Jeff: This is an awful lot of posts about
something incredibly trivial and at best mildly
amusing. It's also entirely divorced from British
and Irish poetry. Anyone here who wants to follow
the discussion could do so at poetryetc, where
you've been posting the identical posts. If
Britpo slides back into silence for a while, so
what? You may have noticed that almost nobody
here shows evidence of being interested, except
for a couple of Americans who are also on poetryetc.
Mark
At 07:11 AM 10/2/2009, you wrote:
>Kent asked me to post this response to someone on the Digital
>Emunction blog:
>
>"OK, Brennen, but if it isn’t, then what is it I might have “plagiarized”?
>I’m not saying I haven’t, I’m just curious what you mean.
>
>I see that you are thinking about this at your blog in terms of recent art
>history and theory, quoting Danto, and I think that’s great (Kenny
>should think it’s great, too, since he’s supposedly all about reflection
>and discussion).
>
>In their writings on the Duchampian readymade and its neo-avant-garde
>recyclings, I find critics like Buchloh and Foster more interesting than
>Danto. Though they take strong exception to Burger’s wholesale dis
>missal of the neo-avant-garde, they’re also very critical of ways the
>great, original readymade move has been cut and pasted ad infinitum
>into the art market since, say, Nouveau realisme recycled gestures
>with this or that generic tweak or novelty, that is, emptied of any radi
>cal, anti-​institutional charge
>ready-​made, as it were, for rapid capture
>and incorporation by the networks of “Museum Culture.”
>
>This recycling, I’d say, is transparently the case with the work of Kenny
>Goldsmith (Goldsmith and Bok, to be sure, who despite their polemics
>for the benefits of ego-​less
>“uncreativity” seem to have been drunk for
>the past few years on some kind of secret Author Function Ego Juice,
>are quite exuberantly open about their desire for the Museum). KG’s
>work is “uncreative” and “boring” not just as affective extension of its
>proclaimed poetic and “ontological” premises; it’s uncreative and boring
>because it’s so damn old hat: an attempted
>importation of decades-​old
>gestures into a Po-​Biz scene that, as
>Goldsmith himself puts it, “is forty
>years behind art,” and thus likely (at least part of its crowd) to take
>his “conceptual” banalities as exciting and new. In some circles, they
>call it snake oil.
>
>But it’s MY Day, Brennen, that is truly new, you see. The Authentic
>Item. Because no one has ever done it quite like this before. I’ve taken
>his whole bookum and made it mine, in single decisive act. And doing
>so, I’ve put his plagiarized bookum into the
>dustbin of sub-​poetic sub-​
>history. I am being both funny and serious, in saying that. Doubled in
>my intent, so to speak, like the red-​hot “Doubled K” poker that K.
>dreamily mentions in his blurb to my Day, where he acknowledges me,
>his mirrored K, as his master. And it’s why he’s going to put my book up
>on UbuWeb.
>
>And one more thing, though here I’m not kidding around: What they
>call “Conceptual poetry”? It’s forty years behind Broodthaers and Institu
>tional Critique.
>
>Kent"
Announcing The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban
Poetry (University of California Press).
Forthcoming in November 2009 2009.
To read more go to: http://go.ucpress.edu/WholeIsland
"The Whole Island is a masterwork of cartography:
a map of what is, for English-language readers,
an almost unexplored territory, full of poets--at
home and in the diaspora--whom we ought to know."
-Eliot
Weinberger
"A definitive anthology guiding curious poets,
literary scholars and teachers, and generations of
readers out of the shadow of ignorant,
imperialist 'lockdown' surrounding the breadth and power of
Cuban poetry. [Weiss] provides a salient,
comprehensive introduction covering the fascinating vidas
of individual poets, literary movements,
political exigencies, and the vicissitudes of an ongoing cultural
struggle. But the imagination of the poetry
rules. What emerges is an essential compendium to
world literature. Presente!"
-Anne
Waldman
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