The Institute of General Semantics is pleased to announce the first book in its Language in Action Series.
The book, Diatribal Writes of Passage in a World of Wintertextuality: Poems on Language, Media, and Life (But Not as We Know It) by Lance Strate is his second poetry collection.
About the Language in Action Series
The Language in Action series, sponsored by the Institute of General Semantics, publishes books devoted to creative modes of expression that can open the doors of perception, and foster better understandings of the nature of language, symbols, communication, and the semantic, technological, and media environments that we inhabit. Through processes of play and probing, art can bring into awareness alternative forms of experience and evaluation to the everyday, routine, taken-for-granted world. It can also shed new light on mind and method, consciousness and culture, abstracting and attention, ecology and enlightenment, and, most important to students of general semantics, science and sanity.
Founded in 1938 by Alfred Korzybski, the Institute of General Semantics promotes, in the words of S.I. Hayakawa, the study of how not to be a damn fool. As a non-aristotelian system devoted to enhancing human potential, general semantics has inspired numerous novelists, poets, artists, musicians, and creative thinkers. General semantics today is devoted to explorations of meaning and the meaning of meaning, of metaphors and memes, archetypes and arts, symbols and signals, signs and significance, codes and ciphers, sense perception and sense-making, and the vast variety of ways of seeing, feeling, and thinking that humanity is heir to. The quarterly journal of the IGS, ETC: A Review of General Semantics, has been publishing essays, research, and literary work since 1943.
About Strate's New Book
Strate's entry in the series brings together an eclectic mix of poems that address the themes of language, communication, media, technology, and poetry itself, etc.
A bold and radiant journey into a jigsaw universe, Strate’s poems reveal a redemptive self-awareness, a playful exuberance with the twists and turns of the whirling worlds of language and imagery, feeling and experience.
–T.C McLuhan, author and filmmaker
Significant, casually formal, sly, engaging, passionately inexact, curious, playful, and utterly readable: the magic in Lance Strate’s poems is in the profound and humble poetic intelligence that guides them. With it he creates a charged silence in the gaps between the words where their consensual meanings, along with the reader, pass through the universe of things thus far unsaid–the ever-present substance of what life feels like–before they reach the next word on the other side.
–Chuck Wachtel, poet, novelist, Pen/Ernest Hemingway Citation recipient
Lance Strate’s wordplay unleashes a tumbling and a turning of phonemes and phrases skipping consciousness like stones on a lake. This is a delightful collection resonant with sound and rhythmic flourishes. The poet’s jesters that “…the meaning of meaning is meaning… a leaning” then immediately goes about his craft pitting story against a light-hearted dance with language.
–Lillian Allen, internationally acclaimed poet and Professor of Creative Writing, Ontario College of Art and Design University
Lance Strate’s clever, pithy, and logocentric poetry at once celebrates language and manifests itself as performance art. Poems with titles such as “essays,” “prose,” and “these words”—unlike the verbiage described in “up in smoke” becoming “disappeared for all time”—will endure. Why? Because, for example, the science fiction poem “ode on a geekian urn” poses the definitive question of our brave new science fiction virus-sodden world: “thank goodness the Force was with us then is it with us now?” The answer: emphatically yes. We have Strate’s luminous poetic illocutionary force to accompany us and light our way during dark times.
–Marleen Barr, novelist, literary critic, and Pilgrim Award recipient
Lance Strate has created a joyous maelstrom of cultural symbolism, timeless mystery, and linguistic dance. His style is both childlike and profound… as if Mother Goose had a son with Lewis Carroll raised by Camille Paglia and Kurt Vonnegut and given a mission to expand the boundaries of perspective and wonder. Treat yourself to insightful, poetic lunacy of the highest order.
–Stephen Roxborough, internationally acclaimed poet, co-founder of Burning Word poetry festival, and Head Poet for Madrona Center on Guernes Island
The book is now available in the IGS Store.
