The Debate Over Conceptual Poetics

So lately I have found myself talking a fair amount about conceptual poetics, which I had also blogged about in 2008 when I went to the Conceptual Poetics conference at the University of Arizona Poetry Center. I was talking with a friend of mine about Conceptual Poetics and Kenneth Goldsmith's appearance at the White House and on The Colbert Report.

Then, lo and behold, my friend Arthur Durkee writes about Goldsmith and Conceptual Poetics at his blog, Dragon Cave in response to an article written by Robert Archambeau on the Poetry Foundation website.

So, I am adding my two cents to the conversation.


I was at the Conceptual Poetics conference held at the U of Arizona poetry center in 2008. Craig Dworkin talked about a desire to link a literary movement to an artistic one, which hadn't been done I think, since Dada/Surrealism. Of course, it's a self-conscious, rather than an organic linking. But I think the desire behind it is a good one.

I agree that much of the techniques employed are very similar to ready-mades and to cut-up poetry, Flarf, etc. I doubt that most of the conference participants would identify exclusively as conceptual poets, except maybe for Dworkin and Goldsmith, although hearing Goldmsith's work at the White House, it was a bit more "artful" than what Goldsmith usually practices and advocates.

I think of conceptual poetics as trying to update and expand on Dadaist and post/modernist poetry practices. I think it is useful for discussion of what poetry is and is not. I use some of Goldsmith's writings in my community education classes, which generates a lot of heated debates because ultimately, people DO want poetry to be charming or beautiful or to help people make connections between seemingly unrelated objects and situations. Ironically, I find Goldsmith himself, in his writings, on television,and in person, to be quite charming and very thoughtful about what it is that he does. He just wrote a very thoughtful blog on the Poetry Foundation's blog, for example, on coming across some of Jackson Mac Low's book collection at a book dealer that was very poignant and thoughtful, despite the glibness of the title, The Burden of Artists' Crap.

Like Surrealist techniques, I find Conceptualist Poetics to be very good for maintaining a writing practice, which can lead to creativity just by forcing one to sit down and write anything. (Keep in mind that visual artists learn to copy as they are learning and developing their own style.) It is very useful for stimulating thought (since Goldsmith would be against the idea of stimulating "creativity."). It can be helpful getting people to believe that everyone can write poetry. (I used to have this debate with people at open mics who would claim everyone is a poet. Not everyone is a poet, anymore than everyone is a plumber, a doctor, an accountant, or a dancer. But everyone should write poetry, dance, be able to do math, and take care of their health.)

There is much that can be borrowed and learned from previous art and literary movements rather than treating them as if they are merely dead relics to be crammed into museums and looked at, rather than a living practice. There is value in updating our venerated avant-gardes then, which, if they have any value to offer, can and should be updated. It is a tenet of modernism to declare what came before you as dead and to proclaim yourself the new hot thing. This, ironically, is both what conceptual poetics is out to deny by denying any idea of creativity in process, and a stance which conceptual visual artists frequently embrace.

Notes from the conceptual poetics symposium

For those who might be interested, these are my notes from the Conceptual Poetics symposium in Tucson this past May. I'm not going to go into a lot of reformatting here, so hopefully this will all work out and be readable. And of course, these notes reflect my understanding, interests in, and interpretation of the weekend's events. But I post them in the hopes that they might be of interest to someone out there and that some of you might post some thoughts engendered by these discussions.

Cheers.

Notes from the conceptual poetics conference – Laura Winton fluffysingler@earthlink.net

Cole Swenson - as opposed to/against a poetry taken over by subject matter
Emphasis on the everyday at the expense of rhythm or other poetic aspects
Poetry/visual art ties
Rhythm, repetition, compositon

Craig Dworkin Reading:

Piece one:
From the 19th century grammar book How to Parse

Reading directly, very quickly, not slam, but quiet and fast, not meant to get every word, but maybe how rules and rules of grammar are absolute, rules of grammar might actually sound to student, to us as moderns, to those who throw out or reject or don’t adhere so much to traditional rules of grammar.

Piece two:
Sentences replaced with grammar elements rather than specific words.
Ex: pronoun noun comma adverb period. Etc.

Piece three:
Other piece: To publish the unpublishable week’s worth of subject lines from spam.

Piece four:
Used personality inventories to create poems. I am . . . etc. to create confessional/expressive poem

Piece five:
Using only the true/false answers and his occasional modifying comments to a quiz.
Note: I could take my Dante quiz and call it “How I Ended Up in the 8th Ring of Hell: with a nod to Craig Dworkin.”

Kenneth Goldsmith:

We shall reminisce about the time when human beings wrote poetry for other humans. (As opposed to themselves??)


Cole Swenson – Civil Disobedience/poetry
Tracie Morris:

Goffman – giving vs. giving off, in black poetics
Undermining typification
Phyllis Wheatley – negotiating neoclassical work w/ black aesthetic

Black “transgressive” speech – doubledness, double-consciousness, double-entendre

Ringshots – uttering of noises, use of codes
African linguistic traits interacting with everyday speech of American vernacular

Morphology of language
Uniquely African constructions

Standard American Vernacular is incorporating more and more of Africa and African speech patterns

Of corse, sampling = collage, per Duchamp, Hoch, etc. Found Art. Kenny Goldsmith in favor of appropriating, stealing, etc.


Missy Elliott—Minimalism, embellishment & futurism
Interesting clip from “The Rain”
Supa Dupa Fly

“bling” as a transgressive act


Saturday morning/pre-lunch roundtable

Jasper: -

Cognitive interruption
Beyond detournment, tqactics of situationists
Defamiliarization
Re-reading earlier works through the lens of conceptual poetics
Activist archivists – reframing works
Editorial aesthetics/poetics

How is the idea of poet/ry as solitary act/person complicated by new work, by conceptualism, by borrowing, pastiche, collage, found work, etc.

Conceptual Poetry as the ready-made. “It’s all already there. I just have to write it down.”

Beckett: Cascando (but also Krapp) “I turn the recorder on. I turn the recorder off.”

Irrelevance of “le mot juste”
My new style of strike out/parentheses= a hedge against “le mot juste”
Trying out/on different words, several simultaneous

Chance Operations

Duchamp – Art – Canned Chance
Cage – music
Judson /Cunningham – dance

Trying to cut out subjectivity. But there’s still a canned subjectivity – the subjectivity within the random/chance. Decisions be made. But is it subjectivity in terms of choices, or in terms of personal-ness, perspective, me-centered poems. Of course, choice is where the subject matter begins – setting up the parameters, the texts, the beginning and ending points, etc. Is there an unsubjective subjectivity?

My notes (already used??) Chance vs. emotion

Avant garde actually has a more democratic impulse than high modernism were we employ metaphors: x=y. (metaphorical mathematics). Where x and y are fixed, a cryptogram to be unlocked, footnotes to poetry, the need for cliff notes, a dictionary to be used side by side with the poem, the desire of vernacular/convessional poetry is the same as the desire of an avant garde, to put out surfaces, straightforward work of a way, but confessionalism still relies on a private set of meanings/references, but assumes that through commonality and sentiment the code can be unlocked.

Bok/Dworkin/Goldmsith –which one of them did the cryptogram poems, a parody of this idea of unlocking??

De-emphasis on meaning per se through choice/collage/found materials, etc. Attempt to unlock the cryptogram, meaning of high modernism, eliot, et al.

Charles Alexander

Social, political import of this work. Does it make it to activism?
Kenny Goldsmith: Sacred space of the poem for transgression.
Panelist: Can it be taken out from there?

Physical pleasures of poetry (see my notes from Friday night on pleasure and transgression.)

Tactile through speech act
I think it can be sexual too

Brian Reed:

Critic working on a book on visual/verbal links

Genres become confused over time
Derrida’s law of genre
My contention that genres become confused and under that weight, give birth to new genres, like the mixing of atoms that create new elements when mixed. Hydrogen and Oxygen combined make water, a new compound, rather than remaining discrete.


Christian Bok Presentation:

I. What is “intentional” in Conceptual Poetry?


Disarming literary mandate of self-expression
Anti-expression
Erase evidence of lyric style, the “normative” style
Suppression of subjective aspects

Oulipo
American Conceptualists like LeWitt

Kinds of manifestos (started to type meanifesto!), adherents, this is an avant garde, and one looking to an art-form, not simultaneous as with Dada, Beat, etc. but not merely homage or writing about, but taking up, just as Gysin said—we are not about 40 years after first burst of conceptualism, so maybe we are catching up—also in performance art, Judson Dance, etc

Poem as an art object.

II. What is expressible in conceptual poetics?

The I with a colon atop instead of a dot.
William tell, a novel. – the apple(s) on the head
Minimalist and conceptual. A world in an image. A story in a letter.


Contrasting to contemporary literary ctitics
The genius of the self
Convincingness of the poem, the lyric, the imagery
Poet’s mastery of self

Against criticism
Against workshop criteria

Death of the Author
Poetic despot
Trial of comprehension
Overthrow the unjust tyrant
In Barthes birth of the reader occasioned by death of the author

III. What is conceivable in conceptual literature?

Tyrant Writer
Victor Reader
Savior Letter

Lyrical style – cognitive aesthetics
Self-conscious and self-assertive simultaneously


Concepts of writing possible – according to Bok

Cognitive

+Intentionality
+Expressiveness

Autobiographic investigations
Author adopts Subjective Persona
Confessional
“Authentic” voice

Mannerist

+Intentionality
- Expressiveness
-
Self-conscious but not self-assertive

Ex: Oulipo
Automatic

- Intentionality
+Expressiveness

Still some self-assertion
Unwilled self-exhibit
Surrealistic – Schwitters to Breton to Ginsberg
Self speaking to self without thinking about self
Ir/nonrational
Aleatory

- Intentionality
- Expressiveness

Authors forfeit control
Dadaist – Tzara, Cage, Maclow


Poetics of a traffice report, its own internal grammar, poetics, lyric?


Bernstein: Saturday, 5/31

“Foolishness is its own reward” – line from poem
“from there to there is enough to blow up in anyone’s face.”

“Attack of the difficult poems”
“The answer is not in our technology but in our poetics.

Benjamin and the uncanny – Arcades project made up entirely of citations

Bernstein’s “Recantation” on poetry page
After Galileo
Therefore, is it forced?
Is it sincere?

Several mentions (typos = almost emotions, emanations, emntions . . . ) by Bernstein & Bok of “detourning” poems. J

Platonic idea – meaning as an ideal that exists outside of the social
Puritan ideal – that meaning should be available, accessible in the poem

“My quest has been to be a normal person, a self-help project toward normalcy. . . . When I become normal I will be a poet in the (normal) world.”

“Theory of Flawed Design”
--Lookup

Dea%r Fr~ien%d

Performed with all sounds, symbols, stops, & verbal struggles

“Poems (themselves) are less important than what they allow us to do in the pereceptual world.”

Progressivist model of replacement is flawed – go back and read things in a different way. How poetry exists within social space that it is written in.

“Singing/chanting ot newscasters to self.”
Poems/operas

“A pixilated man”



Panel discussion: (Friday evening???)

Dworkin:

Intellect rather than emotion
Is Conceptual Poetry the New American Poetry?
Having a “urinal” moment”
What constitutes such a speech act/provocation in this “post”-everything era?
Does Conceptual Poetry have a spiritual resonance?

Charles Bernstein:

Showed conceptual poem and talk (not reading poem) simultaneously
Seems somewhat similar to the Performance Writing people

Christian Bok:

Problem of “lethal” seriousness of the avant garde. The pleasure, play, jouissance is reserved for the poet rather than the reader/audience.

“post” = a gesture to newness in the avant garde, parallel to neo, which
is actually retro, revisiting of the old
Post = our impatience for transcendence
“More of the same, only worse”
Work is good when it creates provocation, more ideas, etc.

Tracie Morris:

Perloff: normativity of language experimentation
Meaning of sonic performance as a script
Replacing idea of consistent speaking position of an “I”

Bok:

Enigmatic bewilderment
Raise issues for as rather than reinforce what we already know – is this my comment or his???

Bernstein:

Difficulty
Invention
Innovation

Social/Cultural difficulty
Textures, ambiance (vs. the difficult of “high modernism”)
One person’s difficulty is another person’s pleasure


Final Panel – 5/31/08

Barbara Cole, Editor, Open Letter

Wystan Curnow:
Forms & History

Bernadette Myer

Gracia Capinha

Epistemicides
Who owns (the) language – paraphrase of moral/story in “official”languages
Poetry and art does matter
The fear of governments and dictatorships toward art proves that it matters, that it has power, can be dangerous
There is no language unless the emotional part of your brain works, according to neuroscience
Modernist project – enlargement of consciousness, non approved, yet to be proven, yet to be known, discovered

Thingness – object = repetition of market

Stephen Fredman

Appropriation in music, sampling
The mix
Creativity rests in how you recontextualize the work of others
Language poetry and its emphasis on discourse cut poetry’s ties to othr art forms
Subjectivity vs. emotion

Vanessa Place

Words as things
“transparent”
Words = what fills up mainstream boxes
Barthes & the evacuation of language/meaning
But language is also procedural
Responding to poems created by machines
“robopoems for a robofuture”
“bankruptcy of image & text”


Final & most heated conversation (did not document who started it, but was the final panelist) – why only 2 women writers in the Ubu Anthology of Conceptual Poetry???

Presented by someone who had done an informal survey of 50 women before the conference regarding their ideas/opinions/questions regarding conceptual poetics/

Some questioned her own “methodology”

Marjorie Perloff – impatient, suggested that not everyone needed to be included in every movement, that then we’d have to worry about why not enough latinos or African-americans, etc. and then having to weigh and watch every single thing.

Batted back and forth – why are we still asking this question in 2008 and why do we have to still ask this question in 2008

Some of the better and less combative comments included a suggestion that sometimes inclusion is a matter of definition. How you define something determines who is included.

My private note—interesting that the conference was at least ½ women and the presenters at least ½ women. Some noted this as a defense or corrective, rather than criticism, of the lack of women in the anthology. See how many of us are here now???

Another good discussion --- nature of something like Conceptual Poetics to grow out of small groups of people who form affinities, begin to define themselves and give name to what they’re doing. Indicated that Goldsmith/Bok/Dworkin constituted such a grouping.

Dworkin himself said that the online version was not meant to be “official” and representative (although some questioned that, given the “The” aspect of the title out on Ubuweb.) He said that there is a print edition planned that will likely be much more inclusive.

My private note: replication of Corso and others’ discussions of why women ignored in Beat anthologies and histories for 40 years (except for a couple who were unignorable like DiPrima). Aren’t all of these always the arguments? Question of definition seems the most pertinent. How you define the “movement”, the “artistic moment” without watering it down to include, but making sure the feelers are out to embrace those whose work does fit in, does have an affinity, etc.

Poetry and liberation

I'm at the conceptual poetics conference in Tucson right now and fled the panel discussion to type up the notes I've been accumulating all day, set off by work by Tracie Morris this morning. These will be more organized I think later, and I have some quotes to look up but I really wanted to put this out there for you all now.

Thoughts on Poetry and Liberation

I.

Thinking about African Americans and avant garde work, about the use of language in hip hop, which influences and infiltrates poetry slam, while at the same time poetry slam is my example of a highly reified form of performance poetry. Is African-american poetry inherently avant garde and experimental? The work has had a way of becoming normative but just as avant gardists themselves make their way into broader culture and no longer remain marginal, that is, not irrelevant, but a set of margin notes, corrections, editorials, on the mainstream, on what is "inside the box" or margins. The way that marginal work gets taken up in the mainstream is criticized as co-option, but the reality is that avant gardes are often about bringing about changes -- in consciousness, in acceptable art practices, in language, etc. So is it truly that the avant garde, and by extensino, that subcultures must constantly change to "stay ahead of" or outside of mainstream culture? to be sure, the danger of the mainstream in capitalist culture is that the mainstream carries with it commodification. And the mainstream also carries with it a tendency to reify, to take the new that it has found, and make it normative. Thus the danger here is that the freedom that the subculture has sought becomes lost and so the constant shifty or need to shift is the attempt of a subculture, avant garde, etc. to be constantly searching for freedom, for the ground of greedom, to maintain a stance, a space carved out.

It is not, as is often charged then, elitism, but rather the desire to stay outside the boundaries, under the radar, where freedom can be tried on, tried out. I believe that those on the margins, once they feel their own liberation, develop the best intentions and want to pioneer a freedom that can be shared with all, passed on to the masses. Breton believed that the liberation of the imagination, for example, was not merely for the poet, but for all, for actual social and revolutionary liberation. As Comte Lautremonte wrote--poetry must be made by all.

II.

John Lydon aka Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols said in The Filth and the Fury "I was never very good at violence. Words are my weapon." Richard Schechner once wrote about the fact that if the actual revolution he and others from the 60s spoke of, were to come, he, as a white academic, would be the first under attack and it would completely disrupt his life. Gil Scott-Heron wrote that "niggers are scared of revolution." The truth is that most of us are. most of us in the west have much to lose, even many of the poor and the working class have been led to believe and do believe that they have much to lose. In fact, they have the most to gain and to lose as they will be the front line, they will be the avant garde of suffering, of foreclosures, job losses, food on the table, money for basic pleasures like theatre and books and movies and cable television and a night out at a restaurant. Perhaps the Marxists who attacked surrealism were right in a way and that poets are armchair revolutionaries, comfortable revolutionaries, not willing to risk.

III.

But I don't think so.

IV.

We could argue, as Breton might suggest, that poets are truly the avant in the avant garde of society, the first line of the revolution, those who pave the way, create the consciousness, create the restlessness, the vision outside of the safety of the known, the mystical vision, if you will, that brought the Jews through the desert that makes the mystic survive the extreme asceticism needed to get to the next stage of their existence. Not to ask the ordinary person to sacrifice unnecessarily, but to create the consciousness that will allow them to move from away the devil that they at least know and toward something unknown of which we have given them a glimpse. How do we create this space for all outside/before reification/commodification. Perhaps we do not bring the avant garde, the margins to the center, but move everyone out of the center, where, as in Richard Schechner's Rasa Boxes acting technique, the center box remains largely empty, Shanta, which he says is both all and nothing. Moreover, maybe the center doesn't need to shift so much as we need to take everyone out of the center, to the margins where feeling exists where imagination flourishes.

V.

The avant garde has a democratic impulse, as opposed to what we call the High Modernism of Eliot et al, where we are taught that metaphors are virtually mathematical, constant, we only need to learn the language of poetry, which functions as a kind of cryptogram where one word or letter = another, an inside secret language of the educated, the need for cliff notes, cheat sheets, crib notes, a dictionary side by side with the poem. The desire of the vernaculr in poetry comes out in several ways. First in confessional poetry, which has a similar desire as the avant grade, to put things out on surfaces, present itself in a straightforward manner. But confessionalism still relies on private meanings, but assumes that through commonality and sentiment that the masses will be able to decode the work without their crib notes.

VI.

Kenneth Goldsmith here has talked about stealing/borrowing/appropriating in work and this of course, does give the lie to the idea of originality and newness that is so fetishized in the avant garde. Of course ready-mades and collages are not original or new per se. It is in the concept, in the re-vision that newness comes out. It is in the criminality/thievery that the newness of the avant garde can exist. If the tired old saw from Plato has any truth whatsoever that every poet is a thief, is every thief a(n) (avant garde) poet? Do we dare romanticize criminality in this day in this point in time? Yet do we note de facto romanticize the pirate, the renegade, the robin hood who liberates materials from the rich, the bourgeois, the masters, for those who need it or even just plain desire it? Is a ready made, a collage, a found poem, a "liberation" of materials for those who need it--materially, creatively--and for those who desire it, with the desire for liberation of all things at its core.

VII.

Why does stealing matter? Because things matter? I think it's because of the breakdown of relationships and trust. The center will always protect itself and its property. more police. more cameras. But we borrow, we try to stay out of the vision of the lens, we try to appropriate and liberate what will set us free--the machines that will open the chains, break down the fences, keep the margin safe.

VIII.

Probably more to come.

IX.

Please comment.