'Day' a new work by Kent Johnson:
http://www.digitalemunction.com/2009/09/22/advertisement-kent-
johnsonsday/
Price: $21, plus shipping and handling. ($250 for each of ten numbered
copies signed by the Author, no charge for shipping and handling.) All
copies come with specially designed, affixed stickers (on cover, back
cover, title page, spine, etc.) to impart authorship, copyright, blurbs,
and co-​production.
If the 836-pp. Day established Kenny Goldsmith as without a doubt the
leading conceptual poet of his time, the 836-pp. Day by Kent Johnson
may well be remembered for nudging the politics of Conceptual Poetry
out of blithely affirmative, institutional framings, and into truly nega
tional critical spaces.
–Juliana Spahr
Recent trends in technologies of communication have already begun to
subvert the romantic bastions of “creativity” and “authorship,” calling
into question the propriety of copyright through strategies of plagiaris
tic appropriation… Such developments have caused poets to theorize an
innovative aesthetics of “conceptual literature” that has begun to ques
tion, if not to abandon, the lyrical mandate of originality in order to
explore the potentials of the “uncreative,” be it automatic, mannerist,
aleatoric, or readymade, in its literary practice… Such activity (employ
ing self and ego-​effacing tactics via uncreativity, unoriginality, appropri
ation, plagiarism, fraud, theft, and falsification as its precepts) has
become one of the most radical, if not one of the most popular, limit-​
cases of the avant-​garde at the advent of the millennium. With Day,
Kent Johnson claims his place as one of the major figures of this new
writing, showing, in single move, how Conceptual Poetry has been
nearly forty years behind the politics of Institutional Critique.
–Christian Bök
As he once asked, at the blog of the Poetry Foundation (though with
what seems in retrospect a disingenuous banality), “Nearly one hundred
years after Duchamp, why hasn’t appropriation become a valid, sus
tained[,] or even tested literary practice?” Here now, Kent Johnson
wagers the query with a vengeance, brazenly upping the ante of Uncre
ative dialectic by throwing down before us a readymade gesture that is
nothing but dizzying in the synthesis of its conception: a flagrant appro
priation of a Conceptual work’s Authorship and Copyright, categories
which themselves had been branded into this same text, in flagrant
appropriation by another K (yes, me), in first, antithetical instance.
Thus, here at Boring Ranch, in gamble with a gambol, he claims all the
cow chips, one could say, with the searing, asterisked irony of a double-
K smoking iron. His Day emerges hot and bright from the dead-​dark of
an innocent pre-​dawn, a sort of authentic Afterlife that rises from
the “original” simulacral body in which it had lain (latent and expec
tant). As in the best of Sherrie Levine, but more radically still, it sum
mons us, now, that we might think harder in its sudden light. Indeed,
Kent Johnson’s Day stands as the first Conceptual gesture of its kind in
the history of American poetry: An open, literal theft of an
entire “book,” exhibited without shame, as a new and strange Work of
Art in our Museum of Modern Poetry. I can only tip my hat.
–Kenny Goldsmith
Order from BlazeVOX Books. Orders also available in the near future
from SPD and Amazon
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