Vanessa Place says: ‘Form doesn’t
matter.’ I am writing a critical book that suggests that form
does matter, that poetry (including the
best of conceptual writing) is the investigation of complex contemporary
realities through the means (meanings) of form. The pun upon ‘means’ is
intended to enact the supposition that if poetry does anything it does it
chiefly through its formal power and less through its content, though it also carries
the further suggestion that form is a form of meaning in its own right, that
form is matter. But then ‘Content doesn’t matter,’ she says (missing the pun
she could have used: ‘subject matter doesn’t matter’, or, even better, ‘matter
doesn’t matter’). Perhaps form and content shouldn’t complain too much because
she also says, ironically speaking for herself: ‘Authorship doesn’t matter,’ a
specialised truism (by which I mean this is true in a specialised sense) ever since
Roland Barthes and the theory of the death of the author. Just to complete, she
adds: ‘meter doesn’t matter’. (This would logically follow from the dismissal
of form.) The statement has form itself, of course, but that doesn’t matter;
form is disavowed in a formal litany: ‘Authorship doesn’t matter. Content
doesn’t matter. Form doesn’t matter. Meter doesn’t matter.’ She adds: ‘All that
matters is the trace of poetry.’ It is interesting to see the word ‘poetry’.
(Goldsmith makes the same point about Christian Bök continuing to use the word
‘poem’ for quite unusual ‘writings’ when, as I’ve noted elsewhere, Caroline
Bergvall shies away from both words, although she allows herself to think of
her scriptural practice as ‘poetic’.)
What, from my
point of view, could the ‘trace’ of poetry be
but its formal (and therefore material) markings?
‘Put another
way, I am a mouthpiece,’ says Place, thus bringing the statement back to her
opening gambit about authorship. This is a description of Roland Barthes’ ‘scriptor’,
assembling texts from fragments of other writings, a situation literalized by recent conceptual
writing, but here adapted to an oral/aural metaphor, in a way that is also reminiscent
of centuries-long theories of inspiration (like the ones analysed in Jed
Rasula’s marvellous Modernism and Poetic
Inspiration (2009)) : ‘I am a mouthpiece.’ To re-cap, and to
re-form (and to prove, as Veronica Forrest-Thomson did years ago in Poetic Artifice, that ‘mere’ poetic
lineation effects a formal transformation of prose content, even when that
content attempts to un-ironically say ‘Form doesn’t matter’):
Authorship doesn’t matter.
Content doesn’t matter.
Form doesn’t matter.
Meter doesn’t matter.
All that matters is
The trace of poetry.
Put another way,
I am a mouthpiece.
‘From the Greek Muse to modern cybernetics
– from divine infusion and mediumistic spell to noise-free channels and optimal
bandwidth – poets have identified strategies to gain access to some enabling
prompter,’ Rasula argues, that will render the poet a ‘mouthpiece’, somewhat
lacking in agency but full of awe. (Rasula 2009: 2) It is possible to see the
self-confessed ‘cyberutopianism’ of
Kenneth Goldsmith in this light. (Goldsmith
2011: 226-27) So can his assertion that perspiration replaces inspiration in
recipe-art, and the insistence of conceptual writing on ‘appropriation’.
‘Appropriation’ is what I take being a ‘mouthpiece’ implies (despite the switch
from active perspiring agent to open conduit), specifically in Place’s usage: her
Statement of Facts consists of appropriated
statements of the ‘facts’ of sexual assaults, collected unedited from her work
as an appellate criminal defence attorney. (See a video of her reading this work
here.) Conceptual writing and appropriation,
Goldsmith argues, are the cures for writer’s block or, more positively, they are
the supreme ‘enabling prompter’, the postmodern Muse. Taking a lead from the
seminal conceptual art practice of Sol LeWitt and Yoko Ono, he instructs us: ‘There’s
a well-honed tradition of adopting mechanical, process-based methods that help
make the decisions… Scores of artists swapped perspiration for procedure, thus
expiating the struggle to create.’ (Goldsmith 2011: 128) Uncreative writing,
quite precisely. Similarly, ‘In a time when the amount of language is rising
exponentially, combined with greater access to the tools with which to manage,
manipulate, and massage those words, appropriation is bound to become just
another tool in the writers’ toolbox, an acceptable – and accepted – way of
constructing a work of literature, even for more traditionally oriented
writers.’ (Goldsmith 2011: 124) (Surely many of us have done that for years?) This
is an interesting remark about conceptual writing because it implies that it is
not an avant-garde, that it is already assimilated into the mainstream (can you
imagine Bruce Andrews reading at The White House?) and is popular, populist and
democratic. Goldsmith says as much: he calls Robert Fitterman’s inventory of
trade marks, the list poem ‘Directory’, one of the ‘truly
populist expressions: what could be easier to understand than a
list of mall stores, reflecting most American’s daily commutes past and common
interactions with our endless malls’. (Goldsmith 2011; 100)
‘Unoriginal
geniuses’ (Perloff’s term and book title) write ‘uncreative writing’
(Goldsmith’s term for conceptual writing and book title). Goldsmith, the most
flamboyant member of this grouping, is involved in pedagogy, the teaching of
these forms, which are antagonistic to the emphasis upon good form, pattern,
meaning and convention in straight ‘creative writing’, with its supposed
emphasis upon originality and craft. These New Critical terms are prevalent in
Creative Writing teaching, but by no means as widely-distributed as he assumes
(certainly not in my teaching). Such
values do not matter to Goldsmith: instead of asking his students to write a
story in the style of Jack Kerouac he instructs them to write out (word for
word) a Kerouac piece and to ask them to describe the effects of the process
(from cramp in the hand to noticing certain patterns in the language).
Obligingly, one British writer, Simon Morris, has blogged the book page by page
(which, of course, appears in reverse order in blog formatting at
www.gettinginsidejackkerouacshead.blogspot.com) but Goldsmith’s prime exemplar of
book-based conceptual writing is his own Day,
a 700 page writing out of an edition of the New York Times, with no images and no change of type-size for
headlines or adverts. The result feels
like a weighty masterpiece and is weirdly fascinating in parts (the forgotten
main news or human interest stories) as well as deeply and deliberately boring
in others (pages of stock exchange statistics). The pagination often dissects
stories and fragments the reading experience in ways we do not notice reading a
newspaper, either passing on to a contiguous story (if uninterested) or turning
to the continuation page (if motivated enough). In its mechanical way, it is not
unlike Joyce’s Ulysses, a detailed panoramic
presentation of one day, a much better analogy I think than the common one of
Benjamin’s Arcades project. Goldsmith says the reader does
not have to read his books because the concept in conceptual writing is often
more important than the result, though it has to be a good concept. Garbage in:
garbage out, as early computer engineers used to say (a phrase oddly Goldsmith
never uses). Against Expression: An
Anthology of Conceptual Writing, which he edited with Craig Dworkin, operates like a textbook for new
writers and its formal experiments include re-writing texts (last night’s TV or
The Bible) from memory; taking the first page/sentence/word of one text and
joining it to the first of another, and so on; taking a text and re-arranging
all the sentences (or the words, or even all the letters) alphabetically or
through some other arbitrary formal principle; listing every
book/possession/trade-mark you own or see; recording every word you (or somebody
else) utters for a set period of time; amassing every document about you
(official and private) to compose a re-formed self-portrait.
The readership of
such a work becomes a ‘thinkership’, admiring the work’s conceptual acuity, conceptual
forms, rather than literary skills. The ultimate in appropriative text is
straight plagiarism or self-quotation. Plundertextualities of various kinds
underwrite most of these patchwriting experiments. However, the irony for me is
how quickly conceptual writing has taken hold of the avant-garde imagination
and then infiltrated the mainstream (when Goldsmith read at the White House he wowed
the audience with his rendition of appropriated traffic news broadcasts), in
other words: how rapidly forms of uncreative writing have become exercises in
creative writing (although Goldsmith allows for that, as I show above).
Is it true that we do not need
to read these works (although Goldsmith only speaks of his own)? Perloff knows
that we should not necessarily trust poetics as a speculative writerly
discourse, partly because it is speculative and partly because it can be
obfuscating, deliberately so, for the author, necessary to keep him or her active.
She writes boldly: ‘Nothing but an actual reading of the text can clarify the
questions of choice and chance that arise here and elsewhere’ as a preface to a
detailed close reading of Traffic. She
‘puts aside … Goldsmith’s insistence that his books are “unreadable”’. (Perloff 2010: 149) This is one model
to follow in the reading of this work.1
‘Questions of
choice and chance’ must, at some level, be formal issues, but much of the
poetics of conceptual writing deals with its content (even though Place, who
perhaps should be overruled in the same fashion Perloff overruled Goldsmith,
says ‘content doesn’t matter’). Call it data, information, verbiage, it is
still the materiality of its offering forth. Goldsmith writes of ‘younger
writers … boldly appropriating the works of others without citation, disposing of the artful and seamless integrating
of … patchwriting. For them, the act of writing is literally moving language
from one place to another, boldly proclaiming that context is the new content.’ (Goldsmith 2011: 3) Even the most New
Historicist-baiting formalist would not deny the role of context in determining
the reception and thus the meaning of a statement, but if context is the new
content, what is the new form? I do not think the answer lies simply in
technology. Goldsmith continues: ‘While pastiche and collage have long been
part and parcel of writing, with the rise of the Internet, plagiaristic
intensity has been raised to extreme levels.’ (Goldsmith 2011: 3) This is true
but is merely expressed in terms of appropriating content more rapidly.
The transformative potentiality of
technology might be more important; in other words, its formal implications. When
Goldsmith notes, ‘The Flarf Collective has been intentionally scouring Google
for the worst results and reframing
it as poetry’ the results may not be important (‘Content doesn’t matter’) but
the reframing, the formal re-functioning of the content, whether by ‘choice or
chance’, whether by using a robotic ‘data-mining program that combs social
networking sites’ like Darren Wershler’s and Bill Kennedy’s Status Update, or by more consciously
Google-sculpting (as the recent Flarf term has it), transformation is the issue
for me, my study, and my writing, creative or other-wise. (Goldsmith 2011: 185)
Importantly, for Goldsmith, it is reframed ‘as poetry’. Formal concerns are
central to conceptual works (though that may be its ‘repressed’ that has yet to
‘return’). I am tempted to say that ‘All that matters is the trace of poetry,’
so long as we realise that the trace of poetry is formal (and recognise the
interinanimation of form and content, perhaps even more pronounced with
technological sophistication at the heart of much, though not all, of this
poesis).
Once the role of transformation is
established, questions can be asked of conceptual writing that are formal in
nature but also pertain to its literary value (I’m daring to use that
unfashionable phrase). ‘An actual reading of the text can clarify the questions
of choice and chance that arise here and elsewhere,’ as Perloff says, one that
might ascertain whether the text transforms its materials (which it can achieve
by simply re-framing, by simple presentation, as well as by sophisticated
formal manipulations). ‘What could be easier to understand than a list of mall
stores, reflecting most American’s daily commutes past and common interactions
with our endless malls,’ asks Goldsmith. But – and this is an open question of
Fitterman’s work, which I have only seen in excerpt in Goldsmith’s book – can
it transform itself formally (it’s formally a list), perhaps even to the point
where it might be able to pose non-formal questions (form is cognitive after
all, not just a container): why there are endless malls, why are the American
people on their daily commutes? It must offer resistance through its form. As
Adorno said: ‘Form that has become reified with regard to its other is no
longer form.’ (Adorno 1997: 220) And forms tend to be difficult, not easy, to
understand.
One section of my recent (poetics journal-sculpted) ‘Eight Notes’ (a part
of Unfinish, a work in progress)
runs:
‘While the conceptualists plagiarise other people’s content, I plagiarise
their forms,’ he said again, quoting his allegedly fictional poet. The
interruption of abstractions and their real violence. ‘Something has to be formed
and transformed or a concept stays the same,’ he said, for himself.
That’s the thought (and the irony)
I’m aiming for here. It’s interesting that it’s better said in poetics. But it must be proven (elsewhere) as analysis.
By the way, the allegedly fictional poet was called Plunderhead.
Kenneth Goldsmith reads Traffic at The White House
here
1. It is also a resistance to its poetics which threatens,
in the ultimate triumph of poetics as a discourse, and its limit case, to be
more important than the art works themselves. This is an obvious success for
poetics because it elevates a supplementary or at least complementary discourse
to primary position. It elevates the concept over the performance, of course, as
in Sol LeWitt’s famous: ‘Ideas can be works of art… All ideas need not be made
physical.’ (Goldsmith 2011: 132) In a sense poetics becomes the work of art,
but poetics may lose its potential as a speculative discourse, which is what I
value it for. By becoming the work, it is its own poetics, reified, fixed,
unchanging. However, this is not the main thrust of what I am saying here but
an important aspect of conceptual writing, one I would pursue if were (still)
writing a book about poetics. See chapters concerning poetics in my
When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry; my
‘Poetics as Conjecture and
Provocation: an inaugural lecture delivered on 13 March 2007 at Edge Hill
University’,
New
Writing. Vol 5: 1 (2008): 3-26; and
my
blogzine
Pages (
www.robertsheppard.blogspot.com),
which carries a serial catalogue of poetics under the title ‘The History of
Poetics’, posted August- November 2009. Self-expression would be another issue.
But form is my theme.
There is a continuation of this post
here.
There is also a long footnote to this piece about the function of self-expression in conceptual writing
here. Only a few of the hundreds of people who read this piece find that one.
And
here you can see all the links to my posts relating to my
The Meaning of Form project.
You can read about my own recent poetry here and here, and follow the links to points of online purchase.
I also offer advice on 'How to Produce Conceptual Writing'
here.
And now here's Kenny G in
Playboy. 'When I'm bored,' he says, 'I tickle the social media machine in order to make it wiggle.'
Works Cited
Perloff, Marjorie. Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in
the New Century. Chicago and London: University
of Chicago Press, 2010.
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
