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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