At Public Books Jacquelyn Ardam Mulls on Robin Coste Lewis's Answer to Conceptualism

At Public Books, Jacquelyn Ardam writes that a new book by Robin Coste Lewis may be the answer to conceptualism's identity crisis. More:

In 2015, the conceptual writing movement came under fire in a very public way. Kenneth Goldsmith and Vanessa Place, two of conceptual writing’s most prominent figures, drew sharp criticism from the larger poetic community—and later, major media outlets—for producing work that was icky and insensitive at best, downright racist at worst. Many writers and groups took the position that conceptual writing itself is a mode of white privilege; Lillian-Yvonne Bertram wrote that the problem with conceptualism is its presumed “transcendence into a pure and untouched imaginative or conceptual space” when that space is, in fact, a fantasy of whiteness. Conceptual writing’s commitment to a poetics of transcription, organization, reframing, and appropriation of already-extant language, many have argued, ignores the social and embodied reality of that language.1

Enter Robin Coste Lewis.

Lewis’s first book of poetry, Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems, has just come out from Knopf. Though Lewis is not associated with the conceptual writing movement—her work is not included in either of its two major anthologies—her bravura title poem offers us an acute illustration of how conceptual methods of writing might be unusually apropos for writing and thinking through social issues: in Lewis’s case, the long history of racism and misogyny in the West. Lewis may not identify as a conceptual writer, but “Voyage of the Sable Venus” is conceptual writing, and potent conceptual writing at that. Lewis activates conceptual modes for political purposes much more successfully than either Goldsmith or Place, and her resulting work reveals, astounds, and lingers. [...]

Continue at Public Books.