Kostelanetz came onto the literary scene with essays in quarterlies such as Partisan Review and The Hudson Review, then profiles of older artists, musicians and writers for The New York Times Magazine; these profiles were collected in Master Minds" '. His book The End of Intelligent Writing: Literary Politics in America caused considerable controversy. SoHo: The Rise and Fall of an Artists' Colony chronicles cultural life in New York City in the late 20th century. In 1967, he signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest," vowing to refuse to pay taxes raised to fund the Vietnam War. Books of his radically alternative fiction include In the Beginning , Short Fictions, More Short Fictions ; of his mostly visual poetry, Visual Language, I Articulations, Wordworks, and More Wordworks. Among the anthologies he has edited are On Contemporary Literature, Beyond Left & Right, John Cage, Moholy-Nagy, Breakthrough Fictioneers, Scenarios, and The Literature of SoHo. A political anarchist-libertarian, he authored Political Essays and Toward Secession: More Political Essays and has since 1987 been a contributing editor for Liberty. In 1973 he was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto II''.
Media
Among his literary contemporaries, Richard Kostelanetz has also produced literature in audio, video, holography, prints, book-art, computer-based installations, among other new media. Though he coined the term "polyartist" to characterize people who excel at two or more nonadjacent arts, he considers that, since nearly all his creative work incorporates language or literary forms, it represents Writing reflecting polyartistry. "Wordsand" was a traveling early retrospective of his work in several media.
Reviews
His work has been acknowledged at some length in the following and additional works:
Ronald S. Berman's "America in the Sixties"
Ihab Hassan's "Contemporary American Literature"
Robert Spiller's "Literary History of the United States"
"The Reader's Adviser"
Daniel Hoffman's "Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing"
Irving and Anne D. Weiss's "Thesaurus of Book Digests" 1950–1980
George Myers' "Introduction to Modern Times"
David Cope's "New Directions in Music"
Joan Lyons' "Artists' Books"
Tom Holmes' "Electronic and Experimental Music"
Jamake Highwater's "Shadow Show"
"Columbia Literary History of the United States"
Eric Salzman's "Twentieth-Century Music: An Introduction"
Tom Johnson's "The Voice of the New Music"
Robert Siegle's "Suburban Ambush"
John Rodden's "The Politics of Literary Reputation"
"The Reader's Catalog"
Lydia Goehr's "The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works"
Bob Grumman's "Of Manywhere-at-Once"
Samuel R. Delany's "About Writing"
Kyle Gann's "Music Downtown"
Sally Banes's "Before, Between, and Beyond: Three Decades of Dance Writing"
