Recircuits

Long concerned with poetic invention, the indisputably avant-garde writer Richard Kostelanetz has recently been discovering new language forms not with words but within words. This new collection of his Recircuits is one of several efforts in this direction. From the great linguist Roman Jakobson he takes this classic appreciation: "Poetry has from the earliest times engaged in play with suffixes; but only in modern poetry, and particularly in Xlebnikov, has this device become conscious, and as it were legitimate." The constraint informing this collection is that the addition or subtraction…