How to Produce Conceptual Writing
1. Have
a good idea, a good concept to carry forward. ‘Conceptual
writing is good only when the idea is good; often, the idea is much more
interesting than the resultant texts.’ (Goldsmith)
2. Work out a procedure.
3. Carry
out the procedure as systematically (even mechanically) as possible
4. Describe
in detail your concept and procedure for your ‘thinkership’. ‘You must insist that the procedure was well
articulated and accurately executed’, says Kenny G.
5. Don’t
worry about appropriating other texts. This plagiarism is in inverted commas.
It’s ‘plagiarism’ (I.e., it is a recognised strategy of the work.)
Here is a list of ideas you can adapt to your own purposes.
1.
Write down all your dreams and juxtapose with
somebody else’s account of dreams or dreaming (maybe a friend or from a book or
even Google the word ‘dream’ and collect language). (Peter Jaeger)
2.
Re-write a story or book or TV programme from
memory. (Emma Kay) Re-write with the thing in front of you. (One or two
exercises)
3.
Fill the syntax of one piece of writing with the
language of another. ‘In the beginning was the word’ becomes ‘In the airlock
was the alien.’
4.
Take the first page/sentence/word of a text and
combine with the second page/sentence/word of another text and so on... (Which
texts? Random or not?) (Joseph Kossuth)
5.
Take all news items on one day (or other text).
Re-arrange sentences alphabetically (Word can do that). Stop there or: use
another technique from this list to complicate it. (Leevi Lehto)
6.
List every book you see (and maybe the time you
see it). It’s a bibliography of contact. (Tan Lin)
7.
Amass every document about yourself or another
(school reports, dental records, anything that records YOU from the outside). Offer
the dossier.
8.
Secretly record a conversation. Transcribe it.
(Trisha Low: she recorded confession. Warhol: he called it a novel).
9.
Alphabetalise a text word by word (your own
perhaps? De-regulate yourself). (Rory Macbeth)
10. Use
a name and pick out words beginning with the letters in a text written by that
name. Damn Inn Colchester Kiss England Never
Scrooge and so on.
11. Each
word in a text must begin with the same letter sequence that concludes the
previous word. i.e, ‘last staff
affect ectomorph orphan’. (Donata Mancini).
12. Read
each page or paragraph or your diary/essay/short story in turn and write
something else, a detached commentary (Sheppard; that's the basic technique of Words Out of Time, see here and here).
13. Write
hundreds of sentences and re-order them by selective or random means.
(Manson/Sheppard; many prose texts, as in 12, but also throughout.)
14. Take
somebody else’s poem and write your name under it. (Stephen McLaughlin and Jim
Carpenter). Take somebody else’s book and put your name on it. Keep the title
and write a new blurb. (You’d need to explain this one: what happens if we read
Great Expectations as written by a
contemporary person in Ormskirk?) (Kent Johnson/Borges)
15. Translate
a text from a language you don’t understand: by sound (homophonic) or word
similarity, and any means you can contrive. (Zukofsky/Melnick)
16. Write
a text using the first and last sentences of every book you possess (or some
other useable batch). (Christof Migone) Or in the middles if you like (Antin)
Or make a ‘Cento’, a very old technique dating back to Roman times, making a
poem using the first lines of another poet’s works. (Hint: use the index of
first lines in a Collected Poems)
17. Anagram
texts. Use an online anagram machine to re-write a text line by line, phrase by
phrase, whatever unit you choose. See K. Silem Mohammad’s brilliant ‘Sonograms’ based on Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Compare with Philip Terry. Write
many texts with the same letters. (Betts)
18. Retype
a famous text ignoring chapter and paragraph divisions; or put on a blog bit by
bit, or use Twitter to narrate in 140 characters per day/hour/minute.
(Morris/Place)
19. List
everything you own, (Bernstein), every trade mark you see in one day (Nemerov)
20. Collect
personal ads and rearrange in terms of interest, time, etc.
21. Arrange all the names of people or places or
trademarks or other selected proper nouns, in a (famous?) text on the page
where they are approximately in the original. (Parasitic Ventures) Or just the
punctuation, or speech marks, whatever works.
22. A
list of everything you ate and/or drank over a day/week/month/year. Or some
other form of consumption. (Perec)
23. Take
lines on one subject from another not about that subject. (All the references
to music in a Rebus novel, all the descriptions of countryside in thriller, e.g.)
(Rosenfield/Cendrars) Use romance novels to write fake love poems. (Alatalo)
24. Use
Google to amass all the similar statements about one place (‘Afghanistan is great’)
(Shirinyan). Use Google to find texts to manipulate for many of the exercises
here.
25. A
text consisting entirely of questions: from sources, or made up or ones you
hear on the TV. (Silliman/Sheppard) Arrange the words of somebody notorious as
a poem: a killer, a dictator, a monster ...
26. Mash
up and sample as many different sources as you can. Assimilate and arrange.
(Stefans)
27. Combine
the statements of two very different people (like 26 above, only with a second
voice). (Sullivan)
28. Devise
as many conceptual experiments as you can think of. Don’t DO any of them: make
a list of them as the conceptual work itself.
29. Describe
an imaginary journey from where you are to the centre of the worst thing that
is happening on the news.
30. Replace
all the letters in a text (except say ‘t’) with ‘t’. Leave gaps where the t s
are.Now explain WHY you did this?
31. Write
a long story consisting entirely of paragraph quotations. (Abish)
32. Take
a technical or scientific text and extract things that sound ‘poetic’ and make
poems out of them. (Antin) Ignore your ignorance.
33. Replace
one word that repeats in a text. (e.g. A history book: replace ‘Hitler’ with
‘Dad’ or ‘Bertie Bunny’.)
34. Use
excerpts from interviews and attribute the Qs and As to other well-known
people. Did they really say that!? (Berrigan)
35. Pick
out the words from a famous text and make a new one (Bervin, Philips (cover of
Rothenberg-Joris)
36. Lipograms.
(Look it up: Bok’s Eunoia).
37. Employ
a private detective to follow you and publish the report. Follow a friend and do
it to them. (Or, maybe, better not.)
38. Make
sonnets (or whatever) out of a famous popular text. (Coolidge’s ‘Bond Sonnets’
from Bond, James Bond!)
39. Collect
slogans and catchlines from adverts at great length.
40. Collect
the life stories of other people with your name. (Google Whack yourself and
your others.) Who are you now?
41. Use
word lists to write poems (children’s language, foreign language learning
texts, etc)
42. Put
the results of any of these exercises into alphabetical order.
43. Write
out a novel but only repeat the sentences beginning with ‘I’ or a proper noun,
one of the characters. (Fitterman)
44. Take
out all the words beginning with ‘un’ – or find something better. (Goldman)
45. Record
every work you speak or Record every movement you make or every weather
forecast or traffic report you hear. (all Kenneth Goldsmith).
46. List
the remarks of somebody stupid. Arrange in stanzas.
47. CHEAT!
The names in brackets refer to originators of the concept groups, mostly drawn from Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing ed. Dworkin, C, and Goldsmith, K., Evanston: Northwestern Uni, 2011.) There is one reference to Rothenberg, Jerome, and Pierre Joris (eds.) (1998) Poems for the Millennium: Volume Two (
None of the above addresses the question of why one might write this way. My critical account of conceptual writing may be read here and here and here.
See my two most recent poetry books here and here.
