“The enemy is nobody, the anger involves nobody. One goes from humility to anger, from anger to humility: to write as well as one can, not in order to be better than the others, but in order to contribute to the elaboration of a text the aim of which is to represent neither me nor the others; to advance unarmed across the paper, to lose oneself in the act of writing, to be nobody and oneself at the same time.”
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i think we can all agree there should be more freedom & equality in the world, and most of us would agree it’s not a good thing to have your ankle chained to the wall of the room of your birth.

the poetry of the privileged is not to be held accountable for the system that gives or withholds those privileges, i should think. and more poets than not, cling rather precariously to a niche lower down; could tell a thing or two about despair & desperation, if they chose. this makes them not morally inferior to the severely dispossessed, however.

what is at stake, then, in this purely aesthetic debacle? am i jealous when a claque of fellow poets modestly succeed at promotion by means of a gimmick, whereas my own gimmicks do not? do i pass by the homeless on my own block, only to enrage myself at the treatment of Iranian protesters in the poem i post online? do i pride myself at knowing three words of the language my grandparents spoke, who might not understand what i write today but who’d be proud that someone in the family turned out to be “a writer”? do i prefer to consider the books i have read, rather than the jails i have on occasion found myself trapped inside of? (oh, i made the wrong choice there, for sure!)

no, identity is problematical for everyone except the wielder of torture–who knows for sure that his victim is a nobody.

m.
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Perhaps Mr. Goldsmith, you mean to say that when you are afraid to say something “as yourself”, you say it “as someone else”.

What is missed in all of this I think is that most people don’t say anything at all regardless of the identity with which they choose to link a statement.
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“so who is grabbing?”

of course there is no self amongst all these egos which is, let’s face it, what poetry is really about
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At which point we all blow our brains out. Of course the problem is with the terms this writing project sets out, which I do think are handled in such a way as to overstate the consequences of internet communication’s effects on identity, and this prompted my original comment. But then it’s all a joke I’m told.

I think you give Conceptual Writing too much credit as far as humor goes, but if you find it vapid and I find it worse, let’s forget about it.
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Let none of this be read as support for conceptual poetry, which doesn’t interest me even a little. I find it vapid, which I guess it’s supposed to be, which I find boring. But I was taken aback at the absence from the thread of a recognition of the philosophical context of Kenny’s comments.
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When he explains the methods of Conceptual Writing, Kenneth Goldsmith usually offers some version of the following, which he added to Silliman’s comment fields for the July 7, 2009 post:

“it employs intentionally self and ego effacing tactics using uncreativity, unoriginality, illegibility, appropriation, plagiarism, fraud, theft, and falsification as its precepts;”

Claims such as this prompted my comment — Goldsmith wants to mingle what (I think) you call the “technical” meaning of identity with current concerns about intellectual property rights, identity theft, and so on. I question how much investment Conceptual Writers have in this, because they often don’t actually violate the customs they say they are violating. The definition of plagiarism, for example, hinges on deception. It is the willing misrepresentation of another person’s writing as your own. In other words, a silent lie has to be involved, and this cannot happen when you transcribe an already-published piece of writing and say “It’s not mine!” as Conceptual Writers more or less always do.

I won’t digress here into discussing the many holes I see in the Conceptual method — I mean to say that I don’t understand your objection to talking about “identity theft” in relation to Conceptual Writing when the authors in this group more or less insist that we do. If you think ” ‘identity’ isn’t used in these arguments the way it is in the concept of ‘identity theft,” ‘ what do you make of the Conceptualist mission statements?

And regarding Locke, his thoughts on identity in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding not only posed hard theological problems about the nature of the soul but also helped change the genre of biography as people then knew it, as you see reading Walton’s Life of Herbert and then Johnson’s Life of Richard Savage, to take some famous examples. Were these “technical” issues? — Could you explain what you mean by that word?

Stephen
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RODEO NATIONAL ANTHEM SECTION: Would be great if we had a series of shots where we see hundreds of people in the rodeo audience driving home, in their “pickups” or whatever, troubled at the thought that hundreds of other people in the audience continued to cheer even after the “Bush drinking blood” line. We could focus on one particular couple who have had complicated feelings about the war in Iraq from the beginning, even though they (1) live in the South and (2) enjoy rodeo. (Although too unbelievable?) A nice touch might be: This family sees Borat hitchhiking, picks him up, he sits in back seat of car with kids, takes shit in back seat, then pretends to be humping the family dog, and we see, from their reaction, that they really are rednecks after all.

PAM ANDERSON (2): The scene where, during “rehearsals” for the naked-wrestling, balls-in-the-face scene, Sacha takes a break to call his powerful agent on his cell phone, to see how negotiations with Pamela Anderson’s powerful agent are going.

(source)
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“Anthony Lane has Flarf’s Number”

(though for some reason he keeps call­ing it “Baron Cohen”):

How effi­cient, though, is embar­rass­ment as a comic device? It’s a quick hit, and it cor­rals the audi­ence on the side of smug­ness; but its vic­to­ries are Pyrrhic…. To scour the world for little people you can taunt, and then pal up with the hip and rich: that is not an advis­able path for any comic to pursue, let alone one as sharp and mer­cu­r­ial as Baron Cohen. All his genius, at present, is going into publicity…But the work itself turns out to be flat and fool­ish, bereft of…good cheer: wholly unsuit­able for chil­dren, yet pro­pelled by a nag­ging pueril­ity that will appeal only to those in the vortex of puberty, or to adults who have failed to progress beyond it.
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And I suppose I agree that the discussion of this truism is often banal on this level of discourse. However, dealt with in art/poetry it can often become new and interesting. I mean, I don’t read Basho’s frog poem to replace the experience of going to a pond. or whatever, just saying that art often deals interestingly with issues that might otherwise be boring.

(o god, this is going to be an unreadably narrow block of text, so sorry)
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And actually, when it comes down to it, it doesn’t actually seem like this argument is even about identity at all. Just copyright law. Not sure why everyone wants to convolute the discussion by trying to guess what people’s intentions are.
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Now, if you’d like to specify whether you’re agreeing with Foucault, or Derek Parfit, or Derrida, or Hume, or just what the hell beyond a complete banality you have in mind—well, that, too, would be a conversation everyone’s had a million times before. But at least it would be specific, instead of just freshman chatter.
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I don’t mean to apply that to Kenny personally; I don’t know him, he’s probably a sweet guy, and he has every right to sign his name to his post as he advocates a poetics I might have issues with. Whether he has a claim on Senator Craig’s hapless interview with the airport cop is another question.

“Reactionary” is the first label that post-avant writers, from Silliman on down, reach for when confronted with disagreement, fudging the line between the poetic and the political.
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your response is still framed as if anyone is saying “the ‘I’ has disappeared”. No one said that. All that’s being is that the “I” does not demarcate a solid unchanging identity that can be grasped or “purely” read. In fact, your own subjective ad hominem reading of K. Goldsmith’s work only really further demonstrates this. It’s a baseless and reactionary reading of him. Which is fine, of course, but “says” as much of the reader as it does the work being read.
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One would never know it by reading the Conceptual and Flarf poets’ very professional, very protocoled Author Bio statements in the journals, Museum-performance brochures, and University of Arizona Conceptual Poetry Conference program notes.”

Nice unmasking, Kent.

Conceptual/Flarf is manifesto-ism plying social truism to the gullible.
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correcting typos in comment sections (a place where text takes on many properties of spoken vernacular) is a passive-aggressive way of saying “fuck you, i don’t want to talk to you”.

My apologies for the lesson if that’s what you had intended.
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