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One thing, he is a bit out of date, the art of plagiarism by middle-class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.
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-​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
>
--
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
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