About the Author

Donald J. Byrd is a poet, sound artist, and Professor of English at the State University of New York at Albany. His work is generally in the fields of literary analysis and information theory. His chapbook, Technics of Travel, was published by Zealot-Tansy press in 1984. His first book-length poem, Aesop's Garden, was published by North Atlantic in Plainfied, Vermont, and his second book-length poem, The Great Dimestore Centennial, was published by Station Hill. Byrd was a frequent contributor to Chris Funkhouser's "Descriptions of an Imaginary University" under the pseudonym "Thus, Albert or Hubert." His Charles Olson's Maximus is published by Southern Illinois University Press and his important The Poetics of the Common Knowledge is published by SUNY University Press. In his lifetime, he proposes to complete one-hundred volumes that will complete a set which he refers to as The Nomad's Encyclopedia.

Reviews

"This powerful act of language is at once a celebration and a moan of dismay. Its theme is the advent of the 'Information Society, ' and its roots are in both the Western Intellectual traditions and American forms of life. The poem's seven sections are devoted respectively to the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, marking the strange persistence of ancient categories of the enigmatic and awesome in the contemporary world.The accident of the centenary of the founding of the F.W. Woolworth chain provides both the poem's formal occasion and a 'principle' for organizing its detail--a delirious proliferation of artifacts - useful and absurd - arbitrary, fanciful and pragmatic in their arrangement." -- Charles Stein