In defense of Christian Bok, I liked parts of his book Enuoia, which took considerable effort to write, I think. And, very much against what Goldsmith says in his manifesto, Bok's lipograms are crafted with readability in mind. He strikes me as more interesting. I have a harder time defending Goldsmith, partly because some of the generating mechanisms he uses are extremely generic and uninteresting, because it would not take an educated person any time to come up with dozens of ideas at least equally as "uncreative" and because I strongly suspect that they wouldn't get published whereas his--because of notoriety alone--will. The sociology of this sort of phenomenon is interesting but discomforting.

Pedro.

And that's just (part of) the morning of the first day!

Ed, if you want to sample some of Goldsmith's oeuvre, it's pretty well all available online. Just go to his Wikipedia page and follow the links under "Works." Soliloquy has some fancy coding that prevents you from seeing the continuous text unless you follow it with your mouse pointer, but you can get around that. Just press Ctrl+A, and the selection highlighting makes the continuous text visible.

The future of poetry. Enjoy!

Thank you, Stephen, for beginning to restore my equanimity. How far is it to 'Om' from 'Meh'?

Ed

Bill, I take it that this particular comment is directed primarily at me, given my response to your demand for 50-word statements of "poetics" from the participants here. I must say I'm intrigued--and rather amused--to learn that my thinking represents nothing more than "a remnant of both Neo-Platonist Christianity and Romanticism with a big R." (Would you care to elaborate?) But then, as I'm sure you must know from reading my workshop threads here, I'm in no way averse to discussing questions of "poetics" when they are relevant to the understanding of a poem--indeed, I'm sometimes accused of going on too much about them. (And incidentally, while we're on the subject . . . no, I don't think that I would "lose an argument about poetics or aesthetics to him [Goldsmith] in under five minutes flat," whether in an "embarrassing" way or any other (post #28). I wouldn't claim the reverse, of course--I've no way of knowing, really, never having met the guy--but I can see no reason whatsoever why I should unquestioningly accept your assumption on that score about myself . . . or anyone else here. Frankly, I'm at a loss as to why you should ever have said such a thing; it's just so much empty bluster, with the added defect of being demeaning towards Eratosphere's membership. Speak for yourself, Bill.)

So no, I don't believe that a poem is perforce a "detached object" that must be taken in isolation from anything anyone--and above all, its author--might have to say about it. At the same time, however, I see absolutely no contradiction between that recognition and the statement "My poetics is my practice as a poet." I could elaborate on that statement, of course, and I sometimes do, if only in an informal way, but that's neither here nor there. The point I was trying to make--obliquely, I confess; I'll make it explicitly now--is just that for the practicing poet, it's the practice that matters. If the "poetics" doesn't lead to a poetry worthy of the name, then it's just so much hot air.

Oh and Bill, by the way, we're still waiting for your statement of poetics here.

.

Hear, hear!

Nemo said (I have added the red boldface.)

Quote:

As far as the "non-producing artist", I am as uncomfortable with the phenomenon as others who I am disagreeing with up here. Yet the vast new world of virtual reality makes such a train of thought inevitable--and we ignore it at our peril. The fracturing of the world order that occurred during WWI led to a parallel refraction in the arts, a huge disruption with what had come before. The era when this so-named conceptualism first took hold of theory was another era of cultural shift, the 1960's. Our present technological revolution likewise seems bound to come with its own violent rifts, no? Art does not exist in a vacuum.

Despite the various sobriquets of shallowness and smugness hurled and despite the reasons for dissent herein fabricated and attributed to dissenters who don't regard KG and his ilk as vanguard artists, I am trying to understand your line of reasoning. I also am trying to figure out why you continue to hold up this dead horse if "are uncomfortable with the phenomenon".

In fairness, I could imagine ways in which conceptual art might serve a purpose but I don't see it being used as anything other than a gigantic fart emitted so the perpetrator can feel better and attract attention.

Suppose, just suppose, that instead of a book of weather reports that isn't intended to be read, the book consisted of excerpts of say,
This is taken completely at random and without analytic thought of how it might be juxtaposed to best effect. Still, I daresay that it is more purposeful and more artistic than a transcribed recording of what KG has said during one week.

There is a reason we have language. Language is not junk.

He doesn't mean beyond his topic sentence.

Actually, Bill did post something like that a while ago, in a thread that mentioned a poem in Now Culture, where they seem to encourage (or require) one to make such a statement:

From Now Culture:

ars poetica
Never make stuff up. Seriously: Never make stuff up. I don't care about the imagination. Look around, at the actual, and try to see clearly. There's plenty of meaning and mystery in what's at hand. Go outside and walk around. Do things. Tell me what happens. A good poem lets us live in the poet's mind for a few moments. It's not 'about' anything, except it's about being a human being, at one exact moment, in one particular place. That's the beauty and mystery of it. It should make us want to live there. That's what happened with "Letter to Susan." I looked outside, and wrote down exactly what I saw.

We walk around, most of the time, not seeing anything, our minds blank, or filled with constant chatter. And yet, every once in a while, we have a transformative experience. Something changes our lives. "I fell in love with her at 1:52 pm. It was a Friday." What did you see at exactly that moment? What did you literally feel? Can I become you for just those two minutes?

Let's forget theory for a moment, and be painfully honest: through her, I have had an experience of something beyond time and space, something infinite and eternal. It changed everything I knew. Now, every poem I write is an attempt to do for the reader what she has done for me. My only goal since then is to write a poem which gives the reader a place to dwell, where the reader may have that same experience. I don't blame people for not believing me. I wouldn't have believed it myself. But I'll keep trying. Remember: I don't make stuff up.

http://nowculture.com/thorns/lantry.htm

I remember because at the time it seemed such a strange, intriguing thing to say, and because I thought it was brave to say it. Or 'post-brave,' perhaps: past the point of bravery. When I look at this singular vision, which really has created wonderful poetry, I don't know how, and I look at Kenneth Goldsmith -- well, it must be a very big sandbox, indeed.

Best,

Ed

What fun! A giddy, nominalist romp – art, because “the artist” says it is.

I can't prove it's not.

So I don’t piss on MoMA’s galleries. But if I owned a Rodin, I wouldn’t put it by the bidet.

I'm probably going to be sorry I got into this. But having gone on record (in TNB) as saying I wanted to try to state a poetics, I now think I have to add that I've found it very hard.

First, doesn't your poetics have to take in more than your own poetic practice? Doesn't it also have to describe what you think works in other poetry? I think it does. I think that's why this thread started; some people looked at a species of poetry and said, Uh, no.

Second, so many statements of poetics seem to rule out some other kind of poetry that I find effective--at least sometimes. Will all respect to Bill, "never make stuff up" rules out way too much other poetry for me, however well it works to produce his poems. Can we imagine Maz living by "Never make stuff up"? Some poets insist that all poems have got to have multiple layers. I'm not persuaded; I think lots of one-layer expository poetry works just fine. Some poets seethe at "prose chopped into short lines," but occasionally there's a piece like this that I find effective. No matter what doctrinaire statement is made, I seem to find exceptions. I grow hesitant to rule out too much; I'd just like to understand it better.

Third, as many times as I've said "I like poetry that does thus and so," I've found books of poems that seem to satisfy all my requirements but that I still don't find satisfying. I happen to be wrestling with one just now. If this happens, obviously the statement of criteria was inadequate.

Fourth, for most of us here it might be too soon to nail ourselves down. I can't find it now, but some time back I once found a personal web page for Amit Majmudar. There was a statement on it to the effect that the poems were all being replaced because the author found that he kept reinventing himself as a poet. If a statement of poetics cut off that process of reinvention, it might not be a good thing.

I'm not equipped to see any value in the KG approach. I've always believe poets should be "makers," and the KG approach is just finding. But I also know there are holes in my theories.

Simply by talking about KG, though, we're probably producing the value he most wants: attention. That's why I think my response to it should be silence.