University of Arizona Poetry Center

She Do the Conceptual in Different Voices*

ATTENTION :colon: write down anything you hear for one hour

It all st It all started when we were brought here

Oy vey! Oy Vey! Every word here is creatively intended

To see what is happening in relation to what has happened

What is the state of poetry today?

There was a certain point at which the story changed.

What the opener does is open the two boxes. What the voice says is: this one?

Never trust what poets say about their own writing

To whom when where how much how much

We are in the midst of

a queer and degenerate avoidance of meaning, coherence, truth & tradition

a broken or failed English

Speaking and embodying or distributing speech

The space as doubt

The question of linguistic belonging

The fetishizing of sounds

performing, reforming, deforming

This gutless indulgence

all they do is play around with

words and phrases refusing to add up to any

Idiom is related to idiot

Flora leads to follow

A revolt against the transparency of the word

bound up in questions of negation

Are you 1 of us? Not 1 of us?

In the middle of the way was a stone was a stone

A poetry of intellect instead of emotion

Is T.S. Eliot recuperable?

True False Uh, depends Not recently

I just wanted to say that this is about my father.

I’m a modernist, too. But I’m a happy modernist.

Yesterday sequesterday

way back when it was Language Poetry

Potential mishearings or hearings

portal mortal

A poetry of intellect instead of emotion

Hello?! Is there a brain inside that mind?!

Shifting content into different containers

A poetry of intellect instead of emotion

archival activism

It all started when

Meaning unmoored from vocabulary

Give it Up, Turn it Loose

Shut up, ubu, shut up

I’ve been troubled by many things and also stimulated

Then I went to the poetry reading and I decided to begin again

language as material

language as process

Gertrude Stein all over again

Made, composed,

The real work as opposed to the copy

reading the illegible

It all started when

material that’s already there

There’s a good part coming up

in which I ask: what is conceivable in conceptual literature

Valueless speech

misbehavior, theft, transformation

Appropriation, citation, reproduction

Sloppy copyists

language as junk

language as

A pony that refuses to be ridden

a rat seeking a dark cavity

the ketchup that loses the race

a different kind of difficulty

Defined by what it is not

Isn’t that too easy? Marjorie’s saying that’s too easy. Marjorie says “I’m right.”

Spontaneous overflow supplanted by meticulous pro meticulous procee

Spontaneous overflow supplanted by

suppl supplanted by by

Period marks of quotation pronoun period

It’s so tiring to read

identity and all that shit

I’m still trying to understand Conceptual Poetry but I think I’m a step closer

It all started when It all started when we when we when we

What happens to the proverbial voice of the poet?

It’s the framing that matters

Everything was fodder

canned chance

troubadours of boredom

If anything is allowed, nothing is possible

Someone has always done anything before

proof that there is life after the continuous present

I love originality so much that I keep copying it

One person’s difficulty is another person’s pleasure

and other great things you can do with your mouth

If you’d like to order at home, $19.95 plus tax

because I loved language more

Poetry is all around if only we have ears to hear it

The answer is not in our machines, it’s in our politics.

Do we get to go eat now?

That was the last question

* All of the above words and phrases were excerpted from individual presentations, panel discussions, readings, Q&A sessions, and the keynote address. Nothing has been added or modified.

Barbara Cole