A new piece is up in the Library: Richard Kostelanetz’s “Endings: A Collection of Closing Sentences (of Otherwise Nonexistent Stories)”. We’ve presented this piece as both an online Java applet and as a downloadable application: if you’re in need of endings, download the application, and you’ll have an ending at hand whenever you need one.
Richard Kotelanetz is something of a legend in the New York avant-garde; his list of books is enormous, but if you’d like to get a handle on his work, you might look at 35 Years of Visible Writing: A Memoir (Koja Press, 2004). Kostelanetz is perhaps best known for his visual poetry in a variety of media, but he’s also written critical histories of the avant-garde in the tradition of Gertrude Stein and John Cage. His self-description on the back cover of 35 Years of Visible Writing might serve as an introduction:
Though I once said that my creative work made me “a poet,” I now speak of myself as an “artist and writer,” nonetheless wishing that there was in English a single term that combined the two. “Maker” might be more appropriate, its modesty notwithstanding. The variousness of the work confuses not only the art public but also those critics who still expect someone to be just “a poet” or just “a composer” or just “a visual artist,” rather than all of those things, and much else besides. The principal problem with person-centered epithets such as “painter” and “writer” is that they become not descriptions but jails, either restricting one’s creative activity or defining one’s creative adventure in terms of one’s initial professional category (e.g., “artist’s books”). As Ad Reinhardt warned, “Art disease is caused by a hardening of the categories.” In truth, anyone realizing a radically different kind of poetry will probably have a radically different kind of poetry career as well. Even so, it should be possible for any of us to make poems or photographs or music, as we wish, and, better yet, to have these works regarded, plainly, as “poems” or “photographs” or “music.” Perhaps the sum of my artworks, including poetry, is ultimately about the discovery of possibilities, initially in the exploitation of available media, and then in art and, by extension, in oneself as a creative initiator.
