This window makes me feel like I am trembling with fear because normally I’m a heavy-sleeper. This window makes me feel numb and skeptical about most everything. This window makes me feel like I’m watching a runner and she wants me to cross that river. This window makes me feel satisfied to know that I’ve reached a lot of people. This window makes me feel like he isn’t interested or he’s just bored because all he does is sleep or watch TV—he doesn’t hardly ever talk to me. This window makes me feel like I’m cheating because I’ve been intimate with an old boyfriend online. This window makes me feel like he’s choosing to go on a date with her instead of just stopping her from hurting me. This window makes me feel like my current generation is too often described in ways to imply that we need to be fixed or corrected.
This Window Makes Me Feel
Robert Fitterman
June 2018
simultaneously banal, vile, funny, and sincere...
Ed Steck
Written in the long shadow of 9/11, This Window Makes Me Feel replaces the individual poet’s response to catastrophe with a collective, multi-vocal chorus of everyday articulations. Never before published in its entirety, This Window… is one of the earliest examples of a long poem solely composed with repurposed web language.
About the Author
Robert Fitterman is the author of 15 books of poetry including This Window Makes Me Feel (UDP, 2018), Nevermind (Wonder Books, 2016), Rob’s Word Shop (UDP, forthcoming, 2018), No Wait, Yep. Definitely Still Hate Myself (UDP, 2014), Holocaust Museum (Counterpath, 2013, and Veer [London] 2012), now we are friends (Truck Books, 2010), Rob the Plagiarist (Roof Books, 2009), war, the musical (Subpress, 2006), and Metropolis—a long poem in 4 separate volumes, and is the co-author of Notes on Conceptualisms (UDP, 2009). He has collaborated with several visual artists, including Serkan Ozkaya, Nayland Blake, Fia Backström, Tim Davis and Klaus Killisch, and is the founding member of the international artists and writers collective, Collective Task. He teaches at New York University and is a member of the writing faculty of the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College.
Praise
Robert Fitterman’s This Window Makes Me Feel taps into the already-faded notions of collective coping promised by an Internet unbound by corporate and state interests. Fitterman’s long poem extracts moments of outsourced tenderness – simultaneously banal, vile, funny, and sincere – to perform as a document of daily human life in a moment of chaos. With the hypnotic mantra of this window makes me feel, Fitterman stacks, strings, and layers group anxiety like an onion over the impending state surveillance of the very window that these voices peer through to seek solace.
Ed Steck
Fitterman’s works constitute an anti-nostalgic and timely re-iteration of appropriation strategies and engagement in modes of radical mimesis that critically examine capitalism under digital culture, mounting an agenda of changing the distribution of the sensible not by making the invisible visible but by proposing counter-reading to ambient distraction and ever-more insidious textual instrumentalities in a culture saturated with marketing and deluged by information…
Judith Goldman, Postmodern Culture
In the News
Links
Other UDP titles from Robert Fitterman here
Notes on Conceptualisms (with Vanessa Place)
Publication Details
ISBN: 978-1-937027-95-7
Trade Paperback
Smyth-sewn. 80 pp, 4.8125 x 7.25 in
Publication Date: June 01 2018
Distribution: Asterism Books (US), Coach House Books via Publishers Group Canada (Canada), Inpress Books (UK)