First of all, I want to thank everyone for the talks and readings I’ve been immersed in during the last two days. It’s been fascinating, and funny, and – inspiring – to use that word here, which was actually the only deliberate constraint I set up for my response.

Yesterday afternoon I wrote down some comments and questions that I planned to bring up today; some of them emerging from the academic’s inclination for taxonomy and institutional distinctions. Of course not with the intention of safeguarding borderlines or to force out a set of criteria for that something called a poem should be called a conceptual poem. But mainly since such identity issues had been brought up, briefly, already, and are touched upon in the introduction to the – yes – the Ubuweb Anthology of Conceptual Writing.

For example: What distinguishes conceptual poetics or poetry from the writings in conceptual art? Is there a certain negotiation between conceptual framing and materiality in the former that sets it off from the latter? Could this kind of negotiation be considered an act of poiesis – the making of poetry as the shaping of language? Is it such an operation – even if deferred to the activity of selecting and moving linguistic data – that makes up for a specific materiality, or even a specific sensual quality in the language in, for example, Kenny’s transcriptions? And if so, won’t older conceptions or definitions of poetry (such as Jakobson’s) make themselves heard again? And what would that imply, and so on, and so forth.

But then I went to the poetry reading last night, and came back, and decided to begin again.

And I don’t want to address the concept of conceptual poetics as much as some of the writing strategies and methods that have been manifested here at the Poetry Center; but also elsewhere, of course, during the last five to ten years or so; but also earlier, certainly. Because one of the most exciting consequences of the use, today, of appropriation, transcriptive strategies, transposition between different contexts or media, détournements, cut-up, montage, remediation, redescription (to use a term from a recent book by the French critic Franck Leibovici, where he uses it to trace the contours of what he calls a poetic document) – one of the most exciting consequences of such strategies is, without doubt, the way they open up new vistas for literary history and criticism. Marjorie Perloff’s brilliant re-reading of Benjamin’s Arcades Project as a conceptual poem the other night illustrates this.

However, apart from being a gift to the literary historian or critic, who from this vantage point can construct a framework for re-conceptualizing earlier works of literature, and reconsider traits in them that before had to be seen as failures or oddities, these methods do, of course, also raise questions about the writing and reading hear and now. And with yesterday’s poetry still sounding, or roaring, in my head, I would like to pose three such questions, or comments.

The first takes as its starting point Caroline Bergvall’s wonderful modulations between different languages last night; an issue that she also addressed in her talk during the morning, and which was also touched upon by Marjorie in her lecture, for example in relation to Finnish poet Leevi Lehto, who in connection with this topic has come up with the thought provoking idea of a broken or failed English as the potential lingua franca for a global poetry to come (not the least on the web). In regard to this, I was wondering – and this is a somewhat vague question – if the concept of translation could be, and should be, expanded and approached as a kind of key concept to describe the poetics – the writing methods – deployed and discussed here? And, also, I am curious about, how you look upon a suggestion such as Leevi’s – from an Anglo-American point of view that is.

The second question is linked to Christian’s stunning performance as well as to a piece of advice he gave during yesterday’s panel, about where one should look for poetry today – in science, in comics, in the mass media and so on (which is manifested in his own practice of course). In relation to this he also mentioned the importance of producing an epistemological addition or effect through the processing of the appropriated material used in the poem. In France some contemporary critics have tried to articulate this manipulation as a kind of “epistemocritical tactics”, based on the reconstruction and distortion of cognitive patterns, to put it bluntly, that tries to dig deeper in its analysis of current culture than mere détournements. What I want to ask is perhaps how one should account for this production of (new) knowledge or this potential political critique in poetry? Could for example an old concept such as de-familiarization still be operative here? And I guess that there are a number of possible accounts or answers to come up with in this regard?

My third comment connects to the issue of re-reading earlier works through the frame of a conceptual poetics. A couple of years ago, the magazine OEI in Sweden, which I work with, suggested the term “archival activism” to describe part of what we’ve been up to since we started in 1999, which is a kind of re-contextualization of aesthetic and non-aesthetic material (diagrams, manuals, primers, tracts on alternative orthography) from the last three centuries (even though the history of the avant-garde has been a main focus). In the last issue we addressed some of these editorial ideas by devoting the issue as such to editorial “aesthetics” or “poetics”. Which leads me to the question – In view of the collaborative strategies that are being developed in the poetry discussed here (I’m thinking, for example, of Christian’s genetics project, The Xenotext Experiment), how much is really the idea of the poet or poetry as a solitary activity affected? Could or should one, for example, include editorial collectives and editing– which of course is one way of describing much poetical writing in a narrower sense as well – as examples of a poetic practice. I have no idea what that would imply, except that Kenny’s most suggestive conceptual poem so far, in that case, maybe wouldn’t be Soliloquy or Day, but might as well be the continuously expanding archive of ubuweb.

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