[Janice D. Soderling]

Janice asked and I agree with her:

Am I the only one who thinks that this discussion has veered from critique of conceptual writing (a.k.a. uncreative writing) into the shadow world of gobbledygook?

Broadly, the thread has ceased to be a productive discourse, assuming it ever was, and now is doing what conceptual writing does best, self-aggrandizement.

Mary, best of luck with your sub to Poetry. That market may be cornered.

[Stephen Collington]

Originally Posted by Janice D. Soderling

Broadly, the thread has ceased to be a productive discourse, assuming it ever was, and now is doing what conceptual writing does best, self-aggrandizement.

Only when you sign it, Janice, and call it art.

[Orwn Acra]

I've come back late to say that I actually like some of Kenneth Goldsmith's work. As I said in another thread, Traffic gives off a nostalgic warmth because of all the times I fell asleep listening to traffic reports and talk radio in my dad's car, and Day is just a real Ulysses. Like any form of art, not all of it is going to be good. Shopping lists as poetry? The idea isn't interesting enough to be a successful conceptual piece. But Goldsmith occasionally gets it right, and the results are worthy of study and thought and deserve to be read. Plus, Goldsmith runs Ubu, a wonderful, wonderful archive of modernist and avant-garde art. Sure, he loves the notoriety, but he's also genuinely interested in the history of poetry.

That said, I lost a little bit of respect for Goldsmith when rumors surfaced that the newspaper that supplied the body of Day was run through a scanner, so that he didn't have to type out the entire paper. Machine production (a la Warhol) is nothing new in art, but it makes me question how much time I should spend with Day if the author couldn't be bothered to do so (and it's why I wonder if Goldsmith is truly being tongue-in-cheek when he says there's no reason to buy his books).

[Stephen Collington]

Originally Posted by W.F. Lantry

La Fontaine gets credit for "by the work, one knows the workman," but it's a much older idea. It's in Matthew 7:16 and Luke 6:44, and many other places besides. But there are a few problems with "by their fruit, you shall know them."

The first one is the separation of product and process. That may be fine for scholars and critics, but for practitioners it may be both troublesome and unhelpful. Worse is the problem of impression: if we bite into the apple, we have certain sensations: sweetness, texture, etc. We're not actually thinking about the apple at all, but rather our experience, what we make of it. In other words, by that point, we've slipped all the way from La Fontaine's fables to reader response theory, in three easy steps.

Odd. First comes the objection that "[the] idea that we can see everything in the practice" is a retrograde, risible and reactionary one ("O'Hara was making fun of that one in the 50's"). Then, hot on its heels, comes the observation that "the separation of product and process . . . may be fine for scholars and critics, but for practitioners . . . may be both troublesome and unhelpful." But frankly, unless you're confounding "practice" and "product" to the exclusion of "process," it's hard to see how that latter formulation can be taken to contradict the statement that (to generalize from my personal formulation) a poet's poetics is his or her practice as a poet. The process is the practice, and the practice is the product. I make something, and while I am making it, I am making it, and when it is made, it is made. You're finding distinctions, Bill, where none are necessary, or intended.

As for the notion of "by the work, one knows the workman," I confess I fail to see the relevance of its age to its truth value--or if you prefer (since "truth value" is a little question-begging here) to its relevance and usefulness as a rule-of-thumb formula for interpreting experience. And if your citing of the gospels is by way of trying to show that the idea is somehow beholden to "Neo-Platonic Christianity" (and therefore illegitimate?), I'm not sure what basis you have for assuming that it is indeed original, or unique, to that context. Frankly, I rather suspect that the idea is as old as the day the first caveman said he could make a better hand axe than Grog could, and then proceeded to expand on his Theory of Conceptual Poelithics while Grog quietly knapped away in the background. ("Okay, now let's see which one cuts wood . . . ") It's really not that complex--or unusual--an idea. And as for the rest, even at a stretch I don't see the connection between La Fontaine and "Romanticism with a big R" . . . though I may be misreading you there. Is there another source forthcoming?

Finally, on the Apple-of-my-Iser stuff, you've lost me, Bill. If your point is that we have no access to things in themselves--only our sense impressions "of" them--well, that's hardly news. The World is my Idea, and all that. But so what? Unless you want to make a case for solipsism, you have to live with the fact that there is indeed such a thing as intersubjective experience, and that "the thing" (das Ding!) thus experienced, for all that we never have immediate access to it, nonetheless exists as an irreducible datum at the centre of that experience. So yes, the product--the publicly shared end of practice--does matter. But that's no objection to saying that poetics is the practice of the poet in the poetry.

Incidentally, I'm glad Ed posted your "ars poetica" from Now Culture. It's a fine statement, "brave" as Ed puts it (I agree, in the most positive way), and human, and oh-so-refreshingly unlike the naked cynicism of Goldsmith's "anti-expressionist" line:

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.

Poetry as communication, poetry as communion. Amen.

[John Whitworth]

Here is my last shopping list:

Gin
Tonic
McVitties Chocolate Digestive Biscuits

[Janice D. Soderling]

Steve said:
Only when you sign it, Janice, and call it art.

Fair enough.

I guess this new upsurge is what is known as the second breath.

[Michael Cantor]

Where does Goldsmith normally publish? Maybe, if and when the thread runs its course, I'll print it out, intersperse it with a few shopping lists and some pages from Malraux's Les Voix du Silence (in French - one of my oldest, favorite and most pretentious unread books), and submit it.

[Ed Shacklee]

Originally Posted by Orwn Acra

I've come back late to say that I actually like some of Kenneth Goldsmith's work. As I said in another thread, Traffic gives off a nostalgic warmth because of all the times I fell asleep listening to traffic reports and talk radio in my dad's car, and Day is just a real Ulysses. Like any form of art, not all of it is going to be good. Shopping lists as poetry? The idea isn't interesting enough to be a successful conceptual piece. But Goldsmith occasionally gets it right, and the results are worthy of study and thought and deserve to be read. Plus, Goldsmith runs Ubu, a wonderful, wonderful archive of modernist and avant-garde art. Sure, he loves the notoriety, but he's also genuinely interested in the history of poetry.

That said, I lost a little bit of respect for Goldsmith when rumors surfaced that the newspaper that supplied the body of Day was run through a scanner, so that he didn't have to type out the entire paper. Machine production (a la Warhol) is nothing new in art, but it makes me question how much time I should spend with Day if the author couldn't be bothered to do so (and it's why I wonder if Goldsmith is truly being tongue-in-cheek when he says there's no reason to buy his books).

Shopping lists and scanned newspaper clippings may have beauty in them, the way that land might have gold in it whether it is mined or not, and flowers on it whether we look at them or not. There's poetry in everything, in that sense, anyway. If I looked up at the passing clouds, I expect I'd see a horsie or a castle after a while, and there's something pleasant about conversations that fade in and out at a diner or on the beach.

There's beauty in every morning and in any rooster crowing, but the sun doesn't come up because of that, and poetry isn't made by standing there taking credit for random beauty moved just a hair sideways. When kids find things like that, it's delightful; and when Lily Tomlin plays Edith Ann, she's funny; but seeking praise, plunder and publicity for random discoveries takes the inner child out of it. In concept, at least. So, from my part of the peanut gallery, 'Meh.'

Best,

Ed

[Mary Meriam]

Originally Posted by John Whitworth

Here is my last shopping list:

Gin
Tonic
McVitties Chocolate Digestive Biscuits

I think you've got something quite interesting there, Whitty.

PS to Ed a few posts back: LOL!

[Lance Levens]

When did we lose the willingness to call BS BS? The person in that interview is lost to himself and to engagiert writers everywhere. Whitworth is correct, though I would choose drawing and quartering. That Cage, DuChamps and other "fartistes" of their ilk make their all too predictable appearances in coffee table art history books merely makes it unmistakably clear how imprisoned by foppish fads the publishers of coffee table art books are. DuChamps is no role model. O'Connor, Dickinson, Dante, Lorca, Mandelstam, Brecht--those are role models. Blood and bones on the line. Or are we just cowards?