Comments on: Conceptual Poetics: An Editorial Pause

By: Doodle

Doodle — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 13:15:56 +0000

One thing remains to be said: isn’t what’s being described in all this nothing more or less than the work of a flaneur? As a concept for (or against) poetry, it’s over a century old and will, in all likelihood, always be with us. (What’s strange is that it’s all just a riff on Benjamin’s take on Baudelaire, but here the “appropriation” isn’t even highlighted by its main practitioner(s) because it would look… bookish? What could be worse than that?)
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By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 22:38:00 +0000

Reginald, did you bother to read the comments stream? It’s not about Kenny, it’s about exactly the sort of question you’re writing about elsewhere on Harriet, the question taken up by Bürger et al. It’s an argument, as I noted above, borrowed from Benjamin & Kittler, & though I too disagree with it, it certainly deserves to be confronted as an argument from historical necessity, not as Kenneth Goldsmith’s Red Book.
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By: Reginald Shepherd

Reginald Shepherd — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 19:38:33 +0000

Kenneth Goldsmith writes that: “Today, we have immense information moving capabilities at our fingertips and new movements like Conceptual Writing or Flarf are the correct responses for our time. If writing is not taking these new conditions into its poetics, it simply cannot be considered contemporary.”
This kind of self-righteous, rigid, dogmatic thinking (so pervasive in our society these days) shuts down possibilities, rather than opening them. This close-mindedness is the opposite of the openness to potentials that is or should be at the core of anything that could be called “experimental.”
Goldmsith goes so far as to set himself up as the arbiter of what can “be considered contemporary,” as if no one could “consider” anything in a different light than he does, and furthermore as if time itself were under his command. I wonder who appointed him God?
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By: kenneth goldsmith

kenneth goldsmith — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 19:50:32 +0000

yes doodle. some artists are ahead of their time. bern porter was one of them.
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By: john

john — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 23:01:37 +0000

Kenneth,
The problem is, the only thing contemporary about Conceptualism is the particularity of the pastiche; in other words, that it’s being written now. Just like front-porch-swing-on-the-banks-of-the-Susquehana poetry. Even the fallacious, dogmatic insistence on Now-ness is dated — Pierre Boulez’s bland echoing of Marinetti’s now-100-year-old manifestos was old and tired 40 years ago.
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By: Doodle

Doodle — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 18:31:35 +0000

Are we saying then, that Bern Porter – whose work is decades old – is actually “contemporary” because he used the technique of appropriation? (Incidentally, some of Porter’s (conceptual???) work is archived at UbuWeb, so I suppose the answer must be yes.)
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By: Kenneth Goldsmith

Kenneth Goldsmith — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 11:31:56 +0000

Mark, The problem is that some things actually are more relevant than others. They might not be what you think are more relevant, but I certainly do. And I’d rather stake a position — however disagreeable to you it might be — than to say that everything is equally relevant. Not everything is contemporary because it happens to take place in contemporary time. Of course poets will do what they do, but clearly some practices are more relevant and more contemporary than others.
This points out one of the of the biggest problems about recent poetic discourse which is the reluctance of poets to take a stance; instead the default is “mov(ing) in a direction of recognizing different, but still sometimes ‘relevant’ versions/visions of the contemporary across competing practices” making for a flat and bland cultural landscape.
I disagree with your statements on ‘tone” as well. Since when are poets expected to act like politicians, having to take on a pleasing “tone?”
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By: Mark DuCharme

Mark DuCharme — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 03:36:47 +0000

I’ve appreciated many of the comments here. I can also see how what Kenny is saying can be linked usefully to Benjamin. And in some ways, I find this argument appealing. I’ll probably find it even more appealing once it’s grown “wildly dated”— a fate which, Goldsmith suggests, he would embrace.
However, what continues to irk me is the TONE of a few isolated statements, such as “new movements like Conceptual Writing or Flarf are the correct responses for our time,” or “for writers to be relevant at this moment, they need to incorporate this ethos into their practice.” Such statements evoke, in me, a kind of visceral, who-died-and-appointed-you-Pope reaction, even when read in context, as I have, and even though I fully appreciate much of Flarf and Conceptual writing, much less the vigor of historical and contemporary avant-gardes.
While I think it’s probably too much to ask Goldsmith to completely defend such statements in a forum such as this— long, thoughtful discursives in the manner of Benjamin seem the more appropriate “technology” toward that task— I’d like to agree with the notion that everything that happens now is, by definition, contemporary. Maybe not “relevant,” and maybe not “good”— but contemporary absolutely.
Part of my disagreement with Goldsmith, then, is purely semantic. However, a larger part of it, I think, is with the implicit notion that only certain writing practices are “relevant” (or, to use what could be read as an equivalent codeword, “contemporary”). Perhaps here it is the tone which I pointed to earlier which influences my reading of the semantic, or even theoretical level of Goldsmith’s assertion. For I am certainly not about to argue that we approach so-called New Formalism or varieties of “avant” and “post-avant” poetries from an allegedly balanced perspective which levels all matters of political, cultural or aesthetic difference. However, I also think that to attempt to privilege one mode of contemporary production in such an uncritical way (as I read it) (though I realize this medium lends itself to a certain level of shorthand which blurs distinctions such as I am crudely trying to make) is also problematic, and equally totalizes the richness of current writing practices which I find, to borrow Goldsmith’s terms, both “relevant” and “contemporary.”
Or perhaps not— just in the sense that, try though I have, perhaps I’ve painted KG too much as the straw man, against my own better tendencies. Not that I would prefer an opposite move of “I’m okay, you’re okay”/”I’m contemporary/ you’re contemporary”— but rather to move in a direction of recognizing different, but still sometimes “relevant” versions/visions of the contemporary across competing practices. To have a view of the contemporary as as fractured, and perhaps as fractious, as the Internet itself.
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By: john

john — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 14:22:05 +0000

Coming of age during the Reagan ascendancy, I became keenly aware that manifestoism is a species of marketing. Since marketing is the ascendant god, Flarf and Conceptualism certainly are of our time.
Now all we need is a Shouting Heads Sunday Morning TV show — Face the Poesis. With Ron Silliman and Billy Collins seeking to shout each other down. Then we’d really be up to date!
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By: Don Share

Don Share — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 13:24:10 +0000

As the neglected poet Lew Welch wrote decades ago, “RAID KILLS BUGS DEAD.”
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By: Henry Gould

Henry Gould — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 11:13:17 +0000

Our druidic friend Coimhghin’s comment above is a reminder that language itself is the techne – the rest is just hardware.
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By: john

john — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 06:25:01 +0000

Kenneth,
Aren’t “fishing on the Susquehanna in July, or porch swings in September” both echt consumerist fantasies?
Were Burma-Shave jingles the poetic equivalent of Warhol? In some respects they were the last gasp of mainstream popular poetry.
The advertiser is the modern equivalent of the medieval craftsperson, each working anonymously to glorify the local god.
You deserve a break today.
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By: Coimhghin Deasmhuman

Coimhghin Deasmhuman — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 04:04:34 +0000

it’s the fascination with finding the magic algorithm, the inner overlap structure, the handle-grip of the machine, the key.*
Here, the key to understanding the poetry written for 1200 yrs from 5 – 18C, is Ogam (phonetic – Ohm) which few now bother with but which is all there in black and white translations. BLFNS
*Like starting a lawn mower : sudden burst of control over all that grass. Then to pretend that it’s not about power, that it’s simply (un)artistic (unvalued, unoriginal, uncreative) free play * in which the contemporary poet/s can re-connect to the one tradition that survived longest and links to the Heroic essentially druidic age.
And traditionally it took seven yrs going through 7 grades before one reached the doctor (ollamh) of poetry realm, and then another five until the ticket, tattoo, Blakean bit of total spacerdom, routed through the BLF of the bearla filid, the top language which was originally Ogam, made by seventy two scribes who trained just after the fall of Bable, and there are five languages recorded, with the *perfected* one being spoken (what is now) Old Irish was a mix of the best bits of greek hebrew and latin.
Not having any of these, is no bar to getting a sense of the key though, as the joy of the net means, no more lies, but a full corpus of (imaginative) proofs, there for the bore to imbibe and the IT age of total letter/s the shaman of the island/s in Sé (phonetically. – shay) and the order of letters in this bearla filid, 20 and strictly placed, for a reason, which relates to an druidic word of unknown meaning, but which amounts to the shadows on Plato’s cave, on coimhe, the 350 tales a poet (file phonetic filler) had to know, five times fifty primary, twice fifty secondary, of which 200 survive, non of which relate to the mystical, hieratic part of a poets practice.
love and peace gra agus siochainn..
classic move of every intellectual game & ideology.
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By: Kenneth Goldsmith

Kenneth Goldsmith — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 03:08:20 +0000

Jasper and John — I’m all for a pro-consumerist poetics. I wrote in favor of it here:
http://poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2007/06/proconsumerist_poetry.html
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By: john

john — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 02:33:33 +0000

Do you choose your history or does your history choose you?
As for the lineages, as a good omnivorous post-modernist consumer, I choose both.
What could be more up-to-date than that?
Wanda Landowska totally rocks, by the way.
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By: Kenneth Goldsmith

Kenneth Goldsmith — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 02:09:12 +0000

Early 20th century poetry contended with the typewriter: Apollinaire, Cummings, Pound. Poets whose work was not (apparently) affected by the change of technology effected by the typewriter — Yeats, Rilke — they weren’t contemporary or relevant?
… and there’s that great split very well articulated. Perhaps these two lineages form at the technological divide. It’s the technology, finally, that is a great factor in determining relevance both during their time and their legacies moving forward. Poets that responded to technology; poets who ignored technology. Choose your history…
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By: john

john — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 01:37:37 +0000

Early 20th century poetry contended with the typewriter: Apollinaire, Cummings, Pound.
Poets whose work was not (apparently) affected by the change of technology effected by the typewriter — Yeats, Rilke — they weren’t contemporary or relevant?
Whatev. > (I wink and stick my tongue out at you while smiling!)
I’m glad someone brought up music. Digital recording has made it a lot harder to use backwards sounds, which were easy to produce with actual tape. A musician friend was complaining of this to me just the other day. Every new technology opens some possibilities and closes others. Most internet platforms make it very hard to type “open field” poetry in the manner of Olson or Duncan.
Once the piano got introduced, people not only stopped composing for the harpsichord, but they stopped performing with it! Until Wanda Landowska reintroduced it to the concert stage ca. 1900.
I’m going to have to go and finish reading your series of posts on the conference. I’ve read most of them and I realize that I still have no idea what Conceptual Poetry IS.
When Rauschenberg died recently, I thought about the uniqueness of his career, and how he started as what I called — perhaps erroneously — a conceptual artist, erasing a drawing of de Kooning’s, producing the white paintings; and then went on to be a fabulously influential (and wealthy) stylist with his elegant, lovely collages. And I thought of his poetic heirs, such as Ronald Johnson’s gorgeous “Radi Os,” and its echo of the erased de Kooning drawing. I was thinking of such a work as conceptualist, but I could be way off base here.
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By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 20:09:41 +0000

>Iain — you’ve got it completely wrong. What is interesting about the internet is not the content that it holds but instead how that content is distributed
Kenneth,
I see what you’re saying. I think what I was trying to get at, though, is a result of how McLuhan’s ideas and Creeley’s statement that “form is nothing more than an extension of content, and content nothing more than an extension of form” always seem to run together in my head. I see every overly-specific niche community on the Internet as a celebration of the formal abilities that the Internet has. Many of these groups, no matter how archaic their ideas, could have never existed without the specific ability to distribute content that the Internet provides. The content distribution capabilities that the Internet has brings not only progressive forms of art to our fingertips, but also mind-numbingly “irrelevant” forms. For instance, I would be willing to bet that there are more traditional sonnets (because of the Internet) being written now than ever before. Even New Criterion’s presence on the Internet is a celebration of its formal capacities (whether intentional or unintentional).
Would it be unfair to say that your framing of “contemporary” is based on an artist’s [i]intention[/i] to embrace these contemporary forms?
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By: Billy Ray

Billy Ray — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 19:45:05 +0000

Flarf . . . conceptual . . . new formalism . . . WHATEVER. Do we really need anymore new movements? Isn’t that so, like, 20th century or something?
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By: Doodle

Doodle — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 18:10:47 +0000

“What is interesting about the internet is not the content that it holds but instead how that content is distributed; the mechanics are more relevant than what’s there.”
That’s hardly contemporary – it’s dressed-up McLuhan “medium-is-the-message” stuff, right out of his (still relevant and therefore contemporary?) 1964 book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.
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By: ryan

ryan — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 17:17:08 +0000

Kenneth,
Can’t both content and distribution be important? Why must there be priority at all? If what is truly important about the internet is distribution, then the entire notion of priority dissolves. So we really must consider both.
So let’s say this notion of priority might be replaced by relevance — certainly culturally speaking — or it might not. At least in terms of content, both relevance and priority seem self-defeating. What we’re left with is the structure of the internet, which you call distribution.
How does flarf interact with or comment on this distribution?
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By: Jasper

Jasper — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 17:11:59 +0000

Michael is right to point to Benjamin as the source for Kenneth’s ideas (this may be the first time I’ve ever agreed with him!). The open question, though, is of what conceptual writing’s “training” consists, what purposes and agendas it serves. Benjamin was writing about constructivist film in the context of the Russian Revolution–that is, an explicitly anti-capitalist pedagogical art. Alas, needless to say, nothing of this sort really exists today. And the information technologies in existence are explicitly, totally, in the service of capitalism. On top of that, Benjamin and Kittler et al (let’s throw in Foucault, Baudrillard, Jonathan Crary) are just plain wrong, and attribute far more agency to the apparatus than is warranted. I’d like to think Benjamin was moving away from this idea later on in the decade.
Kenneth, as I’ve indicated, aims to train the readers of poetry to become better consumers, producers and managers of information within the postfordist mode of production. . .
Jasper
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By: Kenneth Goldsmith

Kenneth Goldsmith — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 16:56:47 +0000

Iain — you’ve got it completely wrong. What is interesting about the internet is not the content that it holds but instead how that content is distributed; the mechanics are more relevant than what’s there. For writing to be contemporary, it needs to assimilate this notion; for writers to be relevant at this moment, they need to incorporate this ethos into their practice.
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By: Iain

Iain — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 15:45:31 +0000

Personally, I love uncreative writing, flarf, conceptual writing… however, since we’re all attacking Kenny, I guess I’ll get in on it too.
Kenny, you say
>I feel that an artist is of little use if they don’t reflect the times in which they are living.
Is this even possible though? Even if I opt to write the most archaic conservative verse, am I not reflecting that there are those in our culture that still long for those days? Also, I would probably be naively reflecting many misconceptions of what past poetry was like. In the end, I would fail to be anything but contemporary.
Even the New Formalists publish on the Internet.
If anything, I’d say that the internet has shown us the continual “relevance” of all things. Whatever weird ideas, conspiracy theories, cults, religions, sexual fetishes that you can ever imagine, there exists a forum on the internet, with a significant membership, devoted to this thing. Hell, there’s even forums for technophobes.
I tend to think of conceptual writing, and conceptual art in general, as calling attention to the inherent reflecting ability of art. Not that it reflects to a greater degree than non-contemporary, or archaic forms, but that it embraces this quality in art more than others.
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By: Matt

Matt — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 12:50:33 +0000

What is bad? All kinds of stuff. What, you’ve never read bad poetry?
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By: ryan

ryan — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 00:27:29 +0000

“Good poems are relevant to people with good taste, bad poems are relevant to people with bad taste. Anything written in contemporary times is contemporary, whether it’s any good or not.”
What is bad?
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By: Andy Gricevich

Andy Gricevich — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 23:47:11 +0000

Kenneth–
“Polemical” was, in fact, meant as a positive term.
I certainly agree with each sentence of your last comment (at 3:59). My quibble is really with the technological aspect overshadowing all others. Can’t contemporaneity (and relevance, urgency, etc.) be just as much a matter of relation to social and political contexts other than that of information technology? Or new formal possibilities that arise elsewhere than from that technology?
I think Benjamin’s essay needs to be read in the context of his work as a whole, where the question of art’s proper relation to technology and political ideology is by no means settled–and it’s the unsettledness (the dialectical aspect) that kept his thought so alive.
A brief but related tangent: in contemporary electronic music (I’m talking about “art music” rather than “dance music”), the most aesthetically advanced work by far is being done not by those who are most enthusiastic about the latest technical possibilities, but by those who refuse to enter entirely into the digital mode–those who employ concrete sounds, simple feedback, manipulations of tape and of circuitry, etc.–and who use digital technology as simply a more advanced and easy way to work with those lo-tech materials. In other words, they engage with the latest technology primarily as a way to realize some possibilities of an earlier (and by no means complete) aesthetic orientation that were difficult or impossible to execute in practice before the advent of that technology. This involves a pretty aggressive relationship to the technology, which is made to do a lot more for you than the old analog stuff was able to do–and therefore tends to produce music that sounds a certain way. This is more and more the case with software for music production–it effectively tells you what to do by making it difficult for you to stop it from doing it for you. The more one goes along with the technology (leaving most of the compositional decisions to it), the more one is considered “contemporary,” “relevant” and worthy of institutional support, while composers who treat the technology as secondary–to the things it makes possible (contemporary) only incidentally–tend to be dismissed as obsolete.
My worry is that art that fetishizes technology will merely mimic its automatic behaviors. It’s connected to other problems of art’s automatic mimicry–of, for instance, the dominant mode of irony…
Andy
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By: Samuel Vriezen

Samuel Vriezen — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 23:03:01 +0000

Perhaps the question could be, how exactly to reflect your time? Much of Conceptual Poetry seems to be about managing information, the processes of information management being what it’s about first of all. Most of the time it seems to involve some language source, some target form, and some process in between that could be as ‘simple’ as copying or more complex, involving all sorts of re-orderings and whatnot.
It’s a paradigm of communication in the end, a transferring of a message from a source (text) to a receiver (text). Now the world is already bloody full of communication. I think you could also be asking the question: should reflecting your time need to involve copying its methods?
I’ve usually found the ideas I’ve encountered in conceptual poetry fascinating. I see a potential in making communication/information management systems – which principally belong to domains of social transparancy – the subject of your art, making them ‘material’ – and thereby, perhaps, rendering them opaque again. It would be an ironic reading of conceptual praxis: an ironizing of communication and information as such. But the problem in irony is always that you have to repeat the thing you target.
If it’s indeed social technology and the information-technological version of ‘Democracy’ that conceptual or flarf take for paradigm, then perhaps there might also be ‘contemporary’ room for an Emily Dickinson to Conceptual/Flarf’s Walt Whitman.
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By: Kenneth Goldsmith

Kenneth Goldsmith — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 19:59:39 +0000

Thank you, Michael. By the way, being contemporary also implies a degree of obsolescence, a trade off I’m willing to make. IMHO, I feel that an artist is of little use if they don’t reflect the times in which they are living. Ten years from now, all I’m putting forth will be wildly dated. I’ll leave Eternity to the others…
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By: Matt

Matt — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 19:24:10 +0000

Good poems are relevant to people with good taste, bad poems are relevant to people with bad taste. Anything written in contemporary times is contemporary, whether it’s any good or not. What’s the big deal?
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