Craig Dworkin “The Politics of Conceptual Writing”
(presented at Conceptual Poetry and Its Others Conference, University of Arizona, Tucson)
Dworkin’s premise is that formal techniques (such as appropriation, citation, or the filtering of databases, or any of the procedures that might define ‘uncreative’ or ‘conceptual’ practices) always necessarily signify, but they do so in contingent, contextual, historicizable ways (rather than in fixed a priori ways). He asks, how and in what ways can we assess such techniques? Dworkin cited a Language poet who bragged about the daring of his pirated literary appropriations but then across the bottom of every page in big block letters — and without apparent irony — was a warning stating that it was forbidden to quote from the essay without permission.
Dworkin went on to discuss the unchecked ventriloquism of George W. Bush’s speeches, which are self-plagiarizing and formulaic. Dworkin states that, when Bush recycles the words of his speechwriters and handlers, it’s unremarkable, but when a poet does the same thing, it’s a distinctive statement, and an alignment without or against certain poetic protocols and ethoi.
He then discussed a most extreme example of conceptual poetry, Robert Fitterman’s “Metropolis 16,” which in part reads:
McDonlad’s
Burger King
Taco Bell
Home Depot
Gap
Dunkin’ Donuts
KFC
J. Crew
Home Depot
Staples
Sunglass Hut
Wendy’s
Kmart
Wal*Mart
Dworkin made the connection between Fitterman and John Ashbery’s “Vermont Notebook” :
“Gulf Oil, Union Carbide, Westinghouse, Xerox, Eastman Kodak, ITT, Mariott, Sonesta, Crédit Mobiler, Sperry Rand, Curtis Publishing, Colgate, Motorola, Chrysler, General Motors, Anaconda, Crédit Lyonnais, Chase Manhattan, Continental Can, Time-Life, McGraw Hill, CBS, ABC, NBC. ”
Both, Dworkin claims, are Debordian mappings of urban spaces. Do these poems present a counter-form to the colonizing post-war expansion and homogenization of social space by corporate capital? How do we account for the exansive development of commercial enterprise referenced by the diminishing abatement of Fitterman’s lines?
Dworkin ended by presenting surveillance works such as David Buuck’s “Conceptual Self-Portrait,” for which Buuck hired a Bay Area private investigator to surveille him, constructing a self-portrait by proxy. He quoted several Sophie Calle projects as the precedent for this work. Dworkin finished by stating: “The figure of the detective returns us to the problems of political forms: how to reconcile the distinctive methods of so much ‘uncreative,’ conceptual writing — with its totalizing, comprehensive, filtering of databases — and the surveillance culture of our particular moment, with it analogous practices: the massive, secret, illegal data mining of accumulated information by administrations and corporations without regard for civil liberties?”
I’d like to hear from others about their reactions to this symposium. Overall, I thought it was fascinating, listening to all those intimidatingly brilliant minds working out loud. I’m still not convinced “conceptual” poetry is a wave (or even a wavelet) of the future, but its existence will surely open up mainstream poets to more challenging approaches and practices in their own writing.
For me, there was a gap between theory and practice. The less radical theorists (Cole Swensen and Caroline Bergvall) read the most affecting and gorgeous poetry. The more radical theorists (Kenny G. and Christian Bok) had to rely on performance (voice and gesture) to humanize their poems, not so much to make them accessible but to make them bearable. Charles Bernstein disappointed me. I do love his mind but I found the poetry he read heavy-handed in its irony and too narrow in the targets it attacked. Especially revealing was his last poem, a love poem that sruck me as maudlin and amateurish and revealing: unrelenting hatred for the other (the self, sincerely emoting) is also disguised love for it and desire to express it? Jefferson
CONCEPTUAL
A smear of foliage
(cataract in my right eye),
road like a silver arm
rising on the left.
What structures
underlie that woman
the invisibility trope
bends to the right
between the bent trees?
And is that a bonnet
or a mask? Theoretically
masks entice & repel, entice
because they repel.
Nicole Kidman’s mask,
even her pale lithe body,
couldn’t save old Kubrick.
The.o.ry, the.o.ry, the.o.ry,
my fist makes its
jacking-off gesture.