“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.”

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.

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.

“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

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.

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.