Prior to proceeding with my response, I would like to briefly state what a pleasure it was to attend the Conceptual Poetry and Its Others conference. From the introductions to the presentations and the readings, the conference was consistently of the highest quality. It is one of the best gatherings I’ve attended. I’d like to communicate a sincere thanks to the participants and organizers for such a memorable event.

“Repetition is the mother of invention.”

I’ve been trying to find a source for this saying, and after searching for it online, have come up with two interesting possibilities—it is attributed to Freud and to the Zen mantra practice of chanting. Though I’m not sure that the saying is actually attributable to either of these two sources, I nonetheless find in this coupling a very interesting and possibly fruitful confusion, especially concerning the issues of originality and epistemology that were discussed throughout the conference.

More specifically, I’d like to address the issues of originality and epistemology in relation to Kenneth Goldsmith’s wonderfully strange aesthetic principle of writing unoriginal poetry. In fact, it is difficult to justify Kenneth’s poeticization of the police transcripts concerning Senator Larry Craig’s airport sex scandal last June (which Kenneth read) as traditionally original.* After all, Kenneth simply repeated what is stated in the transcript. What is new about this? What makes it poetic? And is there anything to learn from it as a poem that we may miss by reading it as a transcript?

During one of the panels, I believe it was Jesper Olsson who raised the issue that conceptual poetry may be strongly related to our old friend “defamiliarization.” Marjorie Perloff echoed this possibility, and I couldn’t agree with it more. Like his work Day, I find that the power of Kenneth’s “unoriginal” poetry lies in the fact that it does not pretend to be anything else than a reproduction, a repetition of the original. However, although this doubling undermines traditional notions of what is considered aesthetically meritorious, I read such work as ingeniously original in that it requires the reader to ask questions that one wouldn’t normally ask, like in the example of the Craig police transcript. In other words, reading such a work as poetry forces us to rethink exactly what we are expected to expect from such a text/situation. Whereas a police transcript already presumes a certain line of questioning and thus thinking—something along the lines of crime and punishment, an ideological form of thinking which is all too present in our “Law & Order” and “CSI” television society—to read the same text as a poem disassociates us from such ideological and institutionalized expectations. To use the philosophical terminology of Alain Badiou, it forces us to rethink the situation, to find the “new” in the already given—to think again. Reading the transcript as a poem encourages us to think beyond the established parameters of guilt and innocence, and instead asks us to suspend such judgment in favor of rethinking the absurdity of the situation itself—how it came about and maintains itself as a situation. Marjorie brought up the point that she can’t believe she lives in a society where the direction or movement of one’s hands and feet in a bathroom stall can result in one’s arrest, and I believe this type of reaction is precisely the point of such a poetic exercise. Rather than approach the situation through the media-packaged terms of “politics and sex scandal,” such a poetic reframing begs that we go further in our questioning and thinking. It asks us to reevaluate our relationship to such practices, and to the judgments we make of them. Whereas a televised report on the incident may focus on the legalistic nature of the situation—on what constitutes the law, and how this law has been broken—a poetic re-rendering of that situation forces us to think from the ground upward. That is, it requires that we begin with the structure or nature of the situation—how did we get here? Who are the agents in this situation, and how did they come to be agents? If the situation is of a legalistic nature, has a threat been neutralized? If so, is the law in question a viable law, a necessary law, one that maintains justice, peace and order in society? Of course one may be perceptive enough to think in such a manner when first confronting Senator Craig’s situation, and would find Kenneth’s piece a superfluous re-rendering—a boring boring text, to use Kenneth’s phrase. But such dialectical reasoning does not come easy, even to the most critically minded among us. We live in a media society that tells us what to think by manipulating the framing of situations. Kenneth’s unoriginal reproductions are original in their re-framing of the frame, and as such encourage us to rethink what we’ve already been told to think.

Returning to the opening quote, repetition can indeed be the mother of invention, as absurd as this might seem. Freud famously practiced this possibility in analysis, from having patients repeat dreams and memories, to his theoretical notions of doubling, the uncanny, and the death drive, not to mention the theory of repetition compulsion (all of these concepts being obviously interrelated). In psychoanalysis, one learns new things by repeating the old—by rethinking, reimagining them. The same goes for the Zen practice of chanting. Chanting is a form of thinking, or of allowing thought to happen, based on a specific, poetic relation to language, and as such constitutes part of the path to enlightenment. Kenneth Goldsmith’s unoriginal work partakes of this critical epistemological tradition in its insistence that we read what we’ve read again. Like a psychoanalytic session, a chanting exercise, or even a Beckett play or Warhol film where “nothing happens,” Kenneth’s work may be unoriginal and thus boring, but it is most certainly of the unboring boring type of boring.

* I can’t recall the title of Kenneth’s piece, and I also understand that he combined his reading of the Craig transcript with some other work, including Fidget (I believe). However, for the purposes of this response, I am specifically referring to the moments in Kenneth’s reading regarding the police transcript.

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