Reading with Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith Reading
Reading with Cole Swensen, Christian Bök, and Caroline Bergvall
Roundtable with Jesper Olsson, Marie Smart, Linda Reinfeld, Vanessa Place, Charles Alexander, Brian Reed, and moderator Marjorie Perloff
Roundtable with Barbara Cole, Wystan Curnow, Jonathan Stalling, Graça Capinha, Stephen Fredman, Laynie Brown, and moderator Marjorie Perloff
Panel Discussion with featured poets, moderated by Tenney Nathanson
Breakout Sessions
Caroline BergvallCharles Bernstein
Christian Bök
Craig Dworkin
Kenneth Goldsmith
Tracie Morris
Cole Swensen
Keynote Address
Marjorie Perloff
Kenneth Goldsmith
A conceptual introduction:
1. I, too, have had an experience similar to Marjorie's.
2. But yeah it bothers me. Museums can't do it, because they've got to get permission. They've gotta get through hoops. They've gotta pay. They've gotta do contracts. They've got to do everything, and we don't have to do any of that shit! I haven't written a contract in my life for anything on UbuWeb. It doesn't exist! And by the way, the plug could get pulled tomorrow and the whole thing could vanish. We've come close...
3. Any avantist who made a point of killing art did it with impeccable taste, hence its ultimate absorption into the canon of art.
4. I prefer email to hugs, culture to nature, air-conditioning to gentle breezes, fluorescent lighting to tropical sunsets, theft to originality, falsification to truth, the manufactured to the hand-crafted, Barry Bonds to Hank Aaron, and value artifice more than life itself.
5. My most cherished books are the various anthologies that appeared in the 1960s.
6. Most likely, you can't understand a word I'm saying, even though it's your native language....the air is now thick with sound posing as language.
7. ...we shall reminisce about the time when human beings still wrote poetry for other humans.
Bio:
Kenneth Goldsmith's writing has been called some of the most "exhaustive and beautiful collage work yet produced in poetry" by Publishers Weekly. Goldsmith is the author of nine books of poetry, founding editor of the online archive UbuWeb, and the editor "I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews," which is the basis for an opera, "Trans-Warhol," premiered in Geneva in March of 2007. An hour-long documentary on his work, "sucking on words: Kenneth Goldsmith" premiered at the British Library in 2007. Kenneth Goldsmith is the host of a weekly radio show on New York City's WFMU. He teaches writing at The University of Pennsylvania, where he is a senior editor of PennSound, a online poetry archive. More about Goldsmith can be found on his author's page at the University of Buffalo's Electronic Poetry Center.
Video:
- Kenneth Goldsmith reading with Craig Dworkin
- Panel discussion with featured poets, moderated by Tenney Nathanson
- Download the mp3 recording of Kenneth Goldsmith's breakout section: Uncreative Writing Workshop
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.
