The Poet Who Went Too Far

Tags: #instapaper #ifttt “He believes that the propositions his writing presents—uncreative writing’s permission to borrow entire texts, for example—are more interesting than the writing itself. “I don’t have a readership,” he said. “I have a thinkership.””

“He tends to speak slowly and enunciate clearly, in a stagy voice, and he models his public manner on Andy Warhol and Salvador Dali. He is an obsessive reader of difficult books and a patient and close listener. He does not try to dominate a room, but when the spotlight falls on him he is prepared. Periodically, he embodies the archetype of the trickster who sometimes pushes things too far, even against his own interests.”

“One day, I had lunch with Goldsmith. “When skill is out of the picture, and it is in most of my books, then you’re left with the concept,” he said. “My cutting and pasting is an acknowledgment of this. I’m dead serious that this is writing now. You may not want to hear that or think of it as writing, but I’m telling you that the moving of information is a literary act in and of itself. Even when people aren’t reading it.””

“Goldsmith’s rhetoric—saying, for example, that he never has writer’s block, because there is always something to copy—annoys a lot of people. Conceptual art and conceptual poetry embody ideas, and both descend from Duchamp. Painting and sculpture are meant for the eye; conceptual art is meant for the intellect.”

“According to Christian Bök, there are four ways to be a poet. A lyric poet typically intends to express a thought or a feeling. It is possible, however, “to express oneself unintentionally—surrealist writing, automatic writing, and stream of consciousness,” Bök says. “Also, Ginsberg at his most rapturous, ‘first thought, best thought’—outbursts of feeling that aren’t meditative.” A third category of poet cares primarily about intention—having a plan, that is, and seeing it through. These poets use constraints to produce poems that aren’t necessarily expressive. An example is a poem written using the avant-garde technique N+7, in which a poet takes out certain words in a piece of writing and replaces each with the seventh word following it in the dictionary. A poet named Rosmarie Waldrop did this with the Declaration of Independence and produced a satirical piece that begins, “We holler these trysts to be self-exiled.” The fourth category includes appropriation—giving an existing text a new form.”

“Bök said that in Buffalo they had talked about “limit cases in writing,” and that there were four: the ready-made text, the mannerist text, the illegible text, and the unauthored text. The ready-made text was a plagiarized text, like “Day.” The mannerist text was written according to a constraint that made proceeding difficult—for example, a book without the letter “e.” “The idea came from a French movement of writers and mathematicians in the nineteen-sixties, called Oulipo,” Bök said. The illegible text included concrete poetry, a hybrid of visual and literary art in which words tend to portray an image, so that a poem about an angel might be printed in the form of an angel’s wings. Unauthored books are written by computers and are “like rolling the dice for words,” Bök said. If they move a reader, it is by means of uncanny associations and the sense that they read as if written by a person.”

““Language poetry was the period at the end of the modernist sentence,” Goldsmith said. Language poets believed that the meaning words held was as important as the way they were used. “It challenged the reader to take fragments of language and reassemble them, so that the reader becomes the author of the text,” he continued. “The modernist project, beginning with Mallarmé, in the eighteen-hundreds, down through Joyce and Pound and Stein and language poets, in the seventies, had always been to deconstruct language to its smallest shard. Finally, language got so atomized that there was nothing left to do. It was language as grains of sand.” “It got pulverized to death,” Bök said. “Conceptual poetry is born out of this discussion.””

“Goldsmith was also inspired by the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler, who, in 1970, wrote, “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” He is fond of the term “unoriginal genius,” which was invented by the critic Marjorie Perloff, a professor emeritus at Stanford; “Unoriginal Genius” is also the title of her book about twenty-first-century poetry. Goldsmith believes that the Internet, with its cataract of words, made obsolete the figure of the writer as an isolated man or woman endeavoring to produce an original work. Instead of depending mainly on his or her capacity for invention, the new writer transports information. He or she retypes and recasts, archives, assembles, and cuts and pastes, passing along pieces of writing and blocks of text, the way people do on social media.”

“Perloff’s term for Goldsmith’s type of writing is “moving information,” by which she means both taking words from one place and using them in another, and the quality produced by the result. A modern writer, operating what Goldsmith calls “a writing machine,” is more a collagist than a writer in the customary sense. “Context is the new content,” he writes in “Uncreative Writing,” his collection of essays on conceptual writing. “How I make my way through this thicket of information—how I manage it, how I parse it, how I organize and distribute it—is what distinguishes my writing from yours.””

“A lyric poem exists in a context of ambiguity. It is not possible to know why Elizabeth Bishop wrote “One Art.” Any number of impulses or states of mind might have accounted for it. Conceptual poems are the result of their method. A lyric poem might pass through many versions before arriving at its final form; a conceptual poem has only one version. As soon as Goldsmith decided to copy an edition of the Times, or present the transcript of a broadcast, the poem existed. Since the poem was a concept, of course, it wasn’t even necessary to produce it.”

“Some poets of color feel that Goldsmith is subtly denying selves that they wish to assert and explore. Only a white person, these writers say, has the ability to shed his or her identity or to wear it casually. Their experience is that to be a person of color in America is to be constantly reminded of who you are. Dorothy Wang feels that identity in conceptual poetry “is a code word for racial or ethnic identity.” She says, “Often, the assumption is that good experimental avant-garde work is bereft of identity markers, and that lead-footed, autobiographical, woe-is-me, victim poetry is minority poetry.””