Question 2
Q: What is conceptual poetry? –Frances Sjoberg
Charles Bernstein: Poetry pregnant with thought.
Kenneth Goldsmith: Conceptual writing obstinately makes no claims on originality. On the contrary, it employs intentionally self and ego effacing tactics using uncreativity, unoriginality, illegibility, appropriation, plagiarism, fraud, theft, and falsification as its precepts; information management, word processing, databasing, and extreme process as its methodologies; and boredom, valuelessness, and nutritionlessness as its ethos. Language as material, language as process, language as something to be shoveled into a machine and spread across pages, only to be discarded and recycled once again. Language as junk, language as detritus. Nutritionless language, meaningless language, unloved language, entartete sprache, everyday speech, illegibility, unreadability, machinistic repetition. Obsessive archiving & cataloging, the debased language of media & advertising; language more concerned with quantity than quality. How much did you say that paragraph weighed?
Susan Howe. I don't know what conceptual poetry is. Maybe I will find the answer in Tucson.
Christian Bök: Recent trends in technologies of communication (such as digitized sampling and networked exchange) have already begun to subvert the romantic
bastions of "creativity" and "authorship," calling into question the propriety of copyright through strategies of plagiaristic appropriation, computerized reduplication, and programmatic collaboration. Such developments have caused poets to theorize an innovative aesthetics of "conceptual literature" that has begun to question, if not to abandon, the lyrical mandate of originality in order to explore the potentials of the
"uncreative" be it automatic, mannerist, aleatoric, or readymade, in its literary practice. Some of the modernist notions of the both accidental and the procedural have begun increasingly to inform the current writing, by poets who find inspiration in the principles of conceptual art. Such poets have begun to use stolen texts, random words, forced rules, boring ideas, and even cyborg tools, in order to mobilize a variety of anti-expressive, anti-discursive strategies that erase any idiosyncratic demonstration of "lyric style." Such activity has become one of the most radical, if not one of the most popular, limit-cases of the avant-garde at the advent of the millennium.
(Question 3)
Q: What is not poetry? -Peter Ciccariello
Cole Swenson: Unless I'm misreading the question, it implies that everything, or at least a very broad sweep, could be considered poetry. For me, that wouldn't be true, and while I think it's counterproductive to try to define it precisely (that would necessarily be reductive), I think it's also counterproductive to be too inclusive. For me, not much in the world (not nearly enough) is poetry. "Art made of language" would be a start, which leaves you with the problem of what art is, which puts you right back in the same place. But perhaps my problem here is with definitions as a class. We tend to think that we need them, that we'll be able to do more with a given form if we know just what it is and what it is not, but I think that's approaching it from the wrong way around. We need to do. And from there, our attention needs to be on the ramifications of what we've done, on what we're going to do next, rather than what category it might fit.
Charles Bernstein: The absence of conception had itself to be conceived.
Susan Howe: Philip Sidney's definition of poetry as “a speaking Picture, with this end to teach and delight” still holds. So does Emerson's aphorism in his great essay “The Poet;” “Art is the path of the creator to his work.”
In Sum: Marjorie Perloff:
The variation in response to the Poetry Center’s questionnaire is nothing if not intriguing. Let’s begin with #2: What is conceptual poetry?
Kenneth Goldsmith and Christian Bök largely equate the conceptual with the “uncreative,” the unoriginal: they talk of the use of “stolen texts, random words, forced rules, boring ideas,” and begin with the premise that in the information age, “language as material” can be seen as “junk, detritus,” to be reframed and recharged. Charles Bernstein, on the other hand, defines conceptual poetry as “poetry pregnant with thought”—a definition Craig Dworkin, whose “Anthology of Conceptual Writing” on ubuweb.com first gave me the idea for this project, would seem to endorse since he talks there of an “anti-expressivist” poetry”—a “poetry of intellect.” And Susan Howe declares with nice irony, “I don’t know what conceptual poetry is. Maybe I will find the answer in Tucson.”
Yet in her answer to Question #1, Howe calls her own poetry “eccentric,” and in fact all the respondents agree as to what conceptual poetry—and indeed poetry—is not. It is not lyricself-expression but, in Cole Swensen’s words, a way of meaning-making that “opens up” thought processes. And although this “new” poetics may defy what Bernstein calls “official verse culture,” it has its own traditions: Dworkin invokes Marcel Duchamp, surely the Conceptual poet-artist par excellence of the twentieth-century.
So now back to Question 1 about the avant-garde and the “death of the author.” The question suggests that for our poets, the reader has leeway to construct the text—a text that no longer "belongs" to its author. This was what Roland Barthes meant when he talked of the death of the author. Barthes himself revered the authors he wrote about—Balzac, Proust, Mallarmé: indeed, he admired their work so much that he felt the novels or poems in question yielded countless, sometimes contradictory, readings. But he did NOT mean that the reader can do whatever s/he wants with the literary work. The theory of reader construction comes, not from Barthes, but more properly from Foucault and in the hands of early language poets, it sometimes sounded as if the author gave up all claims to the text. But soon we learned that poets were quite prickly on this issue, that they resented those who “explained” their poems in ways that didn’t suit them, and that in any case, reading these “avant-garde” poems did not mean that anything goes. In our own moment, the death of the author has become something of a red herring. In Bernstein’s parodic version of Wallace Stevens, “The author dies. The author’s work is born.” And Howe accepts, as I think Swensen would too, Philip Sidney’s definition of Poetry as a “speaking Picture, with this end to teach and to delight.”
Plus ça change?? However different the poets in this symposium may be from one another, all would agree, I think, that as Wittgenstein puts it, “Do not forget that a poem, although it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information.” “What is not poetry? [Question #3]. The communication of information—including information about one’s own personal emotions—for its own sake. Every poet here is concerned with the language game, with the question of “how to do things with words.”
Conceptual Poetry Conceptual Interview
by Annie Guthrie
In anticipation of the upcoming symposium “Conceptual Poetry and Its Others,” I have asked our guest poets to respond to a collection of questions dreamt up by staff and by Peter Ciccariello, an artist whose work will be on display at the symposium.
by Annie Guthrie
In anticipation of the upcoming symposium “Conceptual Poetry and Its Others,” I have asked our guest poets to respond to a collection of questions dreamt up by staff and by Peter Ciccariello, an artist whose work will be on display at the symposium.
Not all poets were able to participate in the interview but I was fascinated by the diversity of the responses that we did get. It was really challenging to write a question that itself would be “open” enough for them to fall into, and enjoy. I loved trying to hold Cole Swensen’s ideas about “indeterminacy” and “generative meaning” next to Craig Dworkin’s idea about “seeing what happens to a text under certain circumstances” and Goldsmith’s assertion about “the simple act of moving information from one place to another.” I hope you’ll find herein an enticing invitation to the symposium May 29 – May 31.
Question 1
Q: Much of your work suspends or refuses the privilege to any one reading. Can you speak about this tendency against the exclusive, and whether or not this choice is aesthetic, political, personal or any combination of the three? This approach to writing/readership as an extension of Barthes concept of the “death of the author” has accumulated quite a history and tradition in its own right. Some suggest, therefore, that it can no longer be considered avant-garde. Speculate about the whether or not this is so, or whether or not it is important. How do you see the evolution of this “tradition” as it might be surfacing today? -Annie Guthrie
Kenneth Goldsmith: Each generation must determine for itself what it means to kill the author. My generation is faced with the unique task of killing the author by means of textual excess. Today, because of technology, there is an unprecedented amount of language; so much, it seems to me, that the writer's job is not to create more language, but rather to engage in the management of this mass of existing language: How you find your way through this heap of language will distinguish you as a writer from me. The simple act of moving information from one place to another today constitutes a significant cultural act in and of itself. I think it's fair to say that most of us spend hours each day shifting content into different containers. Some of us call this writing.
Susan Howe: I consider my poetry to part of an eccentric aesthetic, political, sometimes religious, sometimes ecological, North American literary tradition that begins in New England as early as 1637. Barthes' concept of the “death of the author” is alluring-but problematic for women writing/reading poems.
Cole Swensen: No, it's definitely not avant-garde, but I think whether or not indeterminacy is avant-garde makes no difference—being avant-garde for avant-garde's sake has always been pointless. But beyond that, I don't think we can use the term avant-garde meaningfully these days except historically; it refers to an earlier situation in which the terms of artistic engagement were radically different from what they are today. However, the very concern about this issue seems to imply that if a stance such as indeterminacy is not new, it has a less value, which is to reduce it to a fashion. I think it's important not to get swept up into privileging novelty for its own sake. Indeterminacy, or open-ended meaning—generative meaning (meaning that continues to generate other meanings) —is an important avenue into thoughts and feelings, and it has, I think, all three elements—the aesthetic, the political, and the personal—though perhaps most strongly, the political, or rather, the social. It offers a way of acting upon language and its meaning-mechanisms to encourage a fluid thinking, to encourage an approach to language in which it doesn't limit thought, but instead opens it up. In general, our culture considers precise thinking to be good, and it certainly has its uses, but non-precise, unfixed thinking does as well, and can unleash the aesthetic potential in language.
Craig Dworkin: I think the characteristic you identify is actually a result of why I write poetry to begin with, which isn't really for me, and certainly isn't for the reader, but rather for Poetry—for Language itself. So I don't have any one reading to privilege or reject; I'm not trying to "communicate" any particular "message." But I do want to see what happens to a text under certain circumstances. With certain constraints or rules in place, what follows? What happens? And that's an open question, a question I'd only ask if I didn't already know the answer, so I'm happy with whatever answer—or answers—a reader (myself included) can discover.
As to the Barthes, I'm not sure about the legacy of that particular text for the current avant-garde; off the cuff, I would say that Barthes' essay—with its emphasis on the active, aestheticist reader, was more important for a generation that came of poetic age in the 70s, when it would have resonated with Umberto Eco's idea of the open text and various post-structural, post-'68 political ideas.
But your question raises an important point. I think it's a mistake to conflate the avant-garde with the new, or the anti-traditional (although both of those have obviously been a part of the rhetoric of certain avant-gardes). Instead, the key to the avant-garde seems to me to be much more about the freedom of choosing your own history, of making your own tradition, rather than just accepting the received canon. This is why choices about the contemporary resonate backwards in history: if you're interested in conceptual writing, then Marcel Duchamp, for instance, suddenly looks much more important to the canon than, say, Robert Frost. If you're interested in other kinds of poetry, the opposite might hold true, with Duchamp looking completely irrelevant.
Charles Bernstein:
AG: Much of your work suspends or refuses the privilege to any one reading.
CB: That's true of poetry generally, of poetry as a genre.
AG: Can you speak about this tendency against the exclusive, and whether or not this choice is aesthetic, political, personal or any combination of the three?
CB: I'd say it's more a condition of language than a choice. Though of course you can fight against the conditions of language all you like, or work with them, as I prefer to do.
Depending on the meaning of it.
The idea of meaning being "exclusive" strikes me as troubling on an aesthetic, political, and personal basis.
But then trouble is my business.
AG: This approach to writing/readership as an extension of Barthes’ concept of the “death of the author” has accumulated quite a history and tradition in its own right.
CB: It seems odd to me to attribute this "approach" (if that is what it is) to Roland Barthes but in Writing Degree Zero, a favorite book of mine, Barthes does make the distinction between the readerly text and the one you are gesturing toward in your questions, the writerly text.
The author dies. The author’s work is born.
AG: Some suggest, therefore, that it can no longer be considered avant-garde.
CB: I hope so. But then you'd have to explain why so much of what celebrates itself as official verse culture hasn’t gotten the news. Remember that scene in Rosemary's Baby in which Mia Farrow’s in the waiting room reading the issue of Time with Nietzche's "God is dead" on the cover?
News travels slowly in some sectors of the pluriverse.
AG: Speculate about whether or not this is so, or whether or not it is important.
CB:
This is so & so is this
But neither is important.
That is theirs
& near’s not here
But neither is important.
Never twill, never twine
Nor peep nor bleat nor pipe.
Neither’s important.
AG: How do you see the evolution of this “tradition” as it might be surfacing today?
CB: I'm plunging under the surface as an organized evasion procedure.
