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Damn the Planet, Full Speed Ahead!
Clearcut Forest, OregonPhoto: Marli Bryant Miller Kenneth Goldsmith and some like-witted pals are inviting us all to join in “the first-ever attempt to print out the entire internet.“ Of course, that’s not his goal. His goal is self-promotion and a quasi-scientific interest in seeing how many suckers will respond. “What you decide to print out is up to you,” Goldsmith says (with, I imagine, a sly grin); “as long as it exists somewhere online, it’s in.” In the next breath, of course, he imposes his conceptualist restrictions: “We’re not looking for creative interpretations of the project. We don’t want objects.Read More
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Vanessa Sells Out
Let me see: what could I lay before you to concretize the acedia that characterizes Conceptual writing? Well, how about this: Yes, as trumpeted by both conceptualist “author” Vanessa Place and her dopey-eyed peeps at Harriet, Place’s … well, what it is? a “book”? a “work of art”? … let’s just say “latest release” (such as one might enjoy some onanistic evening while pondering the idea of a canvas Duchamp had sense enough never to paint: “Nude Barthes Descending Staircase”)…; to reprise mid-sentence, Vanessa Place, lawyer and con-woman, managed to “sell out” (are we surprised?) this work (is it fair to…Read More
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Language of the Power Elite
I can’t believe this bit of brilliance from Keston Sutherland came to me via Harriet, which has been toadying to Con Writers and their Maven-in-Chief Marjorie Perloff for a long while now. I’m thankful to whatever whistleblower at Harriet found it and posted the link to it, though. Here’s a sample: [S]ignificantly for so-called “conceptual” poets, the refusal to give a conceptual account of the “subject” whose rejection defines the schema of their art is a manifest expression of contempt for the very work of conceptual definition itself.Read More
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Stupid Stupid Shakespeare
Remember the children’s books about a family named the Stupids? Evidently one of their descendants has landed a blogging gig at Harriet—a fellow we’ve met before: K. Silem Mohammad. His latest post is hard to beat for sheer stupidity. The irony, of course, is that our blogger resorts to actual compositional writing in order to praise a book called Words of Love for being “beyond the usual condition of appropriational recycledness”—a book, that is, of surpassing stupidity.Read More
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WaPo Intern Pokes Poetry, Concludes It Is No Longer Living
On her aptly titled ComPost blog, Harvard grad and erstwhile pundit/humorist Alexandra Petri uses Richard Blanco as a footstool (much as Marlowe‘s Tamburlaine did the Emperor of the Turks) and from that elevation declaims her negative opinion of American poetry.Read More
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A Blogger’s Notebook 16
CONCEPTUAL WRITING In the chipped blue bowl there are snippets of lettuce brown at the edges with an oysterish slime. Tough tomato wedges the color of sun-bleached orange plastic. Deliquescent cucumber slices. Carrot shreds curled and dry as the armpit hair of a circus strongman. Dressing the consistency of industrial sludge. We’re hungry but reluctant and in the end don’t bother taking a bite.Read More
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Flying the Flag
Reading this, it struck me that watching Kenny Goldsmith try to think is like watching Keanu Reeves try to act. The lack of basic skills is no bar to either man making a tidy income, because each has stumbled into a style of performance that requires no talent—a value-free type of entertainment that speaks both to the canny cynicism of their self-presentation and to the low expectations of their audience.Read More
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Copper-Egg People
Just when you think the folks at Harriet have finally disappeared down the rabbit-hole of Con Writing and its several intersecting tunnels (look just under the sod: they don’t dig deep), in walks Linh Dinh to shake things up.Read More
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Hapax Legomenon Redux
Harriet celebrates Poetry Month with this hilarious post by con man Kenny Goldsmith, in which he makes good on his promise of “uncreative writing” by quoting a vacuous, jargon-ridden exercise in what passes for criticism in the back alleys of academe. “Conceptual writing signaled the end of the era of individual voice,” opines Ms. Johanna Drucker. “Poetics of the swarm, mind-melding writing, poiesis as the hapax legomenon of the culture?” (No, that question mark is not an typo. It is in Drucker’s text and is as mysterious there as it is here.Read More
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Stupid Funny*
“Why are so many writers now exploring strategies of copying and appropriation? It’s simple: the computer encourages us to mimic its workings.” The above is from Kenneth Goldsmith’s introduction to Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (a free UbuWeb download). Goldsmith, of course, does not explain why writers have not created novels with internal combustion engines in imitation of the way cars work; or anthologies that flush their contents as you read them, in imitation of urinals. Oh … wait….Read More
Joseph Hutchison, Colorado Poet Laureate 2014-2019, has published 20 collections of poems and edited or co-edited three poetry anthologies. He currently directs two master’s-level programs for University College at the University of Denver: Professional Creative Writing and Arts & Culture Management. Joe lives with his wife, Melody Madonna, in the mountains southwest of Denver, Colorado, the city where he was born. 
