and are Spain the best football team ever? I prefer the 1970 Brazilians but picture reception was less reliable then. I also believe in Hamlet but as some other clouds have been stirred lately perhaps someone might want to consider Vanessa Place's already notorious (note, notorious, meaning) essay, from as long ago on the digital watch as last April, 'Poetry is Dead, I Killed It'
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2012/04/poetry-is-dead-i-killed-it/
while I have seen Perloff's 'Poetry on the Brink' cited in tandem:
http://www.bostonreview.net/BR37.3/marjorie_perloff_poetry_lyric_reinvention.php
I like the wit in Place's paragraph below:
"Drucker’s central thesis is that conceptualism is a symptom of a smooth-faced crisis of the Zeit,
in which systems exist to perpetuate themselves as systems rather than
servants. Where we are we only as bits of webbing used to tat more
networks that work to no other end but their own endless extension. This
seems correct in a general sense and what of it? For, in a general
sense, given that all we are are more or less attractive DNA delivery
devices, why should our souls be any less utilitarian or bent towards
something other than a dumb repetition? As Hegel noted, “Spirit is a
bone.” Or, as Craig Dworkin has illustrated, the Man Booker Prize is
awarded yearly to singularly unoriginal work,
much like the pages of most poetry anthologies go tęte ŕ bęte with
their faithful readers. Too, it is too easy to note that the majority of
poetry that is produced is produced as reams of subjectivity, and that
the ability to sell one’s innermost and/or ethos is the call to market
for many an MFA. Or that poetry is largely a cottage industry of the
university, and like other university discourses, is the hand that feeds
it. Or that much political poetry presumes that the moo-faced masses
must be written at in order to be written for. But Drucker’s argument
falls most apart in its particulars, from its belief that aesthetic
movements follow each other like right and left feet, to its daisy chain
of false predicates and caged assumptions. To wit: (valid) art is about
opposition; opposition is about critique; (valid) politics is about
critique; thus (valid) poetics is about (valid) politics; critique is
about apartness; conceptualism is sameness; thus conceptualism is not
critique; thus conceptualism is neither valid politics nor valid
poetics. However, each semi-colon should serve as question mark, for
each point betrays its own faulty presumption. To be equally
reductive/reactive: art is about nothing but art, poetry is pointless
except as poetry, and The Matrix was a very good movie indeed.
Drucker wants to believe that once an aesthetic gesture has become
institutionalized, it loses its critical cachet, which is its only avant
ace. And she wants to believe this while also asserting the postmodern
maxim that we are but culture products and producers, and while
acknowledging the commonplace of cultural critique in a
post-Institutional Critique culture of production, in which we are but
producers, etc. But if we can agree that we may function critically not
from the conceit of extramural critique, which is essentially a
postmodern argument, but rather from a relational perspective, which is
the more conceptualist approach, we can avoid the temptation to fall
into the sweet satisfactions of self—including a sorrowful self that has
seen it all before. The best minds of my generation are servile, but it
is service with a purpose. We take it and dish it out and leave its
rumination to other minds. For, as Marjorie Perloff argues, the genius
of conceptualism is in the plating"
--
David Joseph Bircumshaw
Website and A Chide's Alphabet
http://www.staplednapkin.org.uk
The Animal Subsides http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html
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