In the latest edition of The Yale Anthology of French Poetry the academic canon is extended once again. Howard Slater explores the incompatibility between poetry and the academy

Anja Büchele and Matthew Hyland on the American poet Susan Howe and her latest book, The Midnight

...She believes tables move

without contact I am skeptical.

Brian Kim Stefans on a recent anthology of writing on digital poetry

p0es1s: The Aesthetics of Digital Poetry, eds. Friedrich W. Block, Christiane Heibach, Karin Wenz, Hatje Cantz, 2004

John Cayley on poetry, the alphabet and the future of programmatrons

Text is the Net's supreme structuring principle.
It also creates its destructive elements -
its weeds, moles, acidbaths and bombs.
In the age of multimedia convergence,
what is there left for text to teach us?

Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics contains a selection of half a dozen pieces of writing, all of which can be seen as in some sense process-generated; the co-work of Brian Kim Stefans and certain of his digital familiars – demons that drive both him and his media.

A section from the long poem VOG, by Ron Silliman

Viewing Private Ryan,
weeks later I’ll dream
the future of slasher flicks,
packed house applauds seventh arrow in the skull.
Laughing gull gives vent to its name.
Special white, mosquito about the ear.
Post-punk video ads
shown not on television
but against warehouse walls.
Sand flies by the cloud.

In Howard Slater's consideration of Rimbaud's Season in Hell, the poetry is adopted and adapted as a transhistorical 'locus of expression'; one that - in keeping with Rimbaud's own desire to move beyond identity, self-expression and representation - centres on a poetic politics of affectability and becoming. This text first appeared on http://www.infopool.org.uk.

In his oscar speech, Michael Moore described ours as fictitious times and the documentary form as their antidote. Last month's anti-war protests drew a strong response from the poetry community. In this week's webexclusive, we add two poems by Howard Slater to the linguistic pool: Untitled, and God's Banker.

Ed Emery, translator extraordinaire of Italian literature and political theory, discusses his ‘personal key to the universe’: the ancient poetic form of the Muwashshah. For insights into Dante and the development of western culture in general, read on

Mikhail Epstein’s essay ‘Charms of Entropy and New Sentimentality’ shoehorns the memory of the Russian poet Venedikt Erofeev (1938-1990) into a simultaneously deconstructive and annunciatory treatise on mythmaking and historical times - past, present and future. In the process, he tells us more about contemporary myths of subject formation, but who are we to complain?