Conceptual Writing demonstrate a remarkable variety of new ways of thinking about the nature of texts, information, and art, using found, appropriated, and randomly generated texts to explore the possibilites of non-expressive language. The best thing about conceptual poetry is that it doesn't need to be read

Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing, Craig Dworkin and, Kenneth Goldsmith, eds., Northwestern University Press, 2011.


"Against Expression is the premier anthology of conceptual writing, charting a trajectory of the conceptual aesthetic from early precursors such as Samuel Beckett and Marcel Duchamp through major avant-garde groups of the past century, including Dada, Oulipo, Fluxus, and language poetry, to name just a few. The works of more than a hundred writers from Aasprong to Zykov demonstrate a remarkable variety of new ways of thinking about the nature of texts, information, and art, using found, appropriated, and randomly generated texts to explore the possibilites of non-expressive language."

"The best thing about conceptual poetry is that it doesn't need to be read. You don't have to read it. As a matter of fact, you can write books, and you don't even have to read them. My books, for example, are unreadable. All you need to know is the concept behind them." - Kenneth Goldsmith

"Conceptual art’s willingness to distance the artist from the manufacture of the artwork and to discount traditional valuations of originality is another vantage from which to compare contemporary writing with its art world precedents. Precedent is itself a key factor in assessing creative originality. In this case, attempting the most uncreative repetition ultimately disproves the possibility of a truly uncreative repetition." - Craig Dworkin

"In much the same way that photography forced painting to move in new directions, the advent of the World Wide Web, with its proliferation of easily transferable and manipulated text, forces us to think about writing, creativity, and the materiality of language in new ways. In Against Expression, editors Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith present the most innovative works responding to the challenges posed by these developments. Charles Bernstein has described conceptual poetry as "poetry pregnant with thought." Against Expression, the premier anthology of conceptual writing, presents work that is by turns thoughtful, funny, provocative, and disturbing. Dworkin and Goldsmith, two of the leading spokespersons and practitioners of conceptual writing, chart the trajectory of the conceptual aesthetic from early precursors including Samuel Beckett and Marcel Duchamp to the most prominent of today's writers. Nearly all of the major avant-garde groups of the past century are represented here, including Dada, OuLiPo, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, and Flarf to name just a few, but all the writers are united in their imaginative appropriation of found and generated texts and their exploration of nonexpressive language. Against Expression is a timely collection and an invaluable resource for readers and writers alike.

Authors include: Monica AASPRONG, Walter ABISH, Vito ACCONCI, Kathy ACKER, Sally ALATALO, Paal Bjelke ANDERSEN, David ANTIN, Louis ARAGON, Nathan AUSTIN, J. G. BALLARD, Fiona BANNER, Derek BEAULIEU, Samuel BECKETT, Caroline BERGVALL, Charles BERNSTEIN, Ted BERRIGAN, Jen BERVIN, Gregory BETTS, Christian BOK, Marie BUCK, William S. BURROUGHS, David BUUCK, John CAGE, Blaise CENDRARS, Thomas CLABURN, Elisabeth CLARK, Claude CLOSKY, Clark COOLIDGE, Hart CRANE, Brian Joseph DAVIS, Katie DEGENTESH, Monica DE LA TORRE, Denis DIDEROT, Marcel DUCHAMP, Craig DWORKIN, Laura ELRICK, Dan FARRELL, Gerald FERGUSON, Robert FITTERMAN, Lawrence GIFFIN, Peter GIZZI, Judith GOLDMAN, Kenneth GOLDSMITH, Nada GORDON, Noah Eli GORDON, Michael GOTTLIEB, Dan GRAHAM, Michelle GRANGAUD, Brion GYSIN, Michael HARVEY, H. L HIX, Yunte HUANG, Douglas HUEBLER, Peter JAEGER, Emma KAY, Bill KENNEDY and Darren WERSHLER, Michael KLAUKE, Christopher KNOWLES, Joseph KOSUTH, Leevi LEHTO, Tan LIN, Dana Teen LOMAX, Trisha LOW, Rory MACBETH, Jackson MAC LOW, Stephane MALLARME, Donato MANCINI, Peter MANSON, Shigeru MATSUI, Bernadette MAYER, Steve MCCAFFERY, Stephen MCLAUGHLIN and Jim CARPENTER, David MELNICK, Richard MELTZER, Christof MIGONE, Tomoko MINAMI, K. Silem MOHAMMAD, Simon MORRIS, Yedda MORRISON, Harryette MULLEN, Alexandra NEMEROV, C. K. OGDEN, Tom ORANGE, PARASITIC VENTURES, George PEREC, M. NourbeSe PHILIP, Vanessa PLACE, Bern PORTER, Raymond QUENEAU, Claudia RANKINE, Ariana REINES, Charles REZNIKOFF, Deborah RICHARDS, Kim ROSENFIELD, Raymond ROUSSEL, Aram SAROYAN, Ara SHIRINYAN, Ron SILLIMAN, Juliana SPAHR, Brin Kim STEFANS, Gary SULLIVAN, Nick THURSTON, Rodrigo TOSCANO, Tristan TZARA, Andy WARHOL, Darren WERSHLER, Christine WERTHEIM, WIENER GRUPPE William Butler YEATS, Steven ZULTANSKI, Vladimir ZYKOV
Introduction (pdf)

or at scribd

"Can you discuss how conceptual writing began?
- It began in 1999 in Buffalo after I gave a reading there and Christian Bök and Darren Wershler drove down from Toronto to see me read. They were Canadian pataphysicists who were involved with concrete and sound poetry, while I was coming out of a text art tradition, but we all saw our respective paths as dead ends. So, we blended these obsessions to come up with a new way of writing just as the Internet was emerging. These strategies as applied to the digital writing environment made sense to us and continue to even more a decade later as the web has evolved.
Can you explain why you think non-conceptual poetry is dead and how conceptual writing breathes new life into that space—or is it an entirely new space?
- The poet David Antin sums it up:
“. . . i had always had mixed feelings
about being considered a poet if robert lowell is a
poet i dont want to be a poet if robert frost was a
poet i dont want to be a poet if socrates was a poet
ill consider it”
We’re uncreative. You might ask, what’s wrong with creativity? “I mean, we can always use more creativity.” “The world needs to become a more creative place.” “If only individuals could express themselves creatively, they’d be freer, happier.” “I’m a strong believer in the therapeutic value of creative pursuits.” “To be creative, relax and let your mind go to work, otherwise the result is either a copy of something you did before or reads like an army manual.” “I don’t follow any system. All the laws you can lay down are only so many props to be cast aside when the hour of creation arrives.” “An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.”
When our notions of what is considered creative became this hackneyed, this scripted, this sentimental, this debased, this romanticized… this uncreative, it’s time to run in the opposite direction. Do we really need another “creative” poem about the way the sunlight is hitting your writing table? No. Or another “creative” work of fiction that tracks the magnificent rise and the even more spectacular fall? Absolutely not.
Notes on Conceptualism emphasizes that words, like pictures, are objects and that “a word is worth a thousand pictures.” Yet I have a different experience with conceptual poetry than I do with other works of art. What expectations, if any, should I have when approaching conceptual writing?
- Conceptual writing treats words as material objects, not simply carriers of meaning. For us, words are both material and carriers of meaning; it’s language and you can get rid of meaning no matter how hard you try. This is made manifest by the digital environment where, since the dawn of media, we’ve had more on our plates than we could ever consume, but something has radically changed: never before has language had so much materiality—fluidity, plasticity, malleability—begging to be actively managed by the writer. Before digital language, words were almost always found imprisoned on a page. How different today when digitized language can be poured into any conceivable container: text typed into a Microsoft Word document can be parsed into a database, visually morphed in Photoshop, animated in Flash, pumped into online text-mangling engines, spammed to thousands of email addresses and imported into a sound editing program and spit out as music; the possibilities are endless.
In your “Paragraphs on Conceptual Writing,” you write that: “Conceptual writing is good only when the idea is good.” Yet, “It doesn’t really matter if the reader understands the concepts of the author by reading the text.” To make a simile, can conceptual writing be seen as a mirror-revealing the thoughts of the viewer and the quality of the reflection is the quality of the work itself?
- Yes, it’s the idea that counts, not the reading of it. These books are impossible to read in the conventional sense. 20th century notions of illegibility were commonly bound up with a shattering of syntax and disjunction, but the 21st century’s challenge to textual convention may be that of density and weight. The Internet is mostly unreadable not because of the way it is written (mostly normative expository syntax at the top-level), but because of its enormous size. Just as new reading strategies had to be developed in order to read difficult modernist works of literature, so new reading strategies emerging on the web: skimming, data aggregating, the employment of intelligent agents, to name but a few. Our reading habits seem to be imitating the way machines work: we could even say that online, by an inordinate amount of skimming in order to comprehend all the information passing before our eyes, we parse text-a binary process of sorting language-more than we read it. So this work demands a thinkership, not a readership.
You are known to be an excellent performer, yet you claim that conceptual writing is often dry and boring. How do you negotiate the contradiction between the way you frame your work and your actual delivery of it?
- The human voice hydrates even the driest of texts.
How do you feel about your larger-than-life persona within a movement that de-emphasizes identity? Is this assumed persona a strategy to make conceptual writing more accessible, or is it a natural outgrowth of your work and personality?
- Well, there’s always somebody behind the curtain, running the machines. Contrary to my own claims, I’m always banging my head against the realization that no matter how hard you try, you can never remove the individual from art. I have made arguments for egoless art, found art, art driven by chance operations and many other strains, but in fact there’s always someone behind the curtain, manning the machines. I have yet to encounter tasteless art. If there’s one thing that the avant-garde has shown us, it’s that regardless of form, non-expression is impossible. Take Duchamp. Every objet trouvé of his reeked of his taste. What if, for example, Duchamp had chosen a light bulb (as Johns did later with impeccable taste) instead of a urinal? A shoe (as Warhol did later with impeccable taste) instead of a bicycle wheel? What made these anti-art objects essentially Duchampian was his great taste. In writing, Jackson Mac Low, too, had amazing taste: he made all the right choices to free himself of choice-making. And why did Cage’s aleatory works or Feldman’s spare late pieces sound so damn good? They chose the right ingredients and mixed them together with such exquisite taste that they couldn’t help but be not only beautiful but also totally defensible.
Tell me about the forthcoming anthology. When will it be available and what is your involvement in the project?
- Craig Dworkin and I are just finishing up editing Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing, which will come out from Northwestern University Press. It will include the work of over 100 authors, beginning with Mallarmé and ending with students in their early twenties. The book will be out in the fall of 2010." - Kenneth Goldsmith interviewed by Katherine Elaine Sanders

"How would you explain conceptual poetry to a younger audience unfamiliar with the tenets of conceptual art?
- The best thing about conceptual poetry is that it doesn't need to be read. You don't have to read it. As a matter of fact, you can write books, and you don't even have to read them. My books, for example, are unreadable. All you need to know is the concept behind them. Here's every word I spoke for a week. Here's a year's worth of weather reports...and without ever having to read these things, you understand them.
So, in a weird way, if you get the concept—which should be put out in front of the book—then you get the book, and you don't even have to read it. They're better to talk about than they are to read. It's not about inventing anything new; it's about finding things that exist and reframing them and representing them as original texts. The choice of what you're presenting is more interesting than the thing that you're presenting. You're not evaluated on the writing or what's on the page; you're evaluated on the thought process that comes before 'pen is set to paper,' so to speak.
In 1959, Brian Gysin said that writing was 50 years behind painting. And it still is. So if conceptual art happened 50 years ago, we're just beginning to get around to it now. These are ideas that have never been explored in poetry. We've had a little bit of pastiche, a little bit of—you know, a line from here, a line from there. But we've never had the concept of lifting something that you didn't write and moving it over five inches, saying that it's yours, and claiming that it's a newly authored text.
Are there conceptual strains/models you find in classic works by poets like Homer or Sappho, Shakespeare or Keats? Or is the tradition grounded solely in the work of more postmodern writers like John Cage, Jackson Mac Low, Andy Warhol?
- Well, Craig Dworkin and I just did this anthology, entitled, Against Expression. I think a real scholar—someone like Steve McCaffery—could actually find Renaissance examples of this. But, of course, I'm not that. And Craig's a real modernist.
So we begin with Mallarmé. And Mallarmé's falsified writings on fashion. He made a whole fashion magazine, all by himself, under nom de plumes of various people—how to throw a great dinner party, how to wear fashionable clothes, etc. He wrote Vogue but all under pseudonyms. And it became a really popular magazine. Of course, it was a complete lie; the whole thing was a grand work of identity falsification.
Against Expression, the anthology of conceptual writing, is not just people who are fifty years old and younger writing. It really does go back to the beginnings of modernism. And there's a pretty straight path that we plot going through that to the contemporary day.
What are the new frontiers of experimentation in 'conceptual poetry' itself?
- There are different people working on different things. Let me just say that the most interesting investigations in conceptual writing are taking place in fields outside of poetry—so Christian Bök is really almost being a scientist at this point. He's given himself a Ph.D. in Genetics, and he's doing genetic engineering and representing it as poetry. That's something outside of it.
Vanessa Place is taking legal briefs that she writes during the day in the law field. And she doesn't do anything to them, she just represents those as poetry. Darren Wershler is a professor in communication studies and is taking ideas of what's going on in the digital world—stuff that is real hardcore geek stuff—and bringing that into conceptual poetry.
I think the most interesting frontiers of what's happening are coming from outside of the field, and not inside the field. And thereby it's appealing to these other audiences. Christian's work is in Nature magazine. He's more well-known to the scientific community than he is to the poetry community. There's a subversion of poetics, an inversion, and a complete broadening of what we consider to be poetry. It's really amazing.
What are your essential texts/influences? What writers/thinkers make up your family tree? What works do you turn back to for pleasure?
- The touchstones are always the same. You could go back—it's actually the same lineage from which all experimentation emerges. Our roots are not that much different than Language poetry. We love Stein, we love Pound, we love Joyce. You know, that lineage. But then it breaks. Because what's more important then is Fluxus, Pop Art, Sound Poetry, Visual and Concrete Poetry; of course sampling and hip hop are all very important tenets behind it; situationism is really big; and Language poetry is a real influence as well.
Personally, I come back to Cage and Warhol, who are my two main touchstones. In fact, I just got The Warhol Diaries, a thousand-page tome, on the Kindle. I could never read it outside of home, because it's too big. And now it's on the Kindle, and it's an absolute pleasure. That's really pleasurable to read.
How do you feel about the title: conceptual poet? Is it limiting?
- I like limiting things. I think it describes a certain way of working—a certain way that a lot of people are working today. It gives a name to a lot of different gestures.
I'd say that Flarf is one methodology within conceptualism. And Flarf is represented in this book [Against Expression].
People are working differently because of the digital environment. You could call it digital poetics, but a lot of it is not actually happening on the screen. A lot of it is happening on the page, and yet it's informed by the fact that you can cut and paste the entire internet. And then what do you do with that? You just take something and claim it as your own, because you can copy it, and you can cut it and paste it.
I think it's a useful term—a useful umbrella term—and it's not really as much of a break as a continuation. There are precedents—in this book, for example, Burroughs—pre-digital precedents of people who were working digitally before the digital. The book is absolutely full of them. Joyce, some text-based conceptual art, or Cage. Beckett is working with words in a mechanical way, a conceptual way. Clark Coolidge is in here. There's all sorts of stuff...
When the digital happens, we begin to think of language very differently. And the idea of conceptualism becomes useful in describing those digital tendencies.
What are some of the most interesting reactions you've had to your work? And do they feed the work itself?
- Well, you know, it's universally reviled. From the right and from the left. When I read at the White House, Linh Dinh, on the left, accused me of performing for a mass murderer, Mr. Obama. And on the right, a right-wing talk-show radio host named Michael Savage called my invitation to the White House "the decline of western civilization" and "the emergence of Marxist class warfare," and he said that I was "Abbie Hoffman part two."
The White House was a real flash-point for both the left and the right, and it was so shocking to me—maybe not so shocking—but curious how close the rhetoric of the extremes were, about the gesture of conceptualism being in a very prominent place like that.
Do you seek out those extremes?
- I enjoy them. You don't get those reactions in the art world. Art has long ceased to shock. In the poetry world, it's so conservative, that we can still get people upset. It's kind of great in a way.
In the art world, since Duchamp or Jeff Koons crumpled up pieces of paper, or relational aesthetics where people served chicken curry for dinner and that's called "art," everyone goes, "Hey, man, that's cool," and it sells for a lot of money. In the poetry world, you can say, "I'm going to be unoriginal. I'm going to be uncreative," and you can get people very upset by that gesture.
It's a very slow-moving, backwards thing, so you can still have a little bit of scandal. It's sort of exciting. I don't court it, but it happens.
How is your work informed by your contemporaries/friends working in the field—poets like Christian Bök, Vanessa Place, Robert Fitterman, Caroline Bergvall, others?
- It's a long conversation. We have an anthology. We're fifteen years into this. Now everybody's talking about conceptual writing, but it was just a thing that sort of emerged with Darren Wershler, Christian, and myself—just kind of feeling that there was a change in the air which was being precipitated by digital availability, back in the late nineties. So, suddenly, everybody's talking about this. But you have to realize it's been going on for some time.
We just smelled something in the air that was going to change, because of technology. And over the years, various people joined in, and joined on. And now a lot of people are working that way. But the core group is still very much in touch and still very excited.
Vanessa [Place]—five years ago, we hadn't heard about Vanessa. She just sort of came. We had been having this conversation for ten years before, and suddenly, Vanessa's this huge force. But Caroline, also, has been along for the entire ride. And you've got people like Kim Rosenfield and Nada Gordon and Katie Degentesh. There are just people all over.
The other thing I want to say about conceptual writing is that it's the first poetry movement since concrete poetry that is an international poetry movement. Language writing wasn't international. There were a few participants in England, many in Canada and the U.S., and that was it, even though it was known world-wide.
One of the reasons that concrete poetry became an international movement was because you didn't need to know a specific language in order to understand the work. It was primarily visual. So you could get a little key, and you could kind of understand the poems. So you had participants from all over the world. Those were global anthologies. Now, this is a global anthology as well. And the reason being, again, is that you don't really need to read the work. Again, it's not predicated upon knowing a language—it's knowing a concept. And if the concept is put out before you, who cares what happens after that.
People are working this way. We've got friends in France, in England, Brazil, Argentina, of course Canada, and all over Scandinavia. Conceptual writing is massive in Scandinavia. So it's the first global poetics movement since concrete poetry, and that's an amazing thing.
Was there a moment when you shifted from just doing the work you were doing, to writing critical work in order to frame a movement?
- Nobody else was going to do it. When we started, and still, until only really recently, the only thing that people could talk about was Language poetry, which they'd been talking about since 1973. So you had scads of poetics students coming out of Buffalo, still working as Language poetry's umpteenth generation, students of Charles Bernstein, Language poets, or variants of that. And the critical work was still centered on Language poetry. And it really was getting tiresome.
I like Language poetry, but what we learned form Language poetry was that if you wait around for somebody to write about it, it's not going to happen. You've got to get out there, and you've got to do the critical writing, at first, yourself." - Interview with Goldsmith by Poets.org staff

"The PROS:
One rarely likes to be told how to read, where to position a text in the context of its literary theory and formal practices, or who the writing owes its legacy to. However, one of the greatest strengths of Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith’s Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (Northwestern UP, Evanston, IL, 2011, isbn #978-0-8101—2711-1) is that it does precisely that.
In this anthology, each author selection is beautifully cradled by an intro passage which tells us about the work we are about to read in such a way as to make us feel as smart as Dworkin and Goldsmith. These intros, including information about the genesis of the texts and typographical works we are about to encounter, take us into a space where we dialogue with the written and visual works even as we begin reading/looking at them. Most importantly, these informative prefaces are not overdidactic. They are astoundingly well informed but presented in a conversational tone.
Thus this book is an excellent teaching resource for professors seeking new ways to see quickly into the vast array of conceptual writing being composed today in North America and England. It is also a great resource for creative writing instructors in search of conceptual writing techniques to try out as exercises with students. Additionally, this collection of works helps those well-versed in conceptual writing enjoy the techniques being explored, seeing perhaps past these texts to their original conception, or towards writings by the author or other authors which the reader will be delighted to go and discover on their own. For any great anthology is an amuse-bouche, whetting the appetite, making you salivate as you crave more. Here, therefore, readers will be enticed to go back to the full books by the authors whose selections are anthologized and to enjoy uncovering more conceptual work.
Like many recent anthologies, Against Expression at first looks daunting—it is massive and its title made me fear that everything inside would be heady and devoid of emotion or attachment to the world around. But, as the editors note early on in the book in their preface to Walter Abish’s Skin Deep:
“Like many works of conceptual writing […] the result is neither depersonalized nor unemotional. Rather, the formal conceit attempts to discover or more closely approach emotional conditions by avoiding the habits, clichés, and sentimentality of conventional expressive rhetoric.” (p 8)
As I flipped through the book, getting a first feel, I noted that it is organized alphabetically. Immediately, I felt a bit put off, figuring the anthologists could not put in the time to think about how to organize the works they had selected in a useful manner. But as I read, I realized the strength of this lack of organization was that it allowed the works to butt up against each other, grating formally in ways that kept the reading dynamic. All of the sections and authors speak as much or as little to each other. Each work manages, peculiarly, to stand on its own. To try to group the authors by technique would likely have heightened a gimmicky aspect rather than do justice to the works. In short, Dworkin and Goldsmith were wise not to try and categorize the works by technique or formal exploration. Instead, positioning them one against another allowed the entirely or primarily visual texts—such as those by Monica Aasprong, Derek Beaulieu, Yedda Morrison and Elizabeth S. Clark—to create breathing and thinking spaces between the reading of texts that demanded longer attention because of their dense intertextuality and formatting in visual blocks—such as work by Brian Joseph Davis, Dan Farrell, Peter Jaeger, John Cage, Fiona Banner or Peter Manson.
Furthermore, the anthology does a nice job of presenting the complexities and divergence in ideas about what conceptual writing is today in its two book prefaces. For example, Goldsmith’s very concise intro Why Conceptual Writing? Why Now? was brief but thought-provoking. For him, conceptual writing owes its current dominance to the age of the computer, the easy cut-paste-reproduction possibilities offered up by the digital era. He argues, “With the rise of the Web, writing has met its photography.” (p xvii)We live in a time when “The ease of appropriation has raised the bar to a new level […where] language has value not as much for what it says but for what it does.” (p xix) Moreover, he argues that “[…] never before has language had so much materiality—fluidity, plasticity, malleability—begging to be actively managed by the writer.” (p xix) Though I was less excited by his citation at the end about conceptual writing only being good when the idea was good (something some of these texts might well disprove), I felt revved up by his propositions that we lived in an era where the plasticity of the word is at its height and where the new writings are also “proposing new platforms of readership. Words very well might be written not to be read but rather to be shared, moved, and manipulated.” (p xxi)
As such, this anthology serves itself up as a space of sharing, and not just sharing the selected texts. For the ways that Dworkin and Goldsmith set each text up with their mini-prefaces, offering a dialogic space, invites reflection about language and language making and use which at once is focused on each work included in the anthology and yet constantly expands that scope to past movements, the contexts of a text’s making, and even to the political arena within which certain works emerged or are still being written.
Dworkin’s intro, The Fate of Echo, unlike Goldsmith’s, is a lengthy reflection on the notions of conceptual writing and art, flirting at times with the origins of these terms, their rootedness in philosopy, genre, theory, etc. It is a preface which is slippery, hard to pin down, often declaring what conceptual writing is not, though not necessarily establishing what it is or where it is at today. Like Goldsmith, however, Dworkin seems keen on the notions of how words are used. This is to say, a space beyond what words may be saying or meaning to something stretching into a realm of plastic utility, tangibility. He is also intrigued by appropriated text and the explorations of appropriation, that place where, as he declares near the end of his intro, “Echo, literally, always has the last word. And she sets the first example for many of the writers included here: loquacious, patient, rule-bound, recontextualizing language in a mode of strict citation.” (p xlvii)
Two such works reusing given materials and which demonstrate a very different way of composing à la Echo using given text are Peter Jaeger’s Rapid Eye Movement (work echoing entirely quoted materials on dreams)and Noah Eli Gordon’s Inbox (work echoing emails). Just using these two authors as an example, one sees immediately that there is a layering in this book of the attentively composed and constructed language and that which celebrates the everyday we live in. Furthermore, the question of what one might mean by echoing work is quite varied. For example, in Jaeger’s writing, there are 2 wide prose bands of text at the top and bottom of each page. These two bands “[…] consist of quotations from dream narratives (top) and sentences from texts that include the word dream (bottom). No two sentences from the same source are consecutive in the poem.”(p 311) And thus, as the editor’s comment, Jaeger “yokes form and content, bringing the disjunctive jump cuts of the dream to the parataxis of collage” (p 311) What is immediately obvious is the work that is involved in this process, and the demanding attention to choice used in the composition of these texts. As such, Jaeger’s excerpt is layered, dense, dreamy and thought-provoking. Moreover, the composition or role of the author as selecting and acting on the language is apparent/revealed in how the language selected and about dreams is tightly woven in and around itself. Jaeger chooses to compose with fragments, peculiar punctuation and combination to elicit a meditative space in the reader because of lines such as those which begin the band at the bottom of page 313:
“only full and positive reality, the reality of the day. The library of dream is the largest library there never was. A catalogue of dream types or a description of sleeping states is distinct from and, insufficient for understanding the kinds of knowledge associated with dreams.” (p313—this passage starts in lower case, as quoted here)
This passage then contrasts with the band at the top of the page, which also begins in lower case and hints that it may also only be the fragment of a fuller sentence:
“a long corridor on an alien planet. At the party, I wore this stylish outfit that made me feel emotionally and physically uncomfortable. As I gazed out calmly across the blue water, I could see the setting sun sink like a blazing ball of red fire, creating a golden path across the waters, leading to my feet.” (p313)
Here, Jaeger’s language is varied much like a cut-up might produce. But the two bands dialogue across the page, between these narrative, descriptive lines and those associated with thinking about sleep and dream in the band at the bottom of the page.
In contrast, Noah Eli Gordon’s work appears far closer to the literal Echo—trapping and repeating snippets of daily conversations and mental meanderings. His work is more transparent and simpler/less demanding in its composition. For Inbox is a mass of text made up of the bodies of emails where the visual format of the email, the signature lines, etc have been removed so that the body of one email then another then another mash together in an unending, unbroken email paragraph which lasts for pages. The language reflects the everyday, the familiar for the author—we read here what echoes our own emails either written or received: tasks to do, writing being produced or reacted to. But the interest that emerges is how one email butts up against another and the mass in front of us becomes a kind of mirror of the days and habits of Gordon. The life of the author is here. His work is thus a pop cultural, everyday quotidian celebration for all the language that surrounds him everywhere—acknowledging, as many visual artists have in hundreds of installation and other works this past century—the art both of and about the most banal aspects of the self and life as art or art as life. I think here of Tracey Emin’s installation My Bed, which earned her a nomination for the Turner Prize in 1999—it contained her messy, unmade bed surrounded by bits and things including trash, condoms, blood-stained underwear, stuffed toys, stained sheets, papers and bottles. In the same way, these emails are like the things Gordon finds lying around him—not on his floor, but in his head and on his computer screen. The screen has become a space / place which we inhabit and which inhabits us these days. Gordon’s work reflects that and calls our attention to it.
Many of the texts in this anthology, like Gordon’s and Jaeger’s, elicit not only a reaction to the text, but make us rethink our own notions of writing, creation, literature, form and genre. They also call our attention to the processes of linguistic composition—either on a level of semantics and semiotics, but sometimes on a primarily visual language level. For example, less interesting to read, but somewhat fun to peruse visually are texts such as Rory MacBeth’s 10 page-long excerpt from his book The Bible, the “B” section, where MacBeth puts the words of the bible in alphabetical order, starting with “Babbler” and ending with almost 8 entire pages of the word “be”. Here, I doubt very much if readers will read every “be” out loud or to themselves, but this wall of “be” calls our attention not only to its excessive presence in the bible, but to the fundamental forcefulness of this verb as it connects to life for all of us and to our own willingness to live, to strive for things or merely to “be”. As such, this anthology is quite successful.
The CONS:
However, given my flattery above, as I moved farther though the book, what I began to see was how this collection lacks an overarching, solidly-founded and followed program. One might argue that the program is to demonstrate the ways, as Dworkin and Goldsmith praise in their intros, texts are being made rather than composed from many already-existent sources. Yet not all the works use these techniques. Some, such as an excerpt from a fake fashion magazine by Mallarmé (La dernière mode) and published under a pseudonym seems to be presented as conceptual under the guise that “by challenging notions of the authentic self, Mallarmé shape-shifts in ways that anticipate the internet age.” (p 374) But could one not say that of dozens of authors throughout the world, including many women such as Mary Ann Evans as George Sand or Karen Blixen as Isak Dinesen, who took on male names to “shape-shift” as one might on the web into a male or female avatar of any age or style? The editors here are stretching and reaching and, to this reader, the inclusion of Mallarmé’s La dernière mode seems superficial and somewhat forced, if not simply there to provoke responses (such as this) or to incite the purchase of the book by various people who will read anything by well-known authors.
Moreover, the text itself is simply a fashion text, written under the pseudonym Marguerite de Ponty. And as if to compound their peculiar inclusion of Mallarmé, the anthology also includes a much more fitting but untranslated for no apparent reason excerpt from Mallarmé’s Le Livre. This second excerpt by Mallarmé does fit more accurately with the writing techniques which seem to be falling under the heading of conceptual writing here, but I wonder why the editors did not seek out a translation and feel they did so (as they also do with a French text by Canadian author Christophe Migone) under what I would say is an erroneous position that the work is untranslatable. Personally, I think it is quite easy to translate. In an anthology for Anglophone readers, and which does not include untranslated texts throughout the book, the few French texts stand out as anomalies. An exception to this critique is Paal Bjelke Anderson’s text in multiple Nordic languages, printed in those languages specifically because, as the editors announce, “Any difficulty for English speakers posed by this untranslated text, then, is all to the point.” (p 38).
In fact, throughout the book the inclusion of writers from other countries feels hap hazard. Rather than taking a ballsy stand and trying to group up conceptual writing works being composed by different groups around the world (as for example Pierre Joris and Jerome Rothenberg chose to do in their Millennium anthologies), here the editors fail to usefully represent what may be happening in conceptual writing globally. The inclusion of only a handful of French (11 of the 112), Austrian (1) or Norweigan (2) authors feels like a surface level tipping of the hat, perhaps so that the book can call itself international, or, more likely, simply because these are the translated works these particular editors have recently encountered which fit in with their ideas of conceptual writing at the time of making this anthology. The fact that the vast majority of these international writers are French also seems due in part because the editors read the Germ issue devoted to France a few years ago and which they are excerpting or reprinting from here. I would argue that it might have been more exciting to cut the foreign works from this collection. But if they do need to appear, it would have been wise to seek out other texts by the same French authors that had retained the attention of Dworkin and Goldsmith, and thus to present new translations of equally conceptual works to an American/English public. Instead, the few translated excerpts by these foreign authors keep circulating and those who read this kind of work are likely already familiar with these precise extracts.
In addition to its sloppy internationalism, the anthology seems blind to chronology. As a teaching resource, this makesit difficult for someone to try and enter into a solid presentation of the emergence of conceptual work through this collection. To illustrate this, one need merely to peruse the table of contents where the vast majority of authors found here are contemporary Americans, Canadians or U.K. writers writing at the end of the 20th century. The anthology is also primarily excerpting from books published just before or after the year 2000. However, instead of labeling and positioning itself as an anthology which presents conceptual writing on the cusp of the 21stcentury, the book splices texts in from many centuries—first off stretching back to include Americans from the mid-to late 20th century then backing up to those who lived on the cusp of the early 20th century—such as Andy Warhol and Clark Coolidge, or Charles Reznikoff and Hart Crane. But then, in addition to a handful of Oulipian authors from France (including the deceased authors Georges Perec and Raymond Queneau alongside one of the contemporary Oulipians, Michelle Grangaud), some of the unexpected authors contained in this book are the 18th century novelist Denis Diderot, turn of 19th/ 20thcentury French poets and artists Stéphane Mallarmé, Louis Aragon, Blaise Cendrars or Marcel Duchamp, and Irish poets WB Yeats and Samuel Beckett as well as the 1945 Vienna Group (Weiner Gruppe) and extracts from a 1931 text by CK Ogden. The book could have been organized to include a “precursors to conceptual writing in the early 21st century” section, but instead it seems almost accidental that texts from centuries ago, or even a century ago, somehow managed to wend their way in here. It also calls attention to the fact that there are likely hundreds if not thousands of works which could just as easily have been referenced or excerpted from for this book if the editors had decided to look farther. Thus the professor seeking to make use of this book for a course may find themselves less informed and more in need of getting informed to better present the selections.
To compound the difficulty of chronology and nationality, it is very difficult to locate the exact print dates for original works—Dworkin and Goldsmith include an acknowledgements section at the end of their anthology, but some of the works had earlier printings or, in the case of foreign work, the original foreign text and print date is not available here. Also, it is not evident whether some of the foreign work was originally composed in English unless one goes to google—for Dworkin and Goldsmith sometimes mention the translators in the acknowledgements, other times mentioning them in their pre-extract prefaces, and at times I wondered whether they were mentioned at all.
Finally, though I hate as a woman to be the one drawing attention to it, this is a book which contains only a little more than 25% of writings by women and yet is focused on the contemporary period where we are all aware that conceptual art and writing are certainly being practiced by as many women (if not more) as men today. I am not arguing for a representative slice, but rather the dominance of the male author makes me note the failings of the male editorial reader, the limited perspectives, having chosen to not include such significant authors as Susan Howe, who certainly falls into the bracket of echoers and those using archival materials to make writing today even if she herself would likely not want to be seen as conceptual, Lyn Hejinian—who gets referenced in editor notes before Gordon’s text, or Sharon Mesmer—another flarf writer. I also think that, to join the younger voices included here, one might consider someone like Adeena Karasick as having work which fits well with this collection.
In short, Against Expression is a fabulous anthology of conceptual writing with a few structural stumbling blocks—it is a reference book that asks for a bit more structure and perhaps some partner volumes to come. I applaud the hard work of the editors, for their selections and the dynamic and exciting collection that this book is. It is the first anthology to try and bring together and examine in English what conceptual writing is today, and as such it is a daring project. I certainly salute the editors for their hard work, and for getting this amazing dialogue underway. Bravo—I will be watching for the next one!" - Jennifer K Dick

Even when those texts look indistinguishable from the work that is included: An interview with Craig Dworkin by Katie L. Price

Interview with Kenneth Goldsmith at Le Cool London

Between Gut and Intellect: Conceptual Writing and the Postmodern Sublime by Malcolm Sutton


"An Introduction to the Conceptual Fiction folio:
We are by now, familiar with conceptual art, and perhaps even conceptual poetry, but conceptual fiction? It was in this spirit of inquiry that Vanessa Place and I put out a call. What would we get in response? What do writers think is “conceptual”? Although I have been thinking about conceptual fiction for some time now, I have yet to come up with a coherent or instructive definition. On the other hand, my co-editor, Place, has recently published Notes on Conceptualisms, a concise little book on conceptual writing co-authored with Rob Fitterman. Furthermore she has created a conceptual novel in Dies: A Sentence, a 50,000-word novel written as a single sentence. Set in the trenches of WW1, the novel shifts from consciousness to consciousness, bending the constraint in the most mischievous and sublime ways.
Some have (also properly) called Dies a prose poem, which further complicates the question. Though the issue of genre in conceptual writing may be more properly be considered as a question of complexion: pimpled and freckled, pitted with the scars of fresh acne and old wounds. For everything can be poetry—we learned that from Pound and Marinetti and Warhol and Weiner. But everything cannot be fiction, because some things are true, and some things have no character.
So, one might ask, is conceptual fiction simply using a constraint? Is it narrative with external structure or pressure on some aspect of the text? If that is the case then is Helen Humphreys recently published Frozen Thames a piece of conceptual fiction as much as Kenny Goldsmith’s offering (Paxil®)? Humphreys uses the 40 times the Thames has frozen over in recorded history as a way to organize and tell the story of the river, and the literary relationship to it. Her text is not “found,” but the structure is. The text itself is otherwise conventional, beautiful: certainly readable. And conceptual?
One of the hallmarks of conceptualism is its funnel-like shape: it is, in the old manner of new business, a Lucretian attempt to order the unorderable. Like testimony, it carves out a chunk of chaos and serves it up as proof of something: the way we were (Humphreys), the way we were to have been (Goldsmith). The issue becomes not so much whether the work is internally or externally generated but the motive behind the madness. Like fiction, there is the construction of transparency—in conceptual fiction, the transparency is overtly false, the telos godless, brought to you by Telemundo.
Not to say that conceptual fiction can’t be beautiful or readable, but there are some, Goldsmith for example, who want to create a beautiful concept rather than a readable text. Conceptual fiction reveals to us something about the structures of language and writing as much about human consciousness and contemporary culture. It often does this by creating texts that illustrate concepts rather than “tell stories.” These texts are sometimes labeled uncreative (a la Goldsmith’s Fidget), or unreadable (a la Stein’s Making of Americans).
Carl Schmitt wrote of the state occurring along the twin axis of localization (Ortung) and order (Ordnung); conceptualism looks to over-ordering, over-localizing texts as a corrective to the rut and glut of what our larger culture casts as readable. What is too boring, what is too obtuse, disturbing or dense—there is a thickness in these works that capitulates to and colludes in the consciousness of culture-as-state-as-culture. See,
But what makes a text “unreadable”? This is also an intriguing question. One assumes that unreadability might have some consistent traits, but I would argue that it readability itself is more subjective than we might think. Stylistic, genre, or overtly plot-based novels quickly become unreadable for me, for example.
for example,
Once I can see plot, the text becomes unreadable. For others, not being able to see or sense plot renders a text unreadable.
my extraction (and setting in blocks) of those passages in Gone With The Wind that feature the word “nigger.” Does my bas-relief render this icononical American text unreadable? How many ways are there of engaging or teasing unreadablity?
This last semester I assigned my students the task of coming up with an idea for a conceptual writing project. What surprised me was not only the caliber of the projects—a surprising number of them were smart and compelling, but the number of students who actually did the projects. One of those projects is included here. Simon Wake’s pronomonolization of the first 32 sections of the Book of Genesis. The project is funny and moving as it refracts biblical language in a very intense and disturbing way.
Because the constraint decreates Adam, who named all things, and without names, we’re nothing. Compare: following the constraint of the Aristotelean plot arc without blinking. See: Conflict! Crisis! Cheese Pizza!
But to me the constraint isn’t enough, not by a long shot. Aren’t we talking about disruption as a way of ordering disruption? Procedure as a mock-up of process? I guess I’m interested in what happens when avant garde practices are applied to more conventional strands of storytelling… Unreadablity as a feature of reading in extremis? I’m not sure what I’m looking for exists quite yet but I am sensing a kind of formally innovative, intelligent and emotive kind of fiction that is under some pressures, that uses found and sculpted language, that transforms in some new way, how we might look at our (excess) world…that helps us in fact, imagine it." - Sina Queyras & Vanessa Place

I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women, Caroline Bergvall, Laynie Browne, Teresa Carmody, Vanessa Place eds., Les Figues Press, 2012.

"The book includes work by 64 women from 10 countries. Contributors respond to the question: What is conceptual writing?
Conceptual writing is emerging as a vital 21st century literary movement and I’ll Drown My Book represents the contributions of women in this defining moment. Edited by Caroline Bergvall, Laynie Browne, Teresa Carmody and Vanessa Place, I’ll Drown My Book takes its name from a poem by Bernadette Mayer, appropriating Shakespeare. The book includes work by 64 women from 10 countries, with contributors’ responses to the question—What is conceptual writing?—appearing alongside their work. I’ll Drown My Book offers feminist perspectives within this literary phenomenon."

Contributors are Kathy Acker, Oana Avasilichioaei and Erin Moure, Dodie Bellamy, Lee Ann Brown, Angela Carr, Mónica de la Torre, Danielle Dutton, Renee Gladman, Jen Hofer, Bernadette Mayer, Sharon Mesmer, Laura Mullen, Harryette Mullen, Deborah Richards, Juliana Spahr, Cecilia Vicuña, Wendy Walker, Jen Bervin, Inger Christiansen, Marcella Durand, Katie Degentesh, Nada Gordon, Jennifer Karmin, Mette Moestrup, Yedda Morrison, Anne Portugal, Joan Retallack, Cia Rinne, giovanni singleton, Anne Tardos, Hannah Weiner, Christine Wertheim, Norma Cole, Debra Di Blasi, Stacy Doris and Lisa Robertson, Sarah Dowling, Bhanu Kapil, Rachel Levitsky, Laura Moriarty, Redell Olsen, Chus Pato, Julie Patton, Kristin Prevallet, a.rawlings, Ryoko Seikiguchi, Susan M. Schultz, Rosmarie Waldrop, Renee Angle, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Tina Darragh, Judith Goldman, Susan Howe, Maryrose Larkin, Tracie Morris, Sawako Nakayasu, M. NourbeSe Philip, Jena Osman, kathryn l. pringle, Frances Richard, Kim Rosenfeld, and Rachel Zolf.


"This is the essay issue of DIAGRAM so it seems worth spending some time problematizing one of the common assumptions about essays (or, maybe, language), that the role of the written word is to take an experience or an idea and to relate it in a particular way. Like the essayist should go about the countryside and tell us about our thumbs. Or the essayist can with art and wit lead us to an understanding that the essayist already has. All of which is what many essayists and writers are trying to do, tied to a way of reading in which it is perfectly fair to complain you were not told this or that was withheld from you. But it's not inherent or necessary and something else could also happen, like I'm sure I would totally disagree if I had shot an elephant myself.
Which is all a roundabout way of saying that I'll Drown My Book is thrilling and wonderful exactly because of its problematizing, its invitation to the reader that she should after all be a part of the whole process1. Not that the writers don't sometimes have an understanding, or that they aren't involved in something similar to a relationship between themselves and the reader. Just that there is (quite literally) space for something different here.
By conception I'll Drown My Book suggests a couple of questions. One, how is "conceptual writing" being defined, and two, what in particular happens when that definition is taken up by women. There are some answers given from the start. Editor Laynie Browne notes that "this writing does not attempt to create neatly drawn solutions, commentary or speakers, but rather to experiment not for the sake of experimentation but with the desire to reveal something previously obscured" neatly offering something like an answer to both questions. Editor Caroline Bergvall, after mapping some similarities to and departures from conceptual art, says that "the main point of commonality is that the pieces included here all share an acute awareness of the literarity of literature, of the paratextuality of the book, of the technologies of writing, of the examination of the poetic function." Perhaps one of the most important answers to the questions of the book, however, is the exposed reality Brown recognizes, that "it is often at the stage of anthologizing that numbers start to shift so that women are not adequately represented." Anyone who doesn't recognize that women are still being massively underrepresented is willfully ignorant, and likewise for anyone who questions why a book like this is necessary.
The collection groups the writers in regard to three forms or concerns: "structure," "matter," and "event." Most writers give a few representative excerpts followed by a brief artistic statement that clarifies some of their thoughts on conceptual writing and the given work (or, sometimes, just confuses it all a bit more). Some writers only give excerpts, some only artist statements. There are a few writers who are likely familiar to most everyone who picks up the book, like Susan Howe, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Bhanu Kapil, Kathy Acker, &c. There are also a wide range of writers most people have probably not yet encountered, working in modes both familiar and really weird.
So, then, back to problematizing, the troubling of authority and meaning that makes the book so worthwhile. Not to suggest that the book is a book of essays. I am the type of reader who is inclined to ask myself if I could maybe think of everything I read as an essay, and I will admit that only a portion of what is here is actually essay (from the names you would expect to write an essay, for the most part). But yes to suggest that the way the book fucks with some of these ideas is its most exciting quality, and yes also to suggest that the maybe implied link between "women" and "fucking with these ideas" is more than coincidence. Which is the last thing I'll say about gender except that I had some friends over for drinks the day this book arrived in the mail and one friend, reading the title out loud to her girlfriend, saw it as I'll Drown My Baby instead of I'll Drown My Book. Later, we placed our hand on the book, asked it questions about our futures, and then flipped randomly and pointed at a line to get our answers, which I'll suggest as a good way to read it.
Blacked out lines, white space and some more white space and crowds of words, diagrams and images and more white space: the book is a messy joy to flip through. And, also, to read. It is quite so a polyvocality of polyvocalities, inclined toward contradicting itself and not saying some things and saying some other things over and over again. If the book were a hydra she would have had a long life with a lot of sword fights but kept keeping on. Collage is maybe a technique that comes to mind here in the way collage shows we are out of place and shows that we make meaning together, and although there's a lot of collage here I think the fact that most every piece speaks back to the whole through the artist statements makes it something else, like a theme party. Let's all go camping together this weekend. That sort of thing.
After most paragraphs of this review I stop and think that this seems like the place where I should probably quote some from the excerpts but I also want to resist it. If I go with Inger Christensen, "apricot trees exist, apricot trees exist," and then with Joan Retallack, ""she said now that she thought about it / she thought it must have had something / to do with that feeling of self possession in / the moment after the apostrophe took hold," then I'm implying that there's some similarities here and that these might be what you'll find in the book. Which you won't, you'll probably find Christine Wertheim,
I fUck
he fUcks
she fUcks
we fUck
they fUck U
fUck fUck
fUck fUck fUck fUck fUck fUck fUck
fUUUck
or something else that didn't stick with me the first time but if you stuck my attention to it then it would. And to be honest I don't have a scanner and the thing I really want to show people, these shells with words connected to them by diagrammatic lines, I can't recreate them without a scanner. They're really beautiful drawings and the writer, a.rawlings, says that the book of them "pairs found text and image to create a series of seventy-eight tarot cards that blur interpretive and divinatory reading practices." It seems off to urge you to read a book without giving a good sampling from it, but there you go.
There's also the impulse that I should probably quote the statements about writing. These, also, face the problem that picking a few can't hint to the whole, even after stressing that they contradict and compliment one another and that for as many sentences thick with theory there are others that seem to keep all their theory somewhere in the background. But once again this is the whole reason I want you to read it. Cia Rinne says "There is something very liberating to language operating beyond its commonly accepted functions; you could call it linguistic anarchy," which is what I see here. It's anarchic and even if I don't really get clutched by all the voices, that's as much the point (listening to those voices that don't clutch me) as is the fact that there are others that feel like they are now necessary for me.
Mónica de la Torre talks about "a disavowal of totalizing views and its products, an embrace of process," and when conceptual writing is functioning the way I most care about that process includes the reader (me). Maybe it's selfish to say. But the book itself, in that regard, anarchically beautiful, invites the reader. It makes its own rules and sometimes it follows them, which implies that you, reader, too, should make your own rules and sometimes follow them. It's a koan of a map to some writers you probably don't know and you might love. It acknowledges that we can't possibly be expected to understand ourselves unless we listen to each other while recognizing too that it is our task alone to understand ourselves. I want to pick it up and ask it a divinatory question and put my hand on a random line again, and in return Dodie Bellamy says "My thoughts flutter down your purple neck and that gives me a hard-on." What else could I want from something like this?" - TF at Diagram

"To work mine end upon their senses that

This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I’ll drown my book. —Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act V, Scene I

Enter the ghost of conceptual writing, a ghost that cues the gestural fusion of idea with language, the ghost that speaks as a denotative and connotative apparition hiding in a text that is buried alive. There are so many ghosts. They stretch themselves out like a river. I wrap my arms around them. This is how I will drown my book.
I’ll Drown My Book is a new anthology of conceptual writing forthcoming from Les Figues Press, and edited by Caroline Bergvall, Laynie Browne, and Vanessa Place. By collecting recent conceptual writings by women, the anthology opens up an ever-widening discourse: what is conceptual writing really and why conceptual writing now?
As the designer for the book, I have a strange relationship with the text. Kenneth Goldsmith declared that “Conceptual writing treats words as material objects, not simply carriers of meaning.”1 Anthology coeditor Vanessa Place later touches upon this materiality in her Afterword to the anthology:
I have come to consider conceptualism, qua conceptualism, that is, as writing that does not self-interpret, is not self-reflexive, at least not on the page. In other words, writing in which the content does not dictate the content: what appears on the surface of the page is pure textual materiality, no more (and often much less) that what you see on the surface of the page. Conversely, in the way of positive and negative space, conceptualism is also writing in which the context is the primary locus of meaning-making. I have written elsewhere that all conceptualism is allegorical, that is to say, its textual surface (or content) may or may not contain a kind of significance, but this surface significance (or content) is deployed against or within an extra-textual narrative (or contextual content) that is the work’s larger (and infinitely mutable) meaning. 3
I hone in on the words on the page, the brickwork, the patterns the bricks make, the aesthetic and physical qualities of the text, the floating words, line breaks, and poems as blocks of text to be remolded and reshaped. Too, I notice where the wall seems to be eroding away, the cracks in the wall where light from another dimension can shine through, and then, I hear the voices emanating through those tears in the wall. The manner in which I arrange the material follows a spectral logic, connecting dots only predicated on the imaginary relations I envision between words, between the words and myself. Because the recent loss of my mother colors the way I perceive the world—the way I interact with time and space and language—what conceptual writing becomes for me is the manifestation of ghosts. I see ghosts everywhere, especially in the margins of altered texts. The ghosts scurry across the tracks of my mind, leaving footprints on the margins of well-traveled memories, but never creeping out into the open. There is a neurological transcendence at work when we interact with poetry, when we interact with concepts and ideas on this level—the ideas that voice themselves when the letters shed off their physical traits. This is not a new-age description of consciousness, but rather a Badiou-ian eventfulness.
The “event” here refers to that which can not be discerned, the conceptual framework that exists outside of language, the point at which one’s mind is most open-minded, “a rupture in ontology, a being-in-itself—through which the subject finds her realization and reconciliation with ‘truth.’”4 Or, the “blind spot” of Derrida’s grammatology5, the shadow of narrative history, a textualized séance, and a “phantasmogenetic center”—that “point in space so modified by the presence of a spirit that it becomes perceptible to persons materially present near it.”6 The ghost lives in and is alive in writing, and the text is the site of its conjuration and activation.
In her introduction, Laynie Browne explains the anthology’s title as a reference to Bernadette Mayer referencing Shakespeare. Browne writes:
The process of opening Mayer to find Shakespeare reframed seems particularly fitting in the sense that conceptual writing often involves a recasting of the familiar and the found. In Mayer’s hands the phrase “I’ll Drown My Book” becomes an unthinkable yet necessary act. This combination of unthinkable, or illogical and necessary or obligatory also speaks to ways that the writers in this collection seek to unhinge and re-examine previous assumptions about writing. Thinking and performance are not separate from process and presentation of works. If a book breathes it can also drown, and in the act of drowning is a willful attempt to create a book which can awake the unexpected—not for the sake of surprise, but because the undertaking was necessary for the writer in order to uproot, dismantle, reforge, remap or find new vantages and entrances to well trodden or well guarded territory.3
I’ll Drown My Book throws itself the face of this intensity, to face the ghosts and “create a book which can awake the unexpected.” The book communicates telepathically, I feel the resonance of the stack of signifiers, see the portals that lead out of language. The horror writer Stephen King considers writing as a form of telepathy, where through the medium of a text, one’s mental state comes to transcend space and time. The text, like a Ghostbusters‘ trap that only temporarily destabilizes a ghost for containment, waits to be reactivated at a different point in the space-time continuum.7 These ghosts have no intention of escaping. The being-drowned is all part of the process of eventual activation.
The way I understand conceptual writing is similar perhaps to Carl Jung’s theory of synchronicity—there are moments in space and time where and when the physical world becomes a text to be read out and interpreted, where and when the event is structured not by casual networks of matter but by symbolic references producing meaning. Jeffrey J. Kripal relates these processes of writing and reading to paranormal processes, coining the phrase “authors of the impossible.”8 And it is this reaching for impossibility that for me unites the “beyond” haunting metaphysics and a conceptual writing practice.
The table of contents forces the question of how impossibility unleashes itself on the rest of the anthology. How do modes like constraint-driven process, formulaic structure, appropriation, and intertextual weavings cease or encourage the admission of the ghost? Is every text haunted?
In his introduction to Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing, Kenneth Goldsmith points to the present technological era, stating that, “Faced with an unprecedented amount of available digital text, writing needs to redefine itself to adapt to the new environment of textual abundance.” He continues later, “[N]ever before has language had so much materiality—fluidity, plasticity, malleability—begging to be actively managed by the writer. Before digital language, words were almost always found imprisoned on a page. How different it is today, when digitized language can be poured into any conceivable container.”9 Indeed in this digital age where fish and birds seem to readily fall from the sky and apocalyptic cognition a reflex, conceptual writing attempts to create further distance from self, while at the same time, it “tries to get away from itself by catching up with itself.”10 The transmission of ideas and signals through the internet spotlights the materiality of language—the constant copy and pasting, downloading and uploading of texts and images—but the transmission also encroaches upon a telepathic reality, as the constant “what if” of technology marks “a phantom appearance in thought, the very capability of imagining nonexistence, ghosts, apparitions, and virtuality.”10 In conceptual writing, the ghost is always in the process of returning to the scene of the crime.
The anthology is organized into four categories:
1. Process: Constraint, Mimicry, Mediation, Translative, Versioning
2. Structure: Appropriation, Erasure, Constraint, Formula, Pattern, Palimpsest
3. Matter: Baroque, Hybrid, Generative, Corporeal, Dissensual
4. Event: Documenta, Investigative, Intertextual, Historicism, Speculative
These categories are not hard-line inclusive or exclusive, but rather draw further attention to the elusive definition of conceptual writing. Teresa Carmody, codirector of Les Figues Press, notes, “I’ll Drown My Book is a feminist text in the way it creates a space for multiple and sometimes contradictory perspectives of conceptualism.” Though the bulk of my interaction with this book is through feeling and articulating the contours of letters and spaces on the page, the pieces themselves start to circle around an abiding unity, where more and more the singular-plurality of an individual subject starts to color the consequential writings. M. H. Abrams, on Hegel’s The Phenomenology of the Spirit, describes a world in which Spirit or Mind (Geist) constitutes both subject, and object, as well as the plot of the story. Here, the reader is as much a part of the text as the text is a part of the reader.8 This to me sounds much like the “sobject” of Place and Fitterman’s Notes on Conceptualisms. Poetry is not just a reader acting upon a text, rather both text and reader stand as witness to an act of witnessing, “a caloric substance, immanence with bleached teeth.”2
The anthology’s works beg immanence, breathe specter-ship, and promise allegorical gesture.
Each piece in the anthology is accompanied by a brief author’s defining conceptual writing in relation to her own writing process. In reading these, I think about whether ghosts have reflections in the mirror. When I stand in front of the mirror and recite “Bloody Mary” the appropriate number of times, what I see is my own reflection again staring back at me. So then, when “I am haunted by myself who is haunted by myself who is haunted,”10 how can I step behind the mirror? In each moment that I exist as an “I,” the state is continually haunted by the possibility of possibility.
In their statement, Oana Avasilichioaei and Erín Moure describe the process behind Expeditions of a Chimaera: “Here ‘constraint’ is not simply working with and through some work of Nichita Stânescu or Paul Celan, it is also confrontation with the subjectivity and corporeality of the other: admitting that language takes place outside ‘me’ as an individual and that this is writing too, and is, curiously, “my” writing.”3 Christine Wertheim, too, relates the iteration of the phantom “I”:
If I think of my poetic work as conceptual it is in this sense: it plays with concepts in order to point to the existence of a gap in self-consciousness, a fracture in the self-reflecting I that is its subject. However, what makes the works “conceptual” is not merely that it points to this gap, but that in doing so it points to another gap, that between the concept of a subjective disjunction, its actual existence, and the (im)- possibility of the mind’s capacity to imag(in)e or perceptually grasp this phenomenon.3
The “I” that is neither author, narrator, or reader, but instead a ghost, and also the future anterior self, becomes masked by its mere summoning. Or, “[a]n ‘I’ that functioning as a pure passageway for operations of substitution is not some singular and irreplaceable existence, some subject or life.”10 So, who is it that is addressing you? And when you answer, who is it that voices a reply?
We view these as glimpses of the paradoxical world behind the mirror. As we have come to be aware of how visible light exists as a small increment along a rather large spectrum otherwise invisible to normal perception, so too might we understand how subjectivity manifests itself in a conceptual text. Kim Rosenfield renders the following in her statement:
Walter Benjamin: Meaning resides not simply in the text itself or in the subject matter, but in the human transmission of experience. D. W. Winnicott: The place where cultural experience is located is in the potential space between the individual and the environment. Sherrie Levine: I like to think of my paintings as membranes permeable from both sides so there is an easy flow between the past and the future, between my history and yours. Kim Rosenfield (the I): I like to think of my experience of language as chronically subjective, both in my creative life as a conceptual poet, and in my other creative life as an analytic psychotherapist. My language encounters are encounters between a subjective “I” and a lesser known “me” or actual multiple “me’s” in addition to encounters between another’s subjective me-ness and their own multiple self-states. Kim Rosenfield (the image): The world of persons is as plastic and varied as people themselves. What has been described here is the world of persons. the one we live in. In it, what I see in you is an image of myself. And what you see in me is an image of you. IT IS A WORLD OF MIRRORS. IT IS A USELESS AND OBSCURING FICTION THAT THERE IS A WORLD.3
And Rachel Blau DuPlessis simultaneously relates, “I am them as female author, simulacrum of authorship throughout history. I am a fake become ghost become real. For now that history is marked by the shadow of me and others like me.”3
The “me” and “others like me” correspond silently and loudly in the ever-arriving space of the book. In her Foreword, Caroline Bergvall writes:
[Kathy] Acker famously proposed a literary mode which only exists through other texts. It twists itself through other texts. The writer conceives of writing as a collated and plagiarized multiplicity. Cultural pillaging provides a poetic trajectory that negates the original authorial voice. The uniqueness of the work is its lack of uniqueness, its negativity. It exists as a mode of textual appropriation, a process of shadowing and transference. This poetic strategy falls in line with broad notions of conceptual practice. Something like Walter Benjamin meets Sherrie Levine. Simultaneously, it is conceived as a salutary way to escape an abject subjectivity, “I was unspeakable.”3
There is so much that is unspeakable, but also the words of so many voices echo in the “just beyond.” In the search for a concrete “I,” we slip, waver, stare at the moon, and make assumptions. A limited view locates ghosts in the past. But it is more precise to say that their roots lie in the future, in a reading not yet realized but being realized presently.
The remnants of “I”/”me” carry over to the selection of works in the anthology. Vanessa Place admits that she does not necessarily see all the writing in this anthology as conceptual writing. When asked about this she responds, “Just as the masculinist tendency towards singularity is admirably clarifying, the feminist preference for multiplicity is commendably cant. On the other hand, singularity is sometimes promiscuous, and multiplicity may lead to monogamy—problems are productive, productivity problematic. Too, I enjoy arguing.”11 Furthermore, Browne describes the solicitation process and shares that many writers declined to submit work because they not consider their work to fall inside the category of conceptual writing.3 The Anthology provides a sort of shelter for assumptions, the literary compulsions of ghosts that change your perspective so that you change your perspective of them. Uncertainty can be anxiety-inducing, but also essential, productive. Browne writes, “I especially appreciate that conceptual writing very often moves outside the realms or the confines of the personal sense of the ‘I’ and is very engaged in questioning assumptions underlying how we use language to perceive and define.”3
The elephant is the elephant: Place aptly uses the parable of five blind men and the elephant (five men “perceive and define” uniquely) to illustrate the proverb that truth is beholden to the eye of the beholder.3 This is true for our interactions with the world at large, but much less so the act of designating conceptual writing and reading a text. Place quotes Schopenhauer, “Through the allegory a concept is always to be signified, and consequently the mind of the beholder is to be drawn away from the expressed perceptible idea to one which is entirely different, abstract and not perceptible, and which lies quite outside the work of art,” and with the guidance of the specters of our imagination, we are returned to the precept:
“Conceptual writing is allegorical writing.”2
Are the ghosts an allegorical device? Or is my seeing ghosts a veridical hallucination8, both hidden and present simultaneously? If my ordinary conceptual system, in terms of how I both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature12, does the paranormal become a metaphorical, allegorical, conceptual, and/or literal way of interacting with the world?
To shift from a paranormal view to a more political one, I close with some hopes for what this anthology may accomplish. With Teresa Carmody, I hold on to the hope for a “shift from numbers to content,” especially in light of the commotion post-VIDA count13 (the blogger Lemon Hound brilliantly delves into the “What now?” and “What if?” on her own blog14).
The ghosts do not deal in numbers themselves, rather they impress upon us projections of our own embedded ideologies and the potential of impossibility. Conceptual writing cannot run from the spectrality of metaphysics. Rather, the materiality of conceptual writing becomes the foundation for the remnants that haunt our writing. There are ghosts in writing everywhere, offering hope or glimpses of apocalyptic cognition. It is the cognitive estrangement that arises out of encounters with ghosts that brings about cognitive change, the paranormal as instigating. A book is drowning, and indeed, there are ghosts. They are everywhere. Already. Always. Will be. Some are mine. Some are yours. Sometimes they meet on pages. What do these encounters look like? They look like this.References " - Janice Lee

"One half of a knucklebone or other object was a common object to carry in ancient Greece as an identifier to whoever carried the other half: a symbolon, the root of the word symbol. A symbol is a half-thing but of course most things are half-things; otherwise, what is language for? It fossilizes the potential of objects into meaning. Art has that to deal with. Language that knows it is art, on the other hand, seems to seek objecthood.
A walk through a regular art museum might have you thinking art is paintings. A distant second to that is sculpture, then drawings and prints, etc., and the farther the object deviates from these materials (or if the object was made for any other purpose than aesthetic contemplation, say, a quilt), not only is it less likely the object will be canonized (without any modifying category) as art, but the more the object will require mediation, textual padding between audience and object.
Perhaps what makes a work Conceptual, then, in visual art and in writing, is that as an object it attends to its physical deviation from canonical works but also shifts its weight to its context rather than its object. “A construction [is] a beginning of a thing,” wrote Yoko Ono in her Conceptual art book Grapefruit, and in this view, an object or a text is an idea’s anchor that begins, rather than completes, the idea.
The writings in I’ll Drown My Book are surrounded by frames: two introductions and one afterword by the editors. Each selection is then also followed by a writer’s statement, often a description of the work’s procedure or a response to the term Conceptual as it applies to her work. This textual-framing reminds me very much of how the visual arts are presented, propped by text panels in galleries and museums, battened by artist’s statements in magazines and catalogs. And ultimately, Conceptual writing itself is consciously framed by the Conceptual art movement of the 60s and its earlier predecessors in Dada and related movements; solidified by Duchamp in 1917 in his defense of his readymades which refused to supplement art objects with context but instead supplanted them with context. But Conceptual art, just as it is in writing now, never came to define a precise artistic practice, and because of this it became a convenient bag to throw anything that didn’t seem like art. In other words, art that was hard to sell: performances, happenings, instructions, installations, ephemera, sounds, silence. In dematerializing of the art object, artists were certainly responding to the hyper-commodification of contemporary art and its increasingly opaque economics.
Language, though, is already immaterial. Reading is nothing but pointedly conceptual—a reader sees symbols on a page, decodes symbols into letters and words, contemplates how those words work together—while looking at an object seems to reverse this process of signification: objects are not codes, and so we tend to encode them. And the more unfamiliar/removed the art object, the more this space requires language, which is the basis for Herbert Marcuse’s claim that art (unlike writing) functions only through estrangement. But if writing is an object, then Conceptual writers can reframe writing as “a figural object to be narrated” as described by Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman in Notes on Conceptualism. One benefit of writing attending to its objecthood is how it can force the reader out of the regular reading method described above, in following, for example, Judith Goldman’s found political texts semi-obscured with lines, inserted x’s, slashes, sub- and superscript comments, irregular capitalization. In her statement she encourages careful attention to the texts (unlike some Conceptual writers who declare that one need not even read their work to understand it), how their “particularly strained relation to the contents they re-vision and present can make it exceptionally worthwhile to over-read them in detail, to attempt to follow the exaggerated, vitiated, or simply demented protocols of reading.”
In his introduction to Against Expression, Kenneth Goldsmith mentions the “re- gestures” of internet culture, retweeting, reblogging, reposting, etc, and how simply filtering the endless mass of data has itself become an end—not in making anything but choices; the often embarrassingly misappropriated term “curating” really a shorthand now for pointing, maybe a kind of pop asceticism in this flooding glut of content, a Pinterestism that winnows out selves. In rejecting primary craftsmanship of important handmade objects in art or renouncing all regular features of canonized Literature, most see Conceptualism as having made individual artistic virtuosity irrelevant (again), but perhaps it has just mutated. In his introduction to the same book, Craig Dworkin asserts that Conceptual writing “does not seek to express unique, coherent, or consistent individual psychologies,” which sounds to me more like a tame/failed project of Modernism than a new movement, so it was refreshing to see Laynie Browne write in her introduction that “the assumption of a dualistic paradigm which claims that conceptual writing creates only ego-less works is actually another false construction,” and the range of techniques in I’ll Drown my Book confirms that.
Similarly, Conceptual writing’s parallel trajectory with the internet and online writing is an easy thread for critics to pull in attempting to explain its existence, usually concluding that the internet is responsible for radically transforming the very ethos of all writing because technology alters the way people think, and such rule-based writing and text-appropriating is the perfect example. I’m not sure writers are now or ever have been as helplessly overtaken by their tools as the claim goes, and even if they sometimes are, it does seem critics like to forget that this too, as all art, is critique. Political and cultural criticism is a kind of Romanticism at a distance, and at the farthest distance of all is art that critiques art. And the flattened, impersonal text games of Conceptualism are not counter to this but at the very end of its arc. Recently, Johanna Drucker declared Conceptualism over, as its growth has accelerated “from banal to more banal” across generations, and what remains is only a lesson for us on the “unintended consequences of changes wrought by communications systems and their cultural effects.” Possibly, but I enjoyed this book. The range presented here from pleasant-but-mindless pattern-filling to some dazzlingly unfolding logic is not easy for me to dismiss. I went back to Joseph Kosuth’s seminal essay “Art After Philosophy” to see how he extracts Conceptualism out of art through its contextualization, well before the internet slouched up, claiming art’s functions have always “used art to cover up art” (depiction of religious themes, portraiture of aristocrats, detailing of architecture or landscape, etc.) and therefore “art’s viability is not connected to the presentation of visual experience,” but rather the conditions it creates. These conditions are its access point, as the book proves.
I’ll Drown My Book begins with an excerpt from Kathy Acker’s “I Recall My Childhood” from her retelling of Great Expectations, which, although it is only first because of alphabetization, serves as the perfect first piece in how it foregrounds one of the most prevalent methods of Conceptualism—the appropriation. Of the 62 writers represented here, I counted about half as making use of, or specifically referencing, other texts in differing degrees. The technique is not new, nor is it exclusive to Conceptual or even the broader “experimental” writing category, but it is especially concentrated here. Mere collage or “remix” I suppose belongs to now-dead Postmodernism, with its affirmative action, managed diversity, scrambling to add minorities to canon instead of tearing it up. When Postmodernism was quickly absorbed by the institutions it sought to critique, perhaps writers felt no longer content just to sidle up to “master” texts; instead, writers have come to occupy the texts themselves, through erasures, détournements, reproduction, repetition, re-telling, re-typing, plain plagiarism and theft—here presented as a feminist strategy. “Thieving denaturizes what it steals,” writes Caroline Bergvall in her introduction, a practice that “is close to Irigaray’s tactical notion of female mimicry. One is not one self.” It is dangerous work. In her afterword, Vanessa Place quotes Patrick Greaney in his “Insinuation: Détournement as Gendered Repetition” that appropriation is akin to entering “enemy territory,” and warns that “poets burrow into language, but they, too, are dug into, penetrated by the very language that they want to overcome.” Even those closest to visual art’s Conceptualism came to see how appropriation and context-centric art can seal itself into emptiness: Henry Flynt, who originally coined the term “Conceptual” in art, follows this process in his essay “Against Participation” to its logical conclusion: “The only possible opponent of the Establishment is the Establishment. Such discourse, such engulfing of opposition, produces a “no exit” universe. The circle closes; insurrection becomes a fixed point.”
In its Conceptual frames, this anthology is aware of that danger, and perhaps it is in doubled stance as Conceptual and feminist that stretches its awareness. While its true that the term Conceptual writing doesn’t “dictate or predict the writing” in the anthology as Browne notes in her introduction, there is some unifying features to feminist writing (and I’m using “feminist” as a placeholder, recognizing just as the book’s subtitle does (“Writing by Women”) that not all of these texts are necessarily feminist), which, in politics and language, does tend to collect content focused on the body as a site, as so often this single feature of female experience has defined women’s function and status in societies so long as they have existed. Most works in the collection point somewhere to female corporeality, or some in their statements, as Dodie Bellamy notes, “I do not believe the conceptual—especially in the work of women—can be separated from the body.” Certainly attention collects there, and at all points of pain and features of difference. Bellamy’s excerpt here from Cunt-Ups works to embody a text in corporeality’s own weird desire and revulsion, being both inside of a body and a body itself: “my fight wants to fuck your swollen pink and white spaces, to jostle you around gently until you turn blue.” A body, after all, grows but dies, and can both create and extinguish other bodies. The title of this anthology comes from Bernadette Mayer’s use of Prospero’s cry in The Tempest, as if the anthology itself is a body pieced together, sustained in the biosystemic exchanges between the art and its own thinking, its digestion, validating the fragility of this life process—and so, as Browne says, “if a book breathes it can also drown.”
Some of the pieces I liked best were Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s excerpt from Drafts, which she describes as “torqued” versions of “certain key male-authored texts of long modernism”; the selections from Bhanu Kapil’s Schizophrene; Ryoko Seikiguchi’s sensory poems which are presented without an accompanying statement; a section from Renee Angle’s WoO comprised of “spliced” voices of Mormonism, from religious founder Joseph Smith to mailbomber Mark Hoffmann; Katie Degentesh’s poems complied from children’s writings about sex culled from internet searches; and Jen Bervin’s gorgeous pattern samples created with letters and symbols on a typewriter, inspired by Anni Albers’ typed designs and mixed with quotes from others associated with the Black Mountain College. For better or worse, this anthology has enfolded most movements in experimental writing (flarf, concrete poetry, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, post lyric, post language, a tonalist, etc.) in building its case for Conceptual writing, which mirrors the state of contemporary feminism, diffused as it is now with Freud’s key influence on the wane in literature, its kaleidoscopic multiplicity and channeled interests a portent of change.
I found it disappointing that the reproductions of images (erasures, concrete poetry, drawings, photographs, embroidery, etc) were often of poor quality, or too small, as with Kristin Prevallet’s photographs of her “Blue Marble Project,” which are presented in a tragically tiny cluster, too small to for their proportionate detail. And the organization of the texts into four chapters provided thoughtful resting points in what is a pretty long book, but the names of these chapters (Process, Structure, Matter, and Event) seemed puzzlingly arbitrary or vague, as most of these works, it seemed to me, could appear under any one of these headings.
When Vanessa Place collapses the subject and the object of art/viewing into a “sobject” it is like Richard Wollheim’s paradox of “two-foldness” in a painting: it is both surface and content, impossibly plainly there, to look at and to look in. It can be a decorated concept. Or it can spoil itself, thank goodness. It can look at its own illusion; it can worm into old important ones. In writing, language is already a found thing, a massive appropriation set whole upon a mind, and when interest in its loveliness or intricate networks painfully exceeds the critical force of an art-gesture the concept is a hostage: how beauty can stunt us. For all the self-certifying supports surrounding the writings in I’ll Drown My Book, what caught me was the protrusion of the texts, their halfness, extending, as Chus Pato’s Hordes of Writing starts, “From the other side, where we’re alone with time”. - Molly Brodak

Nicholas Grider's review


Janey Smith's review


Ubuweb‘s Anthology of Conceptual Writing

"Poetry expresses the emotional truth of the self. A craft honed by especially sensitive individuals, it puts metaphor and image in the service of song.
Or at least that's the story we've inherited from Romanticism, handed down for over 200 years in a caricatured and mummified ethos - and as if it still made sense after two centuries of radical social change. It's a story we all know so well that the terms of its once avant-garde formulation by William Wordsworth are still familiar, even if its original manifesto tone has been lost: "I have said," he famously reiterated, "that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility."
But what would a non-expressive poetry look like? A poetry of intellect rather than emotion? One in which the substitutions at the heart of metaphor and image were replaced by the direct presentation of language itself, with "spontaneous overflow" supplanted by meticulous procedure and exhaustively logical process? In which the self-regard of the poet's ego were turned back onto the self-reflexive language of the poem itself? So that the test of poetry were no longer whether it could have been done better (the question of the workshop), but whether it could conceivably have been done otherwise.
The works presented here provide one set of answers to those questions. Moreover, from the modernist experiments of Gertrude Stein and Samuel Beckett to the neodadaism of Fluxus, they hint at the range of alternatives and challenges that have been presented to the Romantic lineage of expressive poetry. This collection intends to both recall those traditions and complicate their multiple and intersecting histories. In the social context of its publication, for instance, Alan Davies' a an av es is part of the published record of Language Poetry. At the same time, its mode of composition also gestures towards L'Ouvoir de littérature potentielle [The Workshop for Potential Literature], or OuLiPo for short. The work is a multiple lipogram known as the "prisoner's constraint," in which only letters without ascenders or descenders are permitted - perhaps to be able to write in closely spaced lines and conserve the prisoner's ration of paper, or, more fancifully, to be free of the bars even of letters. Similar crossings occur in Tomoko Minami's 38, which references both the constraint based collages of Walter Abish, in works such as Alphabetical Africa and (especially) 99: The New Meaning, as well as the syllabic rearticulations of Kenneth Goldsmith's No. 111. At the same time, the writerly pleasures of 38 are made legible by the radical abstractions of sound poetry and the reduced referentiality of the twentieth century's most extreme avant-garde writing. Likewise, Christian Bök's String Variables combines the permissions granted by post-Language Poetry lyricism with the constraints of the OuLiPo. It takes the form of a "charade," in which alphabetic characters are respaced but not reordered, effecting what the Russian Futurists called sdvig: the shift of verbal mass within a text.
One should not forget the OuLiPo's origins in the College de 'Pataphysique, and that lettristic shift in String Variables might equally be seen as the swerve of Alfred Jarry's clinamen: the chance swerve of one element of a system that results in a reengineering of the whole. That swerve, in short, bends the rules of the game but continues to play. Indeed, many of these works embody the misapplied rigor and alternative logics of Jarry's 'pataphysics: "the science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments." Jarry's science investigates "the probabilities and necessities of a certain situation," to borrow from Aristotle's definition of poetry, and it accordingly studies particulars, singularities, and exceptions with an absurd necessity, projecting those moments through their logical extremes. 'Pataphysics combines incompatible systems as though they were natural extensions of one another; or it establishes structures and allows them to exhaust their own possibilities; or it puts pressure on closed systems until the logic of a particular form devours itself in an oroborian autophagy. In other words, 'pataphysics is the mental version of Yves Klein's sauté dane le vide [leap into the void], or Bas Jan Ader's second Fall (executed exactly a decade later, in 1970): the clinanematic swerve of his Jarryesque bicycle into the brack of an Amsterdam canal.
Like Ader, the majority of the writers here were participants in the set of contemporaneous practices that came to be known as "Conceptual Art." I want to stress, however, that this anthology is not meant to be a collection of writings by conceptual artists but a collection of distinctly conceptual writing. There are many works of conceptual music, for instance, but John Cage's Cheap Imitation - like the third movement of Todd Levin's Between My Mouth And Your Ear, which was derived by erasing the accidentals in one of Iannis Xenakis' scores - is an essentially written work (and not just because it has been scored). Accordingly, one might expand the sense of "writing" here to include a works like Ceal Floyer's Ink on Paper (2002) - a felt pen placed in the center of a piece of paper and allowed to bleed out - or Dávid Nez' 1970 piece "documenting vibrations of travel" during a trip: a felt pen placed in the center of a piece of paper and allowed to vibrate naturally across the surface in a seismographic waver and fit.
Such works manifest some of the tensions in this collection between materiality and concept. These works negotiate between the modernist emphasis on the material of art (in many cases here that means the materiality of language itself) and a post-modernist understanding of a theoretically based art that is independent of genre, so that a particular poem might have more in common with a particular musical score, or film, or sculpture than with another lyric. Similarly, these works remind us that the "dematerialization" of the art object in the late 1960s and early 70s was accompanied by a rematerialization of language: "language as a material entity, as something that wasn't involved in ideational values," as "printed matter - information which has a kind of physical presence," as Robert Smithson put it. "My sense of language," Smithson summed up, "is that it is matter and not ideas - i.e. 'printed matter'." In sum: A Heap of Language. Accordingly, the conceptual writing collected here is not so much writing in which the idea is more important than anything else as a writing in which the idea cannot be separated from the writing itself: in which the instance of writing is inextricably intertwined with the idea of Writing: the material practice of écriture.
Conceptualizing writing in that way returns us, perhaps surprisingly, to a poetry of form. But not to a form - to the received forms of sonnets and quatrains and the like, with their familiar schemes of stress and rhyme. Instead, the new forms and structures of conceptual writing recall the sense of artifice, constraint, and perversity that the sonnet too must once have embodied. Conceptual writing is the writing of the new new formalism, and far from being a relic of the period Lucy Lippard documented in her invaluable Six Years (1966 to 1972), it has characterized some of the most rigorous and exciting work from twenty-first century writers such as Dan Farrell and Mónica de la Torre.
For all of the ground suggested by this expanded field, the expected disclaimer: far from complete or archival, this collection is meant as a small preview gallery or first sampler of conceptual writing. From here, interested readers might move out in a number of directions: to Robert Morris' 1962 sculpture Card File [collection Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris]; to Frank Kuenstler's extraordinary book In Which; to György Ligeti's poème symphonique (for 100 metronomes); to Michael Snow's video Fridge; to the perl-scripted Apostrophe Engine of Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler-Henry; to well beyond.
In the end, this collection is an attempt to remember the end of Wordsworth's sentence: poetry is that form which "does itself actually exist in the mind."
Or, to put this all another way: This is an essay about Robert Rauschenberg if I say so."

links

Sina Queyras’s Conceptual Writing website


Craig Dworkin:

Scholarly Books:

No Medium [MIT, 2013]

Reading the Illegible [Northwestern UP, 2003]

Edited Collections:
Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (with Kenneth Goldsmith) [Northwestern University Press, 2011]

The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound (with Marjorie Perloff) [University of Chicago Press, 2009]

The Consequence of Innovation: 21st-Century Poetics [Roof Books, 2008]

Language to Cover a Page: The Early Writings of Vito Acconci [MIT Press, 2006]

Architectures of Poetry (with María Eugenia Díaz Sánchez)  [Rodopi, 2004]

       Founding Senior Editor: Eclipse

       Curator:  The UbuWeb Anthology of Conceptual Writing

Poetry Books and Pamphlets:
Alkali [Counterpath Press, 2015]

Remotes [Little Red Leaves, 2013]

       [order a hardcopy of Remotes here]
Chapter XXIV [Red Butte Press, 2013]
Motes  [Roof Books, 2011]
Emblem of My Work  [Laurence Sterne Trust, 2011]
The Perverse Library [Information As Material, 2010]
Parse [Atelos, 2008]
Maps [Editions Ubu, 2007]
Copys [No Press, 2011]
Strand  [Roof Books, 2005]
Smokes [Editions Ubu, 2004]
Dure [Cuneiform Press, 2004]

Selected essays:
The Fate of Echo  [Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (Northwestern UP, 2011)] 212kb
The Stutter of Form  [The Sound of Poetry/ The Poetry of Sound (Chicago UP, 2009)] 288kb
The Poetry of Sound  [PMLA 123: 3 (May, 2008)] 220kb
Hypermnesia  [American Poetry After 1975 (Duke UP, 2009)] 96kb
Seja Marginal  [Introduction to The Consequence of Innovation: 21st-Century Poetics (2008)] 168kb
Hard Core/ Soft Focus/ Middle Ground  [306090 10 (Winter, 2009)] 220kb
Accents Graves / Accents Gravés  [Verse 24: 1-3 (2007)] 176kb
The Imaginary Solution  [Contemporary Literature 48: 1 (Winter, 2007)] 124kb
Poetry Without Organs  [Complicities: British Poetry 1945-2007 (2007)] 339kb
Delay in Verse  [Introduction to Language to Cover a Page (2006)] 246kb
Cenography  [Introduction to Reading the Remove of Literature (2006)] 510kb
Grammar Degree Zero  [Introduction to Re-Writing Freud (2005)] 92kb
Zero Kerning  [Open Letter Twelfth Series, no. 7 (Fall 2005)] 124kb
Unheard Music  [from UbuWeb] 51kb
High Definition  [Xcp 15/16 "Keywords"] 40kb
Language Poetry [encyclopedia entry] 88kb
Whereof One Cannot Speak  [Grey Room 21 (Winter, 2005)] 396kb
Textual Prostheses  [Comparative Literature 57: 1 (Winter, 2005)] 1.5MB
Stan Brakhage, Agrimoniac  [Stan Brakhage: Filmmaker, ed. David James (Temple UP, 2005)] 166kb
Against Metaphor (construye en lo ausente)  [Introduction to Architectures of Poetry (2004)] 100kb
Mycopedagogy  [College English 66: 6 (July, 2004)] 388kb
To Destroy Language  [Textual Practice 18: 2 (June, 2004)] 88kb
Gregg Biglieri, Nyctalope  [Poet's Sampler in The Boston Review 29: 3 (Summer, 2004)]
The Patmore Assumption  [roundtable response to Documents in Poetics 4 (Summer 2003/rev 2006)] 80kb
Parting With Description  [American Women Poets in the 21st Century (Wesleyan UP, 2002)] 5.1MB
Trotsky's Hammer  [American Letters & Commentary 14 "Beyond Extremis" (Fall 2002)] 74kb
Five Words in a Stein   [Xcp: Cross-Cultural Poetics 10 "Articulation" (Spring 2002)] 98kb
Fugitive Signs  [October 95 (Winter, 2001)] 2.6MB
The Restlessness of Language  [Poet's Retrospective in the St. Mark's Poetry Newsletter (February, 2000)] 92kb
'Seeing Words Machinewise': Technology and Visual Prosody  [Sagetrieb 18: 1 (Spring, 1999)] 1.2MB
Penelope Re-Working The Twill: Patchwork, Writing, and Lyn Hejinian's My Life  [Contemporary Literature 36: 1 (Spring, 1995)] 2.2MB

Rarities, ephemera, opusculae:
Haligraphy  [letterpress (2012)]
In the Dark Wood / Nella Selva Oscura  [letterpress (2012)]
Feldspar  [letterpress (2010)]
All Saints  [Vigilance Society, 2006]
Fact  [Chain 12: "Facts" (2005)] 54kb

from The Ossature of Memory  [Verse 20: 2-3 (Summer 2004)] 86kb
[untitled]  [Onsets (Willowdale: The Gig, 2004)] 30kb
Legion (II)  [UbuWeb: 2003-2006] 64kb
Taking "Taking Chances"   [link to description and sound file]
Ar  [Kiosk (Spring 2003)] 64kb
Cyril Method  [Boston Review 26: 3 (Summer, 2001)]
Fountain  [The Nassau Weekly (December, 2001)] 86kb
Concrete Poem  [Deluxe Rubber Chicken 5] 158kb
The Gender of the Archive  [Chain 6 (1999)] 46kb
Lautgedichte, for Tom Raworth  [UbuWeb 1998-]