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Isms and the Liberation from True Knowledge
After observing that “someone who longs for particulars and seizes them in his writing is thinking in the best possible way,” Adam Zagajewski, a page or so later in Slight Exaggeration (as beamed into English by Clare Cavanagh), writes: We rarely consider how much we’ve lost by way of the systematization of intellectual life over the last century. In an age of ideology, systems, endless -isms, have taken hold everywhere, even, or rather especially, in universities.Read More
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Poetry Put Its Hands Up, But Kenny Goldsmith Shot It Anyway
File Under: You Couldn’t Make Up Something This Stupid…. This past weekend, at a conference called Interrupt 3 at Brown University, poet Kenneth Goldsmith read Michael Brown’s St. Louis County autopsy report as a poem. Goldsmith is known for his conceptual, “uncreative writing” practices, which involve working exclusively with preexisting texts — altering them, remixing them, appropriating and repurposing them without credit to the original sources. This was the substance of his performance on Friday night in Providence: he read a remixed and slightly altered version of the official autopsy report for Brown, the teenager killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri, last summer.Read More
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Me and Julio Down by the Playa
Julio Cortázar Per my annual habit of reading Spanish masters in México, I’m indulging in another Archipelago Books offering of Julio Cortázar, his early-but-posthumously-published Diary of Andrés Fava. The translation by Anne McLean is smooth, witty, obscure where it needs to be, and altogether delightful.Read More
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Retro-Garde
Anyone fishing around in the buzzworthy poetry mags these days will recognize the fragmentarian described in this article. The piece was published in 2007, but Mr. Taylor’s publishability has gone off the charts over the past half-dozen years. Of course, he writes under hundreds of pseudonyms with a raft of different MFA credentials attached to each one.Read More
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Putz-Art
Con Artist Those who saw my earlier post about Kenny Goldsmith’s latest foray into avant-stupidity may want to sign this petition on change.org asking Goldsmith and his madcap band of phonies to withdraw his call to “print out the entire Internet.” There is a term for his latest adventure, of course. You’ll find it in the title of this post.Read More
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The Writin’s on the Wall
My previous couple of posts may paint me as a stick-in-the-mud, an opponent of “innovation,” a reactionary sonneteer or lover of Tradition (cue Tevye). No. There is a dimension of the avant-garde I enjoy and admire (the two responses need not align, but it’s best if they do), and I believe one of the best spokesman for this dimension these days is Kent Johnson. I bring Kent up merely to direct Perpetual Birders to his Chicago Review takedown of Marjorie Perloff’s “Avant-Garde Poetics” section in the latest edition of The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.Read More
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Bök to the Future
The latest collection of “poetry” by Christian Bök. From a fascinating article in Seed Magazine: On May 16 the Zoological Society of London released a report suggesting that since contemporary environmentalism emerged with the declaration of the first Earth Day in 1970, close to one-third of all the wild species on Earth have disappeared. Language conservationists have fared no better: Of the world’s roughly 6,800 languages, fully half — though some experts say closer to 90 percent — are expected to disappear before the end of the century.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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Avant-Chunks
“I like the idea of inspiration as regurgitated output. I’m stealing all these ideas from you, I hope you know, so don’t get mad when you see the regurgitated output … uh, I mean ‘inspiration’….” –“Poet” Sharon Mesmer in a Harriet interview with Edwin Torres. Torres prefaces his chat with Mesmer by claiming that her “poem” entitled “This Poem” “shows a fabulous breadth of poetics.” Since the “poem” is a flarf assemblage of stolen phrases, this is like praising a burglar’s storage unit for showing a fabulous breadth of commodities. The comparison of poetics and commodities is appropriate.Read More
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Panem et Circenses Redux
Bill Knott’s post entitled “i told you so” consists of a single link, which leads to an article in The Independent that begins this way: For decades in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art—including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko—as a weapon in the Cold War.Read More