'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