I disliked these 3rd party reminders from the outside world, these supposedly impending contingencies. They impose without any alternative implications. It would seem an increasingly common reaction toward many poet's/artist's frustrations with such specific debates. It's not that what they say isn't true, but that its relevance is superficial: there are omitted, ignored and rejected factors in every debate, as a debate is defined by the examination of a confrontation taking place along specific boundaries of certain entities.
Highlights:
Flarf is Projective Verse. Conceptual Poetry is the
Conceptual Poetry is the new Language Poetry. Flarf is the new New York School. -Andy Dander
Conceptual poetry
is like saying
'hot heat'
flarf is more like
constructing the sound
of a human sneeze
out of dog barks. -Phaneronoemikon
From now on the collective formerly known as Flarf will be known as the Nonceptualists. - K. Silem Mohammad
Nonceptualist Manifesto Part I -K. Silem Mohammad
new movements like Conceptual Writing or Flarf are the correct responses for our time. If writing is not taking these new conditions into its poetics, it simply cannot be considered contemporary. -Kenneth Goldsmith
Now Even More!:
Are these really the kinds of fruitless (and suffocatingly ameri-centric) mappings you want us to engage in? -Brent Cunningham (to Ron Silliman)
- Angela G.
UPDATE EDIT:
OFFICIAL(esque):
Having some unseen impulse, Kasey Mohammad once again repositions the poetry formerly known as Flarf. Read the revisions: Nonceptualists Now Transceptualists. Related fields being Misceptualism/ Unceptualism/ Noceptualism/ Someceptualism/ Windsweptualism/ & Flarfing as a product of a Poetic('s) Disorder [to promote word loss].
9 comments:
Great highights.
-
I am neither a conceptualist, nor a
flarfist, nor a nonconceptualist;
but I am somewhat interested in them. I call my poetics an It Poetics. That is, the work in hand is more important than any--when there is any--preconceived notion about it.
Separately: Your blog is the first
one I've seen which keeps track of
when certain other blogs are updated.
Is that part of the new Blogger?
Brian,
I am also none of the above, or all of the above. Again, I'll echo my initial thought (hope) that the debates and efforts should be focused on practices as form, rather than identities. The naming of things is better left as posthumous work, unless there's some need for solidarity, political stance, or regional identification (none of which see evident/ present in these cases).
I remember I kind of Poetic Statement of on your blog not too long ago. Was that in regard to your It Poetics?
And yes, the update prioritized listings of my blog roll is a feature of the new Blogger.
Jeremy,
You may already know this,
but I just posted a post which
links to this post, and on it
I've included a link to my
rho0028 It Poetics post.
The new Blogger has some nice
features, but I'm going to stay
with what I have.
Alternative implication:
http://chax.org/eoagh/issue3/issuethree.html
Tim,
I appreciate the link & have begun to read. There is so much to read. Perhaps once I have read more I will have a better understanding of what this is. I understand the surface of the thing: to queer something, parallels between identity/ gender politics and GENRE politics (channeling Retallack, here). It seems a true alternative implication, but with true alternative baggage and consequences. My curiosity, however destructive, wants to read yet another manifesto, like: Queerasure Omissions or Opaqueer Contraductions.
Was over at KSM's today, and
he's changed "nonceptualism"
to "transceptualism" and no one
had yet questioned why.
I didn't either.
Thank, Brian. What with Transcepts running around look out for Drag Poetics.
!
Hi Jeremy,
I would think the editorial statements for the journal speak for themselves: the Foucault of the History of Sexuality versus the Foucault of Discipline and Punish, The simultaneous coalescing and dispersal of identity filtered through the idea of language being queer rather than just authors, the problem of the link between manifestos and heteronormativity in general.
Can my "MySpace Avant Garde Superwriting" (see clip bellow) function as an integrative bridge between Flarf dudes and Conceptuals? Can I hang out with any Los Angeles Flarfs or Conceptuals? How smart do you have to be?
Recent news paper article:
Los Angeles based artist Luke McGowan alleges to have hired fifty Chinese child laborers (mean age 12 yrs.), paying them a mere $2 each (a total of $100) to retype the entire oeuvre of United States poet Kenneth Goldsmith. Goldsmith, perhaps best known as editor of the online archive UbuWeb (http://ubu.com) and as host of a weekly radio show on New York City’s WFMU, is leader and spokesperson of a new literary movement he dubs “conceptual" or “uncreative" writing. In a recent piece for the Poetry Foundation, Goldsmith states that his version of conceptual writing “employs intentionally self and ego effacing tactics using uncreativity, unoriginality, illegibility, appropriation, plagiarism, fraud, theft, and falsification as its precepts; information management, word processing, databasing, and extreme process as its methodologies; and boredom, valuelessness, and nutritionlessness as its ethos." Goldsmith’s better-known works include such uncreative and nutritionless projects as the transcription of one entire issue of The New York Times (Day, 2003) and the transcription of a year’s worth of weather reports (The Weather, 2005).
In a recent interview, Luke McGowan, who describes himself as of the new generation of “post-conceptual" writers, has said that he prefers to “just cut-and-paste rather than transcribe all that shit." Indeed, McGowan’s Robo Ursonate, 2005, was contructed by way of simply cutting and pasting the score of Kurt Schwitters’ Ursonate (1932) and letting it rip on a commercial text-to-speech synthesis program. Among other projects, McGowan is known for his spoof on the OuLipo, OuMyPo (google it), a MySpace version of experimental constraint writing.
Of his latest project Uncreative Child Labor, McGowan explains: “It is disgusting what you can do with the internet and what the internet can do to writing. The older generation, for example the Language Poets, and their immediate descendants, including Kenny, are just too enmeshed in a poststructuralist version of academic formalism to combat the implicit bourgeois subjectivity of their webpages, blogs, and emails. I’m just saying that if you want to do something of radical political consequence, you have to say it with its opposite. I mean none of those guys would even add me as a friend on MySpace."
PS This is what happens when you're not totally into this stuff! I think Gary Sullivan thinks I'm stupid. Awkward! Re cognitivist poetics.
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