1. My point is not that Language poetry has had no role in building (or dismantling) certain careers, but rather that the sense of Language Poetry as institutionally successful, or a tool in the career building of professors, is like saying that Coventry Patmore has been assimilated by the academy and converted into cultural capital.

2. ...making a more comprehensive section of the poetic record available to scholarly consideration is imperative at a moment when the literary history of the last few decades is just now beginning to be written and contested.

3. The language of these poems is motivated along multiple, but unprivileged axes;...Language, in these poems, idles, the gears grating.

4. -L-A-U-T-G-E-D-I-C-H-T--L-A-U-T-G-E-D-I-C-H-T--L-A-U-T-G-E-D-I-C-H-T

5. Legion (II) is a response to my poem Legion, which formerly appeared on this site. That original poem was composed by rearranging and recontextualizing the true/false questions of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory....Although the 1942 Inventory has been widely discredited and is no longer published, distributed or supported, the corporation that licenses the exam feels that Legion violates copyright. On the contrary, Legion is almost certainly a "fair use" of its source text (as protected by Title 17, 107 of the United States Code); however it has been removed from this site as a courtesy.

6. ...the new forms and structures of conceptual writing recall the sense of artifice, constraint, and perversity that the sonnet too must once have had.

7. One should always remember Benjamin's warning: "Never trust what writers say about their own writing."

---

Craig Dworkin is the author of Reading the Illegible (Northwestern UP), Signature-Effects (Ghos-Ti), Dure (Cuneiform), Strand (Roof), and Parse (Atelos), and the editor of Architectures of Poetry (Rodopi) and Language to Cover a Page: The Early Writing of Vito Acconci (MIT). He teaches at the University of Utah and curates two on-line archives: Eclipse and The UbuWeb Anthology of Conceptual Writing.

---

• Craig Dworkin reading with Kenneth Goldsmith
• Panel discussion with featured poets, moderated by Tenney Nathanson

• Download the mp3 recording of Craig Dworkin's breakout section: The Politics of Conceptual Writing

---

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Conceptual Poetry and Its Others Symposium is made possible by grants from the Arizona Humanities Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Poets & Writers. We are also grateful for Symposium support from the Arizona Inn; College of Humanities; Book Stop Used Books, and Friends of the Poetry Center, especially Helen S. Schaefer.

Home | email

University of Arizona Poetry Center | 1508 East Helen Street (At Vine Avenue) |Tucson , AZ 85721-0150
Phone: 520-626-3765 | Fax: 520-621-5566 | email: poetry@email.arizona.edu