In 1965, 22-year-old Aram Saroyan shifted the gaze of poetry with his one word poem, “Lighght.”
“Lighght,” written in the middle of a white sheet of typing paper, altered and even removed the conventional reading procedures of official verse culture: gone were rhyme, meter and versification. In their stead was the quick, instant snapshot of a single incorrectly written word.
Furthermore, by adding an extra “gh” into the middle of light, the poem lost its referential quality and ended up embodying its shining signifier. Lighght becomes tangible light! Needless to say, outrage ensued and the inevitable question “What is poetry?” became written across the angry faces of those in charge of the poetical canon.
What upset and enraged the poetry-reading public were the questions that minimalist poems such as “Lighght” brought out in relation to conceiving of what poetry is and should be. For most, poetry is the old, worn hand-me-down of 18th-Century Romanticism and all of its emotional baggage. But what happens when you spurn the beauty of nature and the expression of the self and wholly intellectualize the writer and the readers and their relation to the written word? In a nutshell, you get conceptual poetry!
During the three-day “Conceptual Poetry and Its Other” symposium, the question of what conceptual poetry is received a new twist. To start, conceptual poetry is a broad term-it encompasses such practices as OuLiPo’s constraint-based writings as well as the visual poetics of Concrete poetry, to name only two.
In her keynote address to the symposium, Marjorie Perloff, noted American critique of avant-garde strains of poetry such as language poetry, argued in favor of these new non-referential, material forms of poetry. All these strains of poetry, Perloff said, share a concomitant commitment to innovative technology, a questioning of the politics of mark making, the pluralizing of language and the problematizing of the self as a vehicle of expression. As such, poems such as “Lighght” become more important-they don’t just “express” an idea but actually embody it, thus expanding the horizons of poetry and making language palpable.
But with such poetry already done, where can we go from here? Most of the symposium was spent examining this new form of poetic praxis and was spearhead by the likes of Kenneth Goldsmith; Craig Dworkin, associate professor at the U; and Christian Bok, through the form of “uncreative writing.”
In uncreative writing, things such as plagiarism, appropriation citation, found texts and database mining all become fodder for the production of poetry. Uncreative writing is concerned with a thinkership rather than a readership. For example, Kenneth Goldsmith wrote “Day,” in which he transcribed the Sept. 10, 2001 issue of The New York Times and turned it into a 900-page book. Such works are process oriented, non-expressive and, above all, tedious. Such word play is much more than performative, and calls up not only the ethical responsibility of art, but also its value. As Goldsmith himself said in his panel on uncreative writing, the goal is to transform the writer, not necessarily the reader.
Try it. Pick out your favorite book, poem or whatever and type out five pages of it. Opposing Ezra Pound’s dictum to “Make It New,” conceptual poetry responds with “Why Make It New If You Can Reframe the Old?”
Conceptual poetry is our world-all of it. Besides, with so much new stuff coming out all the time from the creative confines of all the writing genius out there, someone has to manage all that information.
This article is a signifier of a report on a Coneptual Poetry Conference.