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Language of the Power Elite
I can’t believe this bit of brilliance from Keston Sutherland came to me via Harriet, which has been toadying to Con Writers and their Maven-in-Chief Marjorie Perloff for a long while now. I’m thankful to whatever whistleblower at Harriet found it and posted the link to it, though. Here’s a sample: [S]ignificantly for so-called “conceptual” poets, the refusal to give a conceptual account of the “subject” whose rejection defines the schema of their art is a manifest expression of contempt for the very work of conceptual definition itself.Read More
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Stupid Stupid Shakespeare
Remember the children’s books about a family named the Stupids? Evidently one of their descendants has landed a blogging gig at Harriet—a fellow we’ve met before: K. Silem Mohammad. His latest post is hard to beat for sheer stupidity. The irony, of course, is that our blogger resorts to actual compositional writing in order to praise a book called Words of Love for being “beyond the usual condition of appropriational recycledness”—a book, that is, of surpassing stupidity.Read More
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China Doorknobs
Anthony Madrid is by far the most rewarding-to-read blogger on Harriet these days. One feels like each of his posts is a full bucket pulled up from a pouring brook: the taste is good and complex and one can’t forget that the brook is flowing on as one reads—that the bucketful is merely a sample. In this post, Madrid offers a wonderful quote from H. L. Mencken; I only wish he’d documented where it came from: The old-time poet did not bother with theories.Read More
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The Creepy Pseudo-Thought of Languish Poetry
“[E]xperimentalism is often suspicious of formally conservative notions like ‘ear’ and the essentialist values they evoke. Language poetry in particular is in large part predicated on the rejection of the illusion of presence promoted by the privileging of speech and voice.” —K.Read More
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Flying the Flag
Reading this, it struck me that watching Kenny Goldsmith try to think is like watching Keanu Reeves try to act. The lack of basic skills is no bar to either man making a tidy income, because each has stumbled into a style of performance that requires no talent—a value-free type of entertainment that speaks both to the canny cynicism of their self-presentation and to the low expectations of their audience.Read More
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Copper-Egg People
Just when you think the folks at Harriet have finally disappeared down the rabbit-hole of Con Writing and its several intersecting tunnels (look just under the sod: they don’t dig deep), in walks Linh Dinh to shake things up.Read More
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Fail Better
As he notes in the title to his post, Martin Earl fails here. But in satire, failure is success, just as—in the satire of literature that is the career of Kenneth Goldsmith—”uncreative writing” is the canny feint of the con man.Read More
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Avant-Chunks
“I like the idea of inspiration as regurgitated output. I’m stealing all these ideas from you, I hope you know, so don’t get mad when you see the regurgitated output … uh, I mean ‘inspiration’….” –“Poet” Sharon Mesmer in a Harriet interview with Edwin Torres. Torres prefaces his chat with Mesmer by claiming that her “poem” entitled “This Poem” “shows a fabulous breadth of poetics.” Since the “poem” is a flarf assemblage of stolen phrases, this is like praising a burglar’s storage unit for showing a fabulous breadth of commodities. The comparison of poetics and commodities is appropriate.Read More