Richard Kostelanetz

Richard Kostelanetz (born May 14, 1940, New York, New York, U.S.) is an American writer, artist, critic, and editor of the avant-garde whose work spans many fields.

Kostelanetz attended Brown University (B.A., 1962), Columbia University (M.A., 1966), and King’s College, London. He served as visiting professor or guest artist at a variety of institutions and lectured widely.

In 1971, employing a radically formalist approach, Kostelanetz produced the novel In the Beginning, which consists of the alphabet, in single- and double-letter combinations, unfolding over 30 pages. Most of his other literary work, often printed in limited editions at small presses, also challenges the reader in unconventional ways. Kostelanetz’s nonfiction work The End of Intelligent Writing: Literary Politics in America (1974) charged the New York literary and publishing establishment with inhibiting the publishing and promotion of works by innovative younger authors. His “visual poetry” consists of arrangements of words on a page, using such devices as linking language and sequence, punning, alliteration, and parallelism to achieve effects that resonate with broader artistic movements such as Constructivism and Minimalism.

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Among his other works are Recyclings: A Literary Autobiography (1974), Politics in the African-American Novel (1991), On Innovative Art(ist)s (1992), A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes (2nd ed., 2000), Soho: The Rise and Fall of an Artists’ Colony (2003), and Artists’ SoHo: 49 Episodes of Intimate History (2015).

His films include A Berlin Lost (1984) and Berlin Sche-Einena Jother (1988), both with Martin Koerber. Kostelanetz issued many recordings and audiocassettes on his own label and edited or wrote works on musicians such as B.B. King, Philip Glass, John Cage, and Aaron Copland.