Kent Johnson / Craig Dworkin - Hey, Nobody Ever Said Conceptualism Was Easy - The Claudius App 3

KENT JOHNSON /
CRAIG DWORKIN
HEY, NOBODY
EVER SAID CONCEPTUALISM WAS EASY

The Kent Johnson / Craig Dworkin Letters: On the Contested Authorship of Doggerel for the Masses: Forty Sestets of Love and an Ode of Despair, with the Suppressed Preface to the Book Revealed Here for the First Time, and with a Few of Its Poems for Illustration

Craig Dworkin, Ph.D.
John Greenleaf Whittier Professor of Poetry
Department of English
University of Utah
Salt Lake City, UT

March 1, 2012

Dear Craig,

It’s been brought to my attention that you’ve recently published a book titled Doggerel for the Masses (plus long subtitle) and attributed it to my Authorship. And I see from the book’s web page that there are, on its back cover, rather sneering blurbs aimed at me by two of your Conceptual cohorts, Vanessa Place and Kenneth Goldsmith.

It’s quite obvious that your sleight-of-hand work is meant as some sort of payback for my appropriation, a couple years ago, of Goldsmith’s infamous DAY and for my version’s full-page ad in Poetry Magazine. I can understand how it would have annoyed your group that my DAY (along with Geoffrey Gatza’s video performance of its production—I’m of course distressed that Geoffrey has turned around and participated in your caper) is a more complex work, conceptually speaking, than Goldsmith’s “original,” rather banal fabrication. Still, your prank “response” is clearly inappropriate, and it most definitely crosses a line that I cannot abide: It is one thing, as I did with my DAY, to “steal” a work that has already been brazenly stolen; it is quite another to steal another living Author’s name, ascribing to him a whole book that he has not written. I don’t care if you’ve openly claimed in your Against Expression anthology that “the next frontier of propriety will materialize when conceptual writing antagonizes the institutions of poetry by signing for others under texts that they have not written.” And I don’t care that “plagiarism, appropriation, falsification, and theft” are in the publicly proclaimed ConPo “poetics” toolkit. I am a writer with more than two dozen collections to my credit, and I will not stand for anyone toying around with my rights to clear and transparent paratextual identification. You can go about your silly and recycled post-Pop games, if that’s how you want to spend your fifteen minutes of fame, but don’t start messing with my Author Function.

I will give you a fortnight from the date of this letter to send me copy of a satisfactory public apology—one that unambiguously identifies yourself as the actual Author of Doggerel for the Masses and which clarifies, too, that you previously falsely published under my name (in Fulcrum and The Claudius App) a good measure of the book’s content. As well, I would like you to send me editorial confirmation that this apology will be published, without emendations, in either one of two popular web journals, these being Jacket2 or the aforesaid Claudius App. And I would like, further, that you send me simultaneous editorial confirmation that this apology will be printed as a full-page paid advertisement in Poetry Magazine (providing hard-copy receipt of the ad’s payment).

If you fail to meet any of the provisions of this request within the period of time stated above, I will guide my legal counsel to initiate proceedings.

Kent Johnson

__

Dr. Kent Johnson
Highland Community College
2998 West Pearl City Road
Freeport, IL 61032

July 4, 2012

Dear Kent,

As you know, I did not in fact write Doggerel for the Masses, although I am happy to admit it was my idea. I will also admit that, despite your claim to the contrary, I was impressed by your publication of “Kent Johnson’s” Day. It’s a very interesting gesture: both a continuation and critique of Kenny Goldsmith’s (and my) conceptual project. I think even Kenny felt a grudging admiration for it. One night, when we were having cocktails with Ikue Mori and some members of the Kronos Quartet, he said as much. Or almost.

So it seemed to me that your response to Kenny in turn needed a response. I have a friend, or an acquaintance really, who I think is a talented and unjustly overlooked writer, translator, and scholar. In spite of the quality of her writing—which, I should add, is not conceptual, but instead utilizes a fractured lyric with an edge of American surrealism (think Nicanor Parra crossed with Lorine Niedecker’s more outré work)—she finds it difficult to be published. She has finished her Ph.D. at a prestigious program, but can’t get a job. Part of the problem is that she’s not good at what is often called networking, but which also might be called mild to moderate sycophancy. Perhaps you can relate.

I suggested that she write a book of poems that both imitated and parodied your style. That would of course continue the conceptual arc you had started, but it also seemed like an aesthetic gesture in the best and purest sense of that term. Because she published the book heteronymously (a strategy I know you’re fond of), there would be no chance of praise for her personally. In fact, it would be potentially catastrophic for her career if her authorship were known.

Why is that important? Her position shows the extraordinary privilege both you and I enjoy. And your response has showed that, in spite of your ardent and repeated protests, you are a Poetry Insider.

This is the odd thing about success in poetry, especially post-avant poetry: it seems so necessary before you have it, but when you’ve finally secured it, it’s dissatisfying, almost irrelevant. I’m a fairly well-respected poet-scholar. I have tenure, so my job is as secure as anyone’s in the country. I make a comfortable living, own a relatively nice house, drive a relatively nice car. But I live in Utah, a state that, to put it mildly, is not known for its cutting-edge arts scene. Most of my students are of middling ability, although there are some notable exceptions, and they are largely indifferent to both my work and the degree of acclaim and criticism it has received. And I recognize that there are a lot of people in the poetry world who have no idea who I am: the typical MFA graduate and/or reader of American Poetry Review would probably dismiss my work as “academic,” if she ever encountered it.

You and I discussed this at length at the AWP last year, and I’ll repeat what I said to you then: while you rail at my moderate degree of success, you occupy the most privileged position in contemporary poetry.

On the one hand, you have all the trappings of Poetic Success. Your books are regularly reviewed, and those reviews are never tepid: you’re celebrated as an innovator, or dismissed as a provocateur. (As always, Wilde was right: the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.) You’ve worked to bring non-Anglophone poetry to often monolingual North American readers, publishing with the University of Michigan, Princeton, and the University of California. The Yasusada work inspired reviews in the Village Voice, Asahi Shimbun, Financial Times, and The Nation, as well as a special supplement in the Boston Review, among dozens of other articles and essays around the world. Doubled Flowering was the subject of two panels at the MLA annual conference and special features in the AWP Chronicle, as well as of a collection of essays just published by Shearsman. And now Yasusada is even the topic of a Hollywood movie script that’s currently in progress. You’ve won an NEA grant and two awards from PEN, received a Pushcart Book of the Month Award and an Illinois Arts Council Poem of the Year Prize, none of which you seem shy about mentioning in your biographies. You haven’t yet been invited to the White House (unlike Kenny) but that’s still an impressive record.

In what I think is an extraordinary irony, you are more successful than many of the people you attack—including me. In other words, you are a Poetry Insider.

However, you studiously work to undermine your Insider Status, while taking care never to eliminate it completely. You recognized the danger of being celebrated by Marjorie Perloff and Ron Silliman—perhaps the two most influential critics in the post-avant world —and you immediately set out to piss them off. That means you’ve earned both their praise and their ire, and you can invoke either or both of those responses depending on the demands of the situation.

You occupy the sweet spot in North American poetry: you’re not an outsider poet, working a series of shit jobs and struggling both to pay the bills and to get your work published. You’re not a tenured professor like me, or a demi-celebrity like Kenny. You’ve got a comfortable job in a small, Midwestern town with a low cost of living. You like your neighbors and commiserate with them about the Cubs. (Of course you’re a Cubs fan—their record of seemingly willful failure suits you perfectly.) You get to go fishing for smallmouth bass and foraging for morels.

But in your most recent letter to me, your mask slipped: you actually threatened me with a lawsuit. We both know that’s a bluff, so that’s not the issue. Instead, you’ve spent most of your career seeking legal action—or even better, a criminal charge—since that would be the ultimate validation of your faux-outsider status. But by standing as a potential plaintiff, you acknowledge that you’re an Insider with a poetic reputation to protect.

At this point, your only option is to embrace your Insiderness. Here’s how I can help. Kenny has a connection at a fantastic and spectacularly expensive New American restaurant in Manhattan. Let me know when you’ll be back on the East Coast; the three of us can have dinner (the fennel-dusted sweetbreads are extraordinary) and discuss our next project. I’ve been kicking around the idea of a fake autobiography of John Cage written only with text found in the comments sections of right-wing blogs. Interested?

Best,
Craig

P.S. Dinner’s on Kenny. You’d be amazed at how much that guy makes.

__

Craig Dworkin, Ph.D.
John Greenleaf Whittier Professor of Poetry
Department of English
University of Utah
Salt Lake City, UT

March 21, 2012

Dear Craig,

I’ll be brief. My warning to you was not a bluff. In fact, because you failed to meet my deadline of a fortnight to respond, I’d already directed my attorney to commence proceedings. By the time you get this, you will have received a certified letter.

Kent

__

Eric Linsker
Jeff Nagy
Editors
The Claudius App

March 25, 2012

Dear Sirs,

The text of a letter from Kent Johnson “to me” has been leaked my way by a friend in Washington, D.C. I’ve also received the copy of a supposed letter I wrote “in response” to Johnson. In addition, there are rumors circulating that someone has sent you a Preface by “Charles Bernstein” that directly addresses my person. I’ve heard through the grapevine that you plan to publish all of these things in the next issue of The Claudius App.

If you do publish these materials (it is your right do so; I wouldn’t try to stop you, and I even encourage it), I’d request you do me the courtesy of printing this denial. I am sure you will understand my concern.

I never received any letter from Kent Johnson, nor did I, obviously, ever “respond” to him. These correspondences are hoaxes, figments of Mr. Johnson’s pathological mind (I’d wager that the Preface by “Bernstein” is entirely spurious, as well). In fact, I only learned that my name had been associated with Johnson’s Doggerel for the Masses when I saw its ad in the Chicago Review last week, in the theatrical blurb “by” Vanessa Place.

My request that you print this clarification is reasonable, and I (along with the other innocent Conceptual writers who have been brought into this) do trust you will honor it.

Sincerely,
Craig Dworkin

__

April 1, 2012

(First day of National Poetry Month—the irony just occurred to me!)

Dear Jeff and Eric,

Thank you for sharing Dworkin’s missive. What does “Sincerely” mean, I wonder? Can a Conceptual Author be sincere?

I should have known better than to underestimate the determination of these folks to push “theft, appropriation, falsification,” and the like (including Dworkin’s own recent call, in Against Expression, for new conceptual modes of authorial counterfeit) to their furthest frontier. Nor should I have underestimated their resolve for revenge.

I have to hand it to him and his clique: Their proclaimed poetic of amorality and nihilism, extremist as it is, is no joke. They mean it to the death, and they will stop at nothing. They are like on a suicide mission inside a ConAir jetliner. Heaven is a glass-walled Headquarters, with cheese, wine, and Security Guards.

Well, that is it. People can decide for themselves. I’m almost ready to just say, “Sure, OK, the book is mine!”

I mean, Hey, nobody ever said conceptualism was easy.

Best,
Kent

__

Nota bene: This Preface to Doggerel for the Masses, written by Charles Bernstein, was dropped from the book at the last minute. It seemed to both me and the publisher that Mr. Bernstein (who seems, frankly, to have a thing about one-upping even his past confederates) was using the occasion of the good-faith invitation I extended to take some petty, sarcastic, and distracting jabs at U.S. Conceptual poetics in general and at me in particular. Nevertheless, the editors of The Claudius App requested I share the piece with them, and so I did. I don’t know how they found out about its existence, but that is perhaps not so surprising or important, in the end, the post-avant world being the enchanted thicket of gossip it is. In any case, because the editors have expressed (a bit melodramatically, in my estimation!) that the Preface “bears great archival value for the history of U.S. and world avant-garde poetry in our time,” I have agreed to allow it to be published here, trusting the reader will readily sympathize with my decision to exclude it from the collection.

—Craig Dworkin

***

Except for by Dmitri Prigov: A Preface

for Marjorie Perloff

On April 30th, 2011, the last day of National Poetry Month, Craig Dworkin was seized, as he has related, by some minor god of prosody to write these poems.1 It was a kind of rapture, apparently. He reports that he wrote them at his dresser, standing, in one tremendous rush. “It was,” he emailed me, “the triumphant day of my life.” Each poem is (with exception of the ode at the end) in four sestets and a meter of perfect iambic tetrameter. Rhymes (end, internal, perfect, and slant) abound, loosely following sonic patterns of the Welsh Tawddgyrch Cadwynog and the Cyhydedd Naw Ban. To my knowledge, these are the first instances of poems in such strict formal constraints to come accompanied by (or burdened with) an extensive apparatus of footnotes by the Author.

Except for (it occurs to me as I type!) by Dmitri Prigov and Slavoj Zizek,2 who famously attributed some of their texts (both doing so not only with essays and reviews, but with folk ballad verse) to notorious contemporaries, with meticulous annotations, always, to confirm “legitimacy”.... Such subterfuge of agency, I’d propose, is eminently Conceptual in nature and drive. As Dworkin himself has it (if with an innocent belatedness, since the Slavs, at least, evidently beat him to the notion) in his Introduction to Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (Northwestern UP, 2010), a book that features my work:

Signing a text that one hasn’t written will surely become less remarkable, and the next frontier of propriety will materialize when conceptual writing antagonizes the institutions of poetry by signing for others under texts that they have not written.

It is an interesting proposal, and prompts, I think, some questions the new Conceptualism may wish to consider. Does this imply, for instance, that the work of Araki Yasusada should now be seen as a U.S. Conceptual work avant la lettre (I hope not, of course, but the question seems begged)? If so, would this mean that the standard category of the Author, until now virtually untouched by Conceptual gesture, becomes part of the “textual field” to be appropriated, plagiarized, faked, copied, and the like? If paratext is the placenta to which profession is umbilically corded, and the Conceptual Work is the fetus roped at the navel, will there not be a generic miscarriage if the placenta is ruptured? Are the Conceptual poets really up for such self-induced abortion, which will most certainly call Institutional opprobrium down upon their collective Authorial heads, just at the moment those heads are receiving Institutional blessings? Perhaps not. Or maybe I should say: It perhaps seems not: Indeed, pondering Dworkin’s quote, one must note that he, after so boldly proposing the idea of this “next frontier of propriety,” did an abrupt volte face and signed his legal Name to his very next book (i.e. this one)! How strange. And why so? Was this “next frontier” but a Goldsmithian “concept” requiring only “thought” and no enactment? I do not mean these queries as critique; I mean them as honest bemusements. It is good for us to ask questions, much as we must sometimes pretend not to hear them when the wrong people are asking. Perhaps Dworkin and his prolifically pregnant, officially ID’d compatriots will proffer some answers in the near future.3

In any case, it appears that two of Dworkin’s close friends, both well-known musicians (one of them a hip-hop artist, the other a folksinger), have already planned to set these poems to music. A third, a famous experimental composer from Mexico—former roommate of the poet—has declined the idea that they be set as Lieder, claiming the “sing-song doggerel” rhythm makes it impossible to do so. I’m not, admittedly, the closest reader of Dworkin’s work, but I hardly think “sing-song doggerel” is appropriate. While I am quite respectful of hip-hop and folk-song genres, I do still hope (as I suspect Dworkin does) that some more classical adaptation may result, for these lyrics, in their strange pleadings and transports, demand it.

In the end, though, the matter of musical setting is of secondary matter. That is two matters, awkwardly. Poetry must live or die both on the page and off the page. Sometimes it successfully lives on the page and off from it. Sometimes it dies on the page and lives off from it. And vice-versa. That is two matters of off. I hope the former. I mean the second of the three, to be exact. But I’ll take the latter, too. The two latter, that is, as there is the vice-versa. (If I seem to be losing some clarity here, not excluding the awkward use of “latter,” I would say, as I’ve said before, that such is what we should do to undermine Official Verse Culture.)

The point is this: There is way too much attention given to the success of poetry on the page, when truth is that the page is but a surface or cave wall, etc., which we avantists tend to regard as “matter” (the pun is fortuitous), even as we are absolutely enraptured by the shadows there; we stare so hard our hair catches fire from the fire behind, and our whole heads (or is that head?) go up in flames, and it’s a horrible death, even though no one cares. Not the gods, certainly. They’ve sort of set things up that way for poets, the jerks. By jerks I mean the gods, for sure.

Seriously, though, I suppose the sadness Dworkin feels about such mythological tragedies marks the stresses of these poems. As it does the three letter-essays about some South American poets, which are, in fact, much more interesting than the poems. And as it does (hard for me to say, but credit where credit is due!) the e-mail essay on “Poetic Economies of Scale,” which Dworkin, it seems, decided to throw in at the last second. He nails it.

The great Scottish bard Robert Burns often wrote in iambic sestets. That is a coincidence, let us trust, insofar this work is concerned. Did you know there are more statues of Burns in the United States than there are for all other American poets combined? What makes this especially crazy is that he conducted a long career in the slave trade, and his advocacy of the practice approached near-pathological dimensions! Go figure: Poetry and Slavery, raising together a surfeit of guano-teared monuments on urn-like plinths. I don’t state this concern about formal similarity lightly: I have written an essay openly accusing Dworkin of being a self-serving racist.

Neruda was a Stalinist, and he was complicit in the Third International/Alfaro Siqueiros plot to murder Trotsky in Mexico City in 1940. I assume Dworkin’s title (I suppose this is another concern) is in no way a straight homage to that pompous, petit-bourgeois, and opportunist apparatchik.

—Charles Bernstein, February 11, 2011

1 I wrote the poem titled “Go suck on it, you BlazeVOX creep” on September 7, 2011, after Bernstein had written this Preface (obviously). But the poem follows his prosodic description of the others.—CD

2 Given that he gently chides me in a few instances above, I trust Charles Bernstein will not mind my noting that he errs in leaving off another somewhat recent example: The Miseries of Poetry: Traductions from the Greek (Skanky Possum Press, 2003), traduced by Alexandra Papaditsas and Kent Johnson, where most of the traductions are rendered in accentual-syllabic reverb of classical Greek quantitative meters.—CD

3 Bernstein wrote these remarks about my “authorial hypocrisy” without knowing that I’d intended to ascribe the works to “Kent Johnson,” who is, in fact, the Author he has accused of racist appropriation (Bernstein’s playful reference to me, in that regard, is a bizarre coincidence). Bernstein and perhaps others, I realize, might well presume it was his admonishment above that caused me to do so. If so, he and whoever would be very wrong. Forsooth, it was always my well-envisioned Conceptual plan to put this book under Johnson’s signature.—CD

__

And when cell rings, my legs blow off

The thing I’m trying to explain
Is that it’s all a suicide,
This crap of iambs that would be
Some statement of acuity,
Is all a mess of self-regard,
The measure’s in my ego drive.

I want to strap a belt to me,
To blow up my hypocrisy.
I ask my comrade Christian Bök,
To set it off with Blackberrý;
But he declines preoccupied,
With microbes and eternal fame.1

I call up my friend Marjoríe
And ask her if she’ll help poor me.
I ask her will she detonate
The belt I wear on my midriff.
But she says No, says back to me,
She’s with Death Condie in Hong Kong.2

I write my fan, the man at Penn,
I ask him if he’ll help me out.
He closely listens to my plan,
And promises to call right back.
And I say Yes, Charles, thank you much.
And when cell rings, my legs blow off.3

1 Bök is implanting a DNA poetic code of sorts into a bacterium; as he readily admits, he hopes his work will live for billions of years beyond the extinction of the human race.

2 Condoleeza Rice, former President of Stanford University and Secretary of State in the Bush Administration, one of the principal architects of the concocted mass-murder war in Iraq and a close friend of Marjorie Perloff, critical champion of the American Language and Conceptual poets. If this suggests I don’t hold Marjorie Perloff in great esteem, the wrong impression is given. She has been a prolifically brilliant critic and equally prolific in her generous support of poets and critics far and wide. See the reference to Perloff in the poem before this one. Ideology is complicated.

3 Though I’ve only spoken once to Charles Bernstein in person (in company of the late, great Carl Rakosi, in Orono, Maine, quite a good number of years ago), I hope we will have another opportunity. He’s claimed (in a book published in 2011 by University of Chicago) that I am a racist who is driven by “White Male Rage.”

But poetry exceeds her world

You think that satire’s all I got,
Though you don’t know the half of it.
I don’t proclaim to be Fence stuff,
But grief for Nancy Smith was rough,1
For me and friends and all the sheep,
Who baa with faces of our dead.2

I do respect the New York School,
The Language folks, Projectivists;
I do admire Hybrid stuff,
The San Francisco Renaissance.
My nag is with the burning girl,
Who screams in iambs for Allah.

Though then I go to latte shop,
And order there a fancy drink.
I gaze out on the Brooklyn scene
And read my homey, Kenneth Koch.3
When John comes by we say hello,
We share our versions from Rimbaud.4

Our talk gets dark, we deeply kiss,
We fondle each one’s private parts.
We don’t get hard because we’re old,
But hand jobs beat limp politics.
The girl is ash, and that’s a shame,
But poetry exceeds her world.

1 “Grief for Nancy Smith”: lifted from a long poem by John Ashbery. It was in APR; I can’t recall the title.

2 Some may sense an allusion here to my poem about John Ashbery, James Tate, Dean Young, and myself, the one titled “The Best American Poetry,” but this is not the case.

3 One of my favorite poets, totally underestimated, certain to be seen as the Alexander Pope of our times, though it’s not yet the time.

4 Both Ashbery and I have translated Rimbaud’s Illuminations, my own done with Kenny Goldsmith, Christian Bök, Kasey Silem Mohammed, and Vanessa Place, under the collective name of “The Rejection Group.”

If poetry’s to hit the mark

Farid explodes and that’s too bad;1
Our work’s now read in Allahbad.
That makes us feel a bit confused,
But this doth swell avantist muse.
You take your oil from where it comes.
We wish to win a Major Prize.2

The culture’s mowed, what is our place?
We seem to be a lumpen race.
Reduced to games of fraud and theft,3
And readings for the C-I-A.4
It could be worse, we could be dead,
Like bride and groom on some lost road.

Let’s count our stars, though small they be;
We can’t expect celebrity.5
Our fraud and theft, though, is enough,
To get in bed with John R. Barr,
Who calls the State on leftist bards,
Though we’ll ignore that, times are tough.6

We are behind the Art World’s eyes,
By fifty years, some more besides.7
We must catch up with Warhol’s cans,
Or with Judd’s thing at D-I-A.8
Our Author Function must drone up,9
If poetry’s to hit the mark.

1 This is not a reference to the American poet Farid Matuk.

2 In just the past few years, American post-avantists have won the Pulitzer Prize, two National Book Awards, two National Book Critics’ Circle Awards, a Lenore Marshall Prize, a couple Griffin Prizes, a couple MacArthur Grants, about two dozen Guggenheims and National Endowment for the Arts awards, a star turn at the White House, three or four guest appearances on the PBS NewsHour, and scores of other prominent institutional prizes and honors, not to mention major publications with mainline commercial and university presses (especially Ivy League ones) and legitimating journals and anthologies (such as Poetry, the New Yorker, various Nortons, Penguins, etc). The post-avant, solidly ensconced in the Academy (with scores and plus of tenure-track positions, Associate Professorships, and Corporate-funded Chairs, not to mention a whole secondary layer of industrious critics and grad students whose careers, present and future, are tied to studies of these poets), still regards itself as an embattled “opposition.”

3 A reference to the stated aims of Conceptual Poetry, as articulated by its leading spokespeople.

4 The immediate reference is obvious. The more secondary allusion is to the CIA’s active sponsorship in the fifties and sixties of the export of U.S. avant-garde art, namely Abstract Expressionism, as part of its overall international propaganda strategy.

5 Relatively speaking. Attention’s on the rapid rise. It’s sort of like a collegial Parliament now. Like the Green Party in Germany, or something. Though more like the Democratic Party in the U.S., really....

6 John Barr (I don’t know if R. is his middle initial, but it will do for the meter), a multimillionaire investment banker, has been President of the Poetry Foundation since 2004, charged with managing the $100 million gift from Ruth Lilly, the late pharmaceutical industry heiress. The reference to “leftist bards” concerns the eight young poets and artists of the Croatoan Poetic Cell who carried out two peaceful protest actions (the second at the reading of the great Chilean poet and rebel CADA activist Raúl Zurita) at the 20+ million Poetry Foundation headquarters building in Chicago during September of 2011. The PF called the cops on the CPC activists, most of whom managed to scamper away. At a performance intervention at the PF headquarters only a couple weeks previous, one which put the placid bourgeois rituals of a gala wine and cheese reception under mild distress, CPC member Stephanie Dunn had been tackled by PF Security Guards, blocked from leaving the building, handcuffed by the police on their arrival, and taken to jail at the lyrical request of the PF representatives. Approximately three weeks later, at her court hearing, the PF sent two official reps to demand before the judge that Dunn be locked up in the Cook County Penitentiary pending her trial eight days later. In the wake of these incidents, the CPC put up two statements at the Montevidayo blog, explaining the point of their actions and calling out the PF’s obscene siccing of the State on other poets, guilty of nothing but modest civil disobedience actions in perfect keeping with venerable avant-garde tradition. The great majority in the American “post-avant” poetry world knew about these posts (as well as subsequent feature articles about the matter in major publications like the Chicago Reader and Salon), and it is of special note that only a few of its denizens chose to speak publicly in response, even after Zurita had gone on record expressing his “profound tenderness” and admiration for the CPC commandoes. This timid, opportunist-tinged refusal by so many to protest such base violation of poetic-ethical principles will come to be seen, I am convinced, as one of the most shameful episodes in the history of 21st century American poetry.

7 A claim often made by Conceptual poets, who nevertheless keep rehearsing moves made in the art world fifty years or more before.

8 Donald Judd, whose Minimalist sculpture is installed at the DIA center in Marfa, Texas, where many big-name “experimental” poets go on retreat, with grants from hedge-fund monies.

9 See Michel Foucault’s classic essay, “What Is an Author?”

<<MCSWEENEY
SHEPPARD>>

INDEX
ABOUT
AMP
ARCHIVE
FACEBÖK
SUBMIT
TWITTER