Source Codes

by Susan Wheeler

"Source Codes" is a collection about how we represent the world to ourselves and to each other in an era when the images and words we receive are often generated and received without being marked by even a trace of author or consumer. The poems are linked one to the next only by the words that begin and end each; otherwise, there is no stylistic or (on a specific level) thematic connection. They function, then as a 'miscellany', an approximation of the paradoxical finitude in the rush of information and images we believe we experience, hour by hour. The poems and images are not titled except by numbers, by which the reader navigates a key to their sources in the table of contents. 'In the fast flow of capital, we need slow space', and 'Information is dark, not light', the Dutch design group, NL.Design, writes, and in similar spirit, "Source Codes" is not neutral in intent. Its appendices - HTML code framed by typescript and longhand drafts of poems from this book and poems from the author's first book, "Bag 'o' Diamonds" - attempt to highlight the idiosyncratic imprint of an individual in the drafting of the HTML. Intended, likewise, is the loss of some authorial romance in the typescript poems and handwritten notes without their losing that quality of like imprint. Many of the individual poems and images seem to treat a bridge - between the homogenous plethora emitting from the fast flow of capital and the individual gesture from within 'slow space' - skeptically, and gravely. In this sense, too, it is not a neutral book.

Genres: Poetry

120 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Poet and writer Susan Wheeler earned a BA at Bennington College and did graduate work in Art History at the University of Chicago. Her first poetry collection, Bag o' Diamonds (1993), won the Norma Faber First Book Award. The Village Voice Literary Supplement described that book as displaying “limber intelligence and visual wit... with influences including John Berryman, Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, and the Language poets;” the reviewer noted that Wheeler “risks echoing everybody while sounding like no one.” Wheeler's work is noted for its sonic and lyric intensity, surrealist imagery, use of pop culture, pastiche, and non seuqitur, as well as its playful relationship to received form. According to literary critic Majorie Perloff, “Wheeler is that rare thing among poets, a genuine cultural critic; her poems use image and allusion with such exactitude that we see the things around us — from pop tarts to polyvinylled toilet seats —as if for the first time.” Other collections include Smokes (1998), selected by Robert Hass for the Four Way Book Prize and a featured selection of the Poetry Book of the Month Club; Source Codes (2001); Ledger (2005), which won the Iowa Poetry Prize; Assorted Poems (2009); and Meme (2012), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her novel, Record Palace (2005) won high praise for its atmospheric portrayal of Chicago and deft blending of coming-of-age narrative with noir.

Wheeler has won numerous awards and honors for her work, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She has received the Boston Review Poetry Award, the Robert D. Richardson Award for Non-Fiction from the Denver Quarterly, and a Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has taught in writing programs at the New School, New York University, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and Columbia University. Wheeler is currently Associate Professor and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University.