Open Reading, Toothpick, Vort, and BUTTONS. I have performed my poetry at The San Francisco Poetry Center; Intersection, San Francisco; Cody's, Berkeley; St. Mark's Church in the Bowery, New York; The Kitchen, New York; Harvard University sponsored by The Grolier Poetry Bookstore; and numerous conferences. My works for simultaneous voices have been performed by radio stations KPFA Berkeley, WBAI New York, and VPRO Amsterdam; and by the Stanford New Music Ensemble. "Intermittence", a poem for four simultaneous voices and conductor, has been anthologized in Scores: An Anthology of New Music, ed. Roger Johnson, Shirmer Books, 1981. I have constructed the word environments Temporary Poetry 10/73, Les Salons Vides, San Francisco, and Permanent & Temporary Poetry 5/75, The Kitchen, New York.

I began a life-long concern with non-linear poetic forms in 1966, with a series of polylinear poems called Word Nets. By 1968 this concern had evolved to an ongoing series of Diagram Poems, which continues to the present. The diagrams began as an effort to support word clusters, by analogy to the musical concept of tone clusters; because the juxtaposition of words in a cluster disrupted syntax, an alternate channel was necessary for syntax. The diagram concept has provided a rich ground for experimentation with structural concepts not present in ordinary syntax, including null relationships, feedback loops, and interior links. This body of work includes Diagrams Series 3 and Diagrams Series 4, originally published as ad hoc circulations printed on a dot-matrix printer and published on-demand by the author. Diagrams Series 4 was available on-line electronically without manufacture through The ArtCom Electronic Network on The WELL, Sausalito, CA, prior to the advent of the World Wide Web.

Since 1988 my work has consisted of interactive poems. Earlier works were developed on a Macintosh computer using HyperCard software and ported to Windows using Oracle Media Objects. More recent works utilize web technology and the open source interactive environment Squeak. In this ongoing work, beginning with Intergrams, the word cluster is at last implemented as words overlaid in the same logical and physical space, with the mouse used to render individual phrases legible. This is combined with the diagram notation using hypertext links to simplify navigating the diagram. Intergrams, Diffractions through: Thirst weep ransack (frailty) veer tide elegy and The Barrier Frames: Finality crystal shunt curl chant quickening giveaway stare were originally published by Eastgate Systems, Cambridge MA, and are available in reissue here, along with newer works The Inframergence, Diagrams Series 6, and Diagrams Series 5.

I have published numerous papers and essays, and three of my papers have received nominations for the best paper award at the ACM conference on hypertext. This prose work is collected in my book Word Space Multiplicities, Openings, Andings: Collected Essays and Papers in Digital Poetics, Hypertext, and New Media, published by Computing Literature, and distributed by West Virginia University Press.

I have lived since 1974 in a stone house built in the late 18th century in Grindstone, PA, until her death in March, 2024 with my wife and co-experimenter, the painter Mary Jean Kenton. I have supported myself programming computers, from which I retired in January 2013 to devote full time to poetry and defending where I live against the ravages of fracking.


(Photo by Deena Larsen, Hypertext 99, Darmstadt)