/Stefans and Cayley/

Brian's interview with John Cayley is up at the Iowa Review Web. It's a fascinating read which delves into some hard issues, and it is useful both as a sort of introduction to Cayley as a poet-critic and as historical document of the current state of the art. It reads like a considered email interview, with weighty statements by both Brian and Cayley. And it pulls toward a wonderful conclusion by Cayley:

The wager we make is that because the delivery or performance media are, technically, open to us, in that they are fully programmable, we will be able to explore and reconfigure our compositional media as never before. And if the world of letters can be reconfigured—even through the rigours of programming—then its underlying structures and characteristics were always already different from what had been passed down to us, re-revealing latent rhetorics: software ways to make it new.

Ah, if Ezra was a programmer.