[Decayed Rhapsody]

So uh, I don't know if anyone into literature here gives a shit about this. What do y'all think of conceptual poetry? The guy who runs UbuWeb, Kenneth Goldsmith, is a fairly big player in this world and fashions himself the consummate plagiarist, "uncreative" writer.

Goldsmith's essay on Being Boring: http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/golds...th_boring.html

his works: http://www.ubu.com/contemp/goldsmith/

Bollocks or not? This doesn't really scratch my poetic itch that often, but I can see where some of these "writers" are coming from.

Christian Bok (who I dislike) defines it as this:

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.

[atsonicpark]

Well, just like most things "conceptual", I'm really excited about talking about it and reading about it, but when it comes down to actually, y'know, exploring the actual product of the concepts, it usually doesn't thrill me half as much.

But I think Mr. Goldsmith is a talented man, and thank GOD for his beautiful site.

[verme (prevaricator)]

i enjoy it somewhat. flarf as well.
the method itself is nothing new, but seems relevant in the extent of it's contemporaneity.

[Derek]

If you're attempting conceptual poetry then I'd assume you're more concerned with pushing some unexplored or sparse territory than creating something with cathartic resonance.