Synopticon

...there are some very detailed descriptions, protocols circulating in slow motion like a ring of flies in the middle of an interrogation room...' Who but John Kinsella and Louis Armand could have invented and laid out the 21st Century protocols that govern the intriguing collaborative poems in Synopticon? Encyclopedic, witty, packed with knowledge about arcane subjects, this is a book to sample and reread with ever-increasing knowledge, pleasure, and admiration." --Marjorie Perloff, author of Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media and Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy. Synopticon was composed as a collaborative project during the course of an extended email exchange between 1998 and 2008. Part poetics of collaboration, part cultural archaeology, part textual collage, this book records an investigation into authorship and authenticity in the construction of social texts and cultural artefacts. Collaborative praxis is not defined here solely as a method, but as a condition of discourse; a poiesis. LOUIS ARMAND's books include Inexorable Weather (Arc, 2001), Malice in Underland (2003) and Strange Attractors (Salt, 2003), and he is editor of Contemporary Poetics (Northwestern University Press, 2007). He is director of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory at Charles University, Prague. JOHN KINSELLA's books include Disclosed Poetics: Beyond Landscape and Lyricism (Manchester University Press, 2007), Divine Comedy: Journeys Through a Regional Geography (WW Norton, 2008), and he is the editor of The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry (2009). He is a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia.