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Smackdown? Not exactly…
Kenny Goldsmith takes on Al Filreis here. No contest.Read More
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Going to School with Kenny G—UPDATED
If you’ve ever wondered what goes on in one of Kenny Goldsmith‘s classes, here’s a glimpse.* This is what passes for profundity among the avant-garde, and evidently Goldsmith is successfully conning his students into his quasi-mystical faith in “the artistic significance and process of transcription.” I see the attraction.Read More
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Another Simple Desultory Philippic*
One doesn’t have to look to the Paris Review or Poetry Magazine or The New York Review of Books for profound insight. Here’s a bit of wisdom from an interview with Sam Hamill—”poet, publisher, editor and translator, [who] co-founded the Copper Canyon Press in 1972″—published online at The Kearney Hub in Kearney, Nebraska. Hamill remarks: “The way of poetry […] shows us that our lives are simply an instrument of our practice. If we alter our practice, we change our lives.Read More
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What Poetry Can Be
I wonder if there’s room on a post-avantist’s reading list for this. Are the sample poems SoQ? If so, what would a Silliman or a Goldsmith or a Spahr do with such an irruption of brutality in their lives? More broadly, what would Wallace Stevens or any of the other “High Modernists” have done with it? (Is Williams a “High Modernist”? If so, there’s at least one who could do it.) I don’t put these forward as rhetorical questions: I genuinely wonder if the avant-garde and their acknowledged masters haven’t narrowed rather than expanded what poetry can be.Read More
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“Avaunt, malignant enchanters!”
Regarding my just previous post, you can find Kenneth Goldsmith’s introduction to the Flarf/Conceptual Writing section of the latest issue of Poetry here.Read More
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A Blogger’s Notebook 9
THE EXHIBITION After Kenneth Goldsmith* It was clear that the artist had gone mad when he began to mistake his tools for works of art. And yet, as is often the case, there were those willing to indulge his madness. Hangers-on who praised his insight into art’s dependence on mechanical processes. Gallery owners who displayed his palette knives, worn-out brushes, canvas stretchers, rags. Wealthy patrons who relished the adventure of investing in aesthetic futures.Read More
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A New Type of Creativity
I kid you not…. “The old type of creativity really isn’t very interesting,” Goldsmith said. “So by being uncreative, you form a new type of creativity.” […] [Kenneth] Goldsmith is the author of 10 books of poetry. His most recent work is unofficially titled American Trilogy. It consists of “The Weather, Traffic and Sports,” which are respective transcriptions of a year’s worth of radio weather reports, a 24-hour traffic cycle and the radio broadcast of a Yankees game with the ads included.Read More
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Openness Contra Gated Communities
Over at “Stoning the Devil,” Adam Fieled has chosen to re-engage via comments on the poems I’ve posted by Philip Levine and Adrienne Rich. He takes me to task for not explicating the poems, but as I told him in his comment stream, “I have no intention of explicating the poems, although I may comment on them in a general way as I continue to post more examples.Read More
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On Not Getting Over It
Today Linh Dinh has a terrific post on the subject of Power, Money and Fame—a response to this brief note he received from Kenneth Goldsmith (see the comment stream to this post): “Linh: Everyone wants power. And money. And fame.Read More