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?)

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.)

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?”

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.

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!

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.”