Demo Tracks for a Mobile Culture
"1. Buy it. 2. Listen up.3. Deprofessionalize.4. Buy a copy for a friend.5. Write a book like this.6. Industrial Poetics is da bomb.7. Because the taste is what counts."---Charles Bernstein, author, My Way: Speeches and Poems and Shadowtime "Pioneering a viable interface between poetic practice and scholarly responsibility, Amato's is a necessary voice in performative engagement with the labor-intensive underside of academic work. His command of vernacular locutions ranges from impressive to dizzying. Allied to such discerning critical intelligence, such proficiency has the potential to alter---and certainly refresh---the nature of scholarly discourse."---Jed Rasula "The second 'Track' (chapter) of this wild, hilarious, learned, irreverent, energetic, nasty, and touching book is called 'How a Former Professional Engineer Becomes a Former English Professor.' And that's what Industrial Poetics is all about: working-class aspirants for middle-class 'professional' goodies, academic and journalistic hypocrisies, community failures, and the general all-around mayhem we experience at the turn of the twenty-first century. A collage of techniques from anaphoric verse to slangy dialogue, from pop song to scholarly reference, Industrial Poetics will make you laugh and sometimes cry with exasperation. Can life on the assembly line and in the ivory tower really be this absurd? Answer, oh yes, and then some."---Marjorie Perloff
Joe Amato is the author of Symptoms of a Finer Age, Bookend: Anatomies of a Virtual Self, and Under Virga. He teaches writing and literature at Illinois State University and is the managing editor of American Book Review.