From: Tim Allen <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: 'Day' by Kent Johnson
To: [log in to unmask]
Date: Sunday, September 27, 2009, 8:07 AM

In case there is any misunderstanding here let me just say that I by no means mean there should be any transparent link between writer and text. If however, like David, I perceive bourgeois values and tones to be apparent within the text itself, then I think it is right to mention it, and not be put off saying it because the writer in question is supposed to be within some radical or innovative scene. For me this has nothing to do with Kent Johnson by the way - he's far more complicated.

Anyway, I repeat, I am talking 'texts', not 'writer', it is an important distinction. We never know the 'writer'.

Tim A.

On 27 Sep 2009, at 12:44, richard owens wrote:

SEAN &C: it's also worth adding that a good deal of Kent's work over the past 30 years has been given to issues of literacy, social justice & economic inequality -- i.e. he _chooses_ to teach Spanish at a community college (w/ a PhD on Creeley &c) vs. competing for a "successful" hackademic career; he worked teaching literacy in Nicaragua during the Sandinista Revolution, edited an anthology of Sandinista poetry, etc. rich ...        ........richard owens 810 richmond ave buffalo NY 14222-1167 damn the caesars, the journal damn the caesars, the blog --- On Sun, 9/27/09, Sean Bonney <[log in to unmask]">[log in to unmask]> wrote: From: Sean Bonney <[log in to unmask]">[log in to unmask]> Subject: Re: 'Day' by Kent Johnson To: [log in to unmask]">[log in to unmask] Date: Sunday, September 27, 2009, 7:24 AM David, it looks pretty clear that Kent's work is a satire on Kenny Goldsmith. Second, this is the second time in as many weeks that you've accused someone of being "bourgeois", neither time with much justification. Whats the problem? http://abandonedbuildings.blogspot.com/ --- On Sun, 27/9/09, David Bircumshaw <[log in to unmask]> wrote: From: David Bircumshaw <[log in to unmask]> Subject: Re: 'Day' by Kent Johnson To: [log in to unmask] Date: Sunday, 27 September, 2009, 6:02 AM My, Kent's come on. I used to know him before he became a famous bourgeois writer, you know, he even once suggested we collaborate, but I never got him to specially sign anything. I guess though I would have had to pay for that privelige. One thing, he is a bit out of date, the art of plagiarism by middle-class authors was long ago perfected by Messrs Chaucer and Shakespeare. My love to him and his non-ego.   David Bircumshaw   Author of 'If It's On the Internet, It Doesn't Exist' 2009/9/26 Jeffrey Side <[log in to unmask]> '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-&#8203;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-&#8203;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-&#8203; cases of the avant-&#8203;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-&#8203;dark of an inno­cent pre-&#8203;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 -- David Bircumshaw "A window./Big enough to hold screams/ You say are poems" - DMeltzer Website and A Chide's Alphabet http://www.staplednapkin.org.uk The Animal Subsides http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html Leicester Poetry Society: http://www.poetryleicester.co.uk Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/david.bircumshaw

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