First of all, I want to thank Frances Sjoberg and the Poetry Center for their wonderful work organizing this symposium, and I appreciate the opportunity to participate in it.

One of the things that struck me about the conference was the energy of the various performances, especially given the pronouncements in the poetics essays separating conceptual writing from the emotions of so-called expressive writing. So here I want to concentrate on the performances of Dworkin, Goldsmith, and Bök , rather than, say, Swenson, Morris, Bergvall, or Bernstein, since bracketing emotion seems to be a common theme in the essays of the first three, and I’m not familiar with the poetics of Swenson, Morris, or Bervall. All three had a measure of emotional portrayal in their performances. Dworkin’s was the coolest in tone, though he read the MMPI questions and answers “in voice.” His diagrammed sentence poem, though, could not be in any way construed as dramatic. The language of the source text was buried in labels of its grammatical function and constituted a study in thick Steinian stuplimity (Sianne Ngai’s term). Goldsmith read both the Senator Craig police interview and the fan letter to Kenny G. in character. Christian Bök’s performance was literally operatic. Not only was there the screaming monologue of the Three-Horned Evil One, but most of the early poems in his reading were performed in a persona that suggested the bombastic narration of 1950’s science fiction movies. Not much of this was in the cool or flat tone suggested by Mac Low.

So why the gap between the poetics and the performance? Most of the explanations that bubbled up during the audience and panel responses were unsatisfactory for me. True, there is an element of hyperbole in all poetics statements, but the points about emotion are too perennial to dismiss and are not always hyperbolic. Dworkin’s performance seemed to take coolness of conceptual poetics seriously. Goldsmith may have a flamboyant personality, but his reading material in character seemed less a matter of compulsive flamboyance and even less a matter of the drive of genius to break the rules than a deliberate rhetorical choice. And I don’t think he was simply lying in his poetics statements because “all authors are liars.”

One of the “others” of conceptual writing is vulnerability before a live audience, especially one confirmed in its expectations of emotional massage by slam poetry and the melodrama of mainstream poetry. The emotion bracketed in the poetics and composition of conceptual writing is retrieved as a strategy to negotiate that vulnerability. The conceptual writer must make the audience laugh or give it something to identify as she insinuates the alterity of her work.

Each of the three authors plays off conventional expectations for emotional massage and undermines them in some way. In Legion the emotional upheaval suggested by each of the statements of the MMPI is buried under the cumulative sameness of the language. The work is a New Sentence version of the thickened language in the poem of diagrammed sentences. The Craig police interview, contrary to any expectations of the mainstream poem of sincerity (which the symposium audience wouldn’t have), is actually a study in insincerity. Both Craig and the cop feign sincerity as they jockey for an advantage. Bök is actually performing for the AIs of the future if his performance at the symposium was typical. He makes emotion itself into an alterity by amplifying it into an industrial parody of itself--emotion as the cacophony of the machine shop.

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