Kenny G. (a horrible paraphrasing that i have done)

12/16/11 7pm
Kenneth Goldsmith lecture @ the Poetry Foundation

In 1969 the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote, "The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more." I've come to embrace Huebler's ideas, though it might be retooled as "The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more."
-from Uncreative Writing, by Kenneth Goldsmith

on the institution
-occupying power of poetry
-social power of poetry
--poetry is normally marginalized - why doesn't poetry matter?
Goldsmith is asking for an "activist poetry"

with the example of Marcel Broodthaers as a model Goldsmith begins his talk about the power that poetry can use to critique institutions. he emphasized that context should be championed over content and that it should be self-reflexive (staples of conceptual art since Duchamp). these qualities may be found through insincerity and unreadability. here the example of Broodthaers can be used - as this piece (Broodthaers' first sculpture) is made of poetry books of his that he could not sell - and marked his transformation from a poet to an artist.

to further the critique, Goldsmith referenced ISSUE #1 (a large collection of poems that were generated by computer software, and then attributed to famous authors) and Vanessa Place's Factory Work (poems written by others but published under her name, and a nod to Warhol's "Factory"). through appropriation (which of course asks, "who is the author") both of these examples draw attention to how poems can challenge the structure from which they are born.

he then humbly mentioned that avant-guard work like this (which has almost no popular readership) needs to be supported by an institution - and would seem to undermine the whole premise of institutional critique. on the contrary, Goldsmith argues that poetry (an art) can critique and comment on the institution from within. he mentioned some art (Andrea Fraser, to name one) that did this, as well as his reading and suit from the White House Poetry Night (an event he was invited to - with no real strings attached. he was basically free to read/say whatever - sans anything "political"). evidently his suit was of the same style and made by the same people who made Obama's suit he wore that night (of course the pattern was different). he read two excerpts from other poems (one by Walt Whitman and the other by Hart Crane) and a bit from Traffic - all very non-tradition, but accepted in this setting non-the-less. for Goldsmith, he sees this place as a meeting of the everyday and the avant-guard - a place to straddle tradition, but still be radical - and to fuck with the institution in a way that it never notices.

he also mentioned that the occupy movement is a prime place for such activities. he sited a person in S.F. (i think) who brought a sign that read, "GUCCI, Do The Dishes". by Goldsmith's recanting, this person was booted out of the protest because she or he had broken the social contracts of the occupy movement. so, Goldsmith was able to enact his critique because he played by the rules of that institution, while the GUCCI sign carrying protester was excluded from the discussion because her or his message challenged language and social contracts directly. in an interesting twist, a quick google search for 'gucci do the dishes' comes up with this:

anywho, he ended his talk with saying that poetry should be used in other fields (law [Vanessa Place], science [Christian Bök], politics, etc) to drive and alter that field's discourse.
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in the Q&A he laid out his basic principle of "uncreative writing":
poetry is near 100 years behind visual art. this is because the visual arts were challenged by new technologies: the still and moving cameras. these technologies were able to do what artists had done for millennia, so they had to adapt. writing is facing this change now. "The internet revolutionized writing... Language will become mimetic"

*
i've since, and because of this, decided to put my piece, D, on my site. all the text in this piece is taken from Wikipedia.