The ‘secret’ of
Uncreative Writing, so far as Goldsmith is concerned, is that ‘the suppression
of self-expression is impossible’. (Goldsmith 2011: 9). This is offered as
though absorption in acts of poesis are as self-expressive as he thinks his
reader might expect other kinds of writing to be, though not in the same way.
‘The act of choosing and reframing tells us as much about ourselves as our story
about our mother’s cancer operation.’ (Goldsmith 2011: 9). But this plea to
self-expression (which he erroneously equates with acts of creativity) is
self-defeating. ‘The expressionist theory of art is empty,’ writes Karl Popper,
for the same reason that Goldsmith seems to valorise it: ‘For everything a man
or animal can do is … an expression of an internal state.’ (Popper 1976: 62) If
this is so then self-expression ‘is not a characteristic of art’. (Popper 1976:
62) For a formalist the quality of poesis must be the characteristic of art; in
other words what Goldsmith calls ‘the act of choosing and reframing’. Such an
act does not tell as story about ‘us’; it makes a form in the world of forms
and that is where the true humanity of creativity and uncreativity is to be located:
in the shaping acts of
homo faber.
(See all the links to my
The Meaning of Form project, including others relating to conceptual writing
here.)
Update September 2016: For those who can buy
The Meaning of Form in Contemporary
Innovative Poetry, or order it for libraries, here are the places
