Digital Poetics and the Differential Text

Marjorie Perloff

From New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories, ed. Adelaide Morris and Thomas SwissI (Cambridge and London: MIYT Press (2006): 143-64.

It is fundamentally problematic,” writes Peter Bürger in his Theory of the Avant-Garde, “to assign a fixed meaning to a procedure.” [2] Bürger’s reference is to montage/collage: he argues that just because two collages —say, a still life by Picasso and a satiric collage by Raoul Haussmann– use similar techniques of paste-up and collocation of unlike material, doesn’t mean that the two works actually have a shared aesthetic. On the contrary, Bürger observes, German Dadaists like Haussmann took what was, for Picasso, essentially an aesthetic form and adapted it for political purposes.

The same principle, I would suggest, applies to the new electronic poetries. As in the case of any medium in its early stages, digital poetry today may seem to fetishize digital presentation as something in itself remarkable, as if to say, “Look what the computer can do!” But no medium or technique of production can in itself give the poet (or other kind of artist) the inspiration or imagination to produce works of art. And poetry is an especially vexed case because, however we choose to define it, poetry is the language art: it is, by all accounts, language that is somehow extraordinary, that can be processed only on re-reading. Consequently, the “new” techniques whereby letters and words can move around the screen, break up, and reassemble, or whereby the reader/viewer can decide by a mere click to reformat the electronic text or which part of it to access, become merely tedious unless the poetry in question is, in Ezra Pound’s words, “charged with meaning.”

Then, too, a strong claim has been made for the interactivity of electronic text—a claim I take to be largely illusory, especially when it comes to poetry. True, viewers can trace their own path through a given electronic text, can decide whether to move from A to B or B to Q, to rearrange word groups and stanzas, and so on. But is such activity really any more “interactive” than, say, the Simms Family games, which allow their players to “decide” what sort of house the family will live in, what their furniture will look like, and what their “personalities” are? For the Simms player, the personality and wallpaper choices are limited to a fixed set of options, produced by the makers of the game in the interest of mass appeal. As children quickly learn—and this is why they soon tire of Simms Family 1 and turn to Simms Family on Vacation or whatever other computer game—permission, as John Cage would have said, is granted, but hardly to do whatever you want. Indeed, the input is rigidly predetermined by the largely anonymous authors” and programmers. Adorno would have had a field day with this perfect cipher of the Culture Industries.

Nevertheless, electronic text does offer the poet exciting new possibilities, which I shall take up in a moment. First, however, I want to say something about the new dissemination of poetry and poetics that is occurring on the internet. Here a real revolution is taking place right in front of our eyes. Consider Kenneth Goldsmith’s beautifully designed site Ubuweb (www.ubuweb.com), where one can access an astonishing variety of avant-garde poetries from the early twentieth century to the present: from Russian Futurism and Dada to Fluxus and Ethnopoetics, to contemporary movements in visual and sound poetry. There are also critical essays on the poetries in question and, most important, portfolios of otherwise inaccessible work. Thus Craig Dworkin has produced “An Anthology of Conceptual Writing,” with a superb introduction and examples from Samuel Beckett and Robert Barry to Christian Bök—an anthology actually much more adequate than anything currently available in print format. Again, Goldsmith has obtained the entire archive of the avant-garde “magazine in a box” Aspen (1965-72), which is unavailable even in leading research libraries, and has posted the entire run (10 issues) on the web. And on Ubuweb, one can listen to Marinetti intone Zang Tuum Tumb, Henri Chopin recite his sound poetry, and Ron Silliman read his macabre question poem “Sunset Debris.”

How will the dissemination of such rich and varied material affect the poetry-reading public? Like any revolution, this one will take some time to be felt in Establishment culture. Indeed, even as electronic poetics has become more and more sophisticated, the mainstream journals like The Hudson Review or American Poetry Review have moved in the opposite direction: their short lineated epiphanic free-verse lyrics, with their justified left (and often right) margins, surrounded by white space suggest that nothing has changed: a poem is a poem, period! Indeed, at a recent conference in Belfast on Transatlantic Poetics, I heard an English poet, Ruth Padel, say that there is no such thing as a designed book of poems; there are only separate intense lyrics and these are “a gift of God.” And another poet chimed in that it’s time to get away from “silly” concepts like process or the open-ended poetic sequence because the poet had jolly well better make up his or her mind how to finish the poem, how to make that crucial decision that determines its final shape.

No Aspen or Vito Acconci for this group, which still dominates university Creative Writing programs and the major newspapers and reviews. But it is only a matter of time till this situation changes, for obviously younger people, surfing the net, will come across sites like Ubuweb and will absorb the materials posted. Here economics is central: concrete poetry, for example, was always very expensive to reproduce and print, especially in color formats, even as CDs of sound poetry are hard to come by. Today, if you can’t afford to buy, say, the Collected Poems of Haroldo and Augusto de Campos, you can study their works online. True, the texture of the page and its actual lettering will be lost and the digitized artwork cannot quite match the colors of the original, but the fact is that now readers around the world can access the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay or Mary Ellen Solt—work that can now become part of the academic curriculum.

Another interesting facet of the digital dissemination of poetic texts is that electronic texts are likely to be truer to the original than are the usual reprints and anthology versions. The Norton Anthologies, for example, often adjust the visual format of a given poem so as to save space and hence money: intentional double-spacing becomes normal single-spacing, and so on. A classic case is that of George Oppen, who designed Discrete Series so as to have one poem per page, whereas the various reprintings have tended to crowd the short lyrics together, with the poems often broken up at the bottom of a given page and continuing on the next. On the screen, this needn’t be the case; indeed, a website like Futurism and Futurists (www.futurism.org.uk) reproduces the various manifestos by Marinetti and Boccioni exactly as they were designed, whereas most reprints distort the typography, spacing, layout, and so on.

But what about digital poetry itself—the work now written expressly for the screen? The most interesting exemplars of digital poetics to date have tended to be what I have called elsewhere differential texts—that is to say, texts that exist in different material forms, with no single version being the definitive one. [3] Thus a text like Kenneth Goldsmith’s Fidget has a print version, a digital version, and it also exists as an archive of its gallery installation—an installation whose use of visual and sound media gave it a rather different tone from the other two. Which is the “real” Fidget? One cannot say although each reader may well prefer one mode of production over the others.

The ability to move from one medium to another and back again allows the poet to experiment with temporal and spatial frames. And many of these differential electronic texts use procedural devices, following the example of Oulipo or, closer to home, the rule-governed compositions of John Cage, Jackson Mac Low, and Fluxus. Consider, for starters, Brian Kim Stefans’s sequence the dreamlife of letters. [4] This is a flash piece in which the twenty-six letters of the alphabet, presented in alphabetic sequence (with secondary sequences based on the second letter in each word, and so on), produce words and phrases, all animated in various ways against the background of an orange square. The letters are black or white and dance around the screen in silence, producing new formations, splitting up, and regrouping. Some of the formations look like Cagean mesostics; others insert words inside large capitals, others are produced by letter clashes, circular formations, lipograms, and a myriad other textual patterns, no two configurations being quite the same.

In the Prologue, which precedes the actual running of the flash text, Stefans explains the generative email procedure as follows:

In 1999, I, along with several other poets and writers, was asked to partake in an online “roundtable” on sexuality and literature. The event would be centered around a brief essay by the San Francisco novelist Dodie Bellamy. . . .

All of the participants were divided into groups, each individual having a position in that group. As I was the second in position, I was assigned to respond to the person in the first position, who in my case was the poet and feminist literary theorist Rachel Blau DuPlessis.

DuPlessis wrote a very textually detailed, nearly opaque response (to be found here (o). [5]

A click on this link takes us to DuPlessis’ short piece for the roundtable (University of Buffalo Poetics Discussion Group, 30 September 2000). Here the poet uses passages of complex and suggestive phonetic spelling, alternating with their “translation” or transposition into “normal” English, which constitutes DuPlessis’s own commentary on the gender issues with which Bellamy deals. Thus the piece opens with the lines:

“gin dear hiss delight” sad dough tea bellum me wansin moo van bo drop age tick tock 2 cum “gender is te nigt” said Dodie Bellamy once in “Moving Borders” page TKTK (to come to 2 cum.zzz gindra delite ides aye—ginestra scissors delays, hex you all in ties his duh nigh to come). Is gender the night? I’d say—gender is the day, sexuality is the night.

And it concludes, “Weiner hearing sense lay dunkel troubled nixed sensual heft leveling ring uglies. We experience a doubled, tripled, mixed sexuality of everything all ways.”

Stefans seems to have been dissatisfied with this procedure for, despite the complex verbal and phonemic overlay, the DuPlessis piece makes very specific assertions about sexuality. He writes

I had decided that I wanted to respond to her text in a detailed manner, but I felt that normal prose would not suffice on my part, so I alphabetized the words in her text, and created my own series of very short “concrete” poems based on the chance meeting of words. My poem (which you can read here (o)[6] along with a few short paragraphs in response to Bellamy, was my contribution to the roundtable.

As words almost invariably take on nearly obscene meanings, when they are left to linger on their own, and as DuPlessis’s text was so loaded to begin with, I didn’t enjoy that much. More importantly, as it was in a sort of antique “concrete” mode, it resembled a much older aesthetic, one well explored by Gomringer, the De Campos brothers and numerous others in the past fifty years and so it wasn’t very interesting to me.

Here, for example, are sections #4 and #5 (b and c) of Stefans’s concrete poem:

behoove bellamy bellum

ben bend bi bi big bike

binaries/ bo/ borders,

but
butt

buy

character?
chimneysweeper christ,

cinder cixous

com-round, combinatory:

come come)
comes

–conventional cunt curse. . .

cycle.

The alphabet rule is the also the one to be used in the digital version of the dreamlife of letters, but here the words are fixed and anchored in their lines, thus slighting the possibilities for pun, paragram, and lettrism available in the electronic text. In the Prologue, Stefans notes:

I don’t wish to explain much more about the piece here, except to say that it is not interactive. I decided it was much more like a short film than an interactive piece, and there didn’t seem any natural place to let the viewer in that way. . . .

I don’t think I reveal the dreamlife of letters in this piece; the letters have too many dreams, as I’ve discovered, though perhaps not enough for me in the end.

In its digital version, produced by “Reptilian Neolettrist Graphics Gallery,” an orange square of “A’s—about half of them upside-down, some white on black, some black on white, some plain—is complicated by a “Frozen Gifs Gallery” beneath the square, a gallery whose fifteen entries contain different lettriste designs, somewhat reminiscent of Steve McCaffery’s Carnival. One can run the whole dreamlife of letters in about eleven minutes; or one can go to the Index and access each letter section separately. Thus, the third section, “behoove to caucasians” uses exactly the same sixteen words or syllables as Concrete Poem #4, but the units now become actors in a more complex drama. First behoove Bellamy bellum appear on the lower left of the orange square. Next, the words ben bend bi bi big bike snake in from the upper right in zigzag form, bending, overlapping and jostling one another so as to produce a time sequence reflecting “Big Ben” (the clock), introducing bisexuality, and miming the movement of a bicycle across the screen. The “i’s” of binaries, appearing in the upper left, are momentarily missing, invoking Benares in India and only then coming together with bo + orders, constituting the borders of binary oppositions. Then bo is next given a giant B in final position producing Bob, and then the big B is inscribed with but, butt, and buy, all in small white letters and the black caucasians in the lower left, leading us to the next or “C” section.

The one word I feel is out of place here is caucasians, the reference in Du Plessis’s text is to “the Phallus or regressive iden-tiff caucasians”–a too obvious counter, in Stefan’s text, to the multivalent, multisexual images of the poet’s dream alphabet. At the same time, the movement from the ca string of Caucasians to the first word of the next section, character, is seamless as are all the movements from one section to another. In #4, the phrase “character to cycle,” gives way to the collocation of chimneysweeper and Christ, the two words floating in blurred wavy lines across the lower half of the screen. The words cinder and cixous (Helène Cixous, the great feminist theorist of multivalent sexuality), first appear with their i’s missing; their stark simplicity is juxtaposed to the complex, designed mesostic on “com-round, combinatory: /come, come) / comes” that follows. Immediately thereafter, “Conventional,” “cunt” and “curse” appear in quick succession around a giant circling C, the conjunction suggesting that although “curse” is the conventional prudish epithet for menstruation, it is also properly located in the cunt.

Here, then, is Stefans’ poetic commentary on Dodie Bellamy’s erotic fiction, as mediated by DuPlessis’s analysis. the dreamlife of letters is elegant, beautiful to look at and spare, a new way of using language in its materiality so as to make meanings. Is it “better” than the poem, as Stefans himself thinks? Yes and no: the static visual text can be absorbed and studied much more readily than the moving picture. And the third alternative: the embedding of the lyrics in the larger situationist text, is also attractive.

A different variant on the “dreamlife of letters” is provided by Caroline Bergvall in a work called Ambient Fish (1999), available from the Electronic Poetry Center. Here typography is not elegant as in the Stefans piece, but the sound dimension is central to the piece, the poet reading aloud as we watch the screen [play CD] [7] The viewer /listener is presented with two green buttons, ringed in red, on a blank screen. Click on these and they become pea-green breasts. Click on the “nipples” and four rows of four of the same buttons appear. Almost every button quickly gives way to a word or phrase, while the voiceover (Bergvall’s very elegant, cool, and evenly pitched voice) pronounces “Ambient fish fuckflowers bloom in your mouth,” the text then permutating these words and phrases by means of rhyme and consonance so that “ambient fish” becomes “alien fish” and “alien poche,” “loose in your mouth,” becomes “goose in your mouth,” becomes “goose in your ouch” and “fuckfodder” becomes fuckfad,” becomes “fish fat,” while “ alien poche” (“pocket”) becomes “alien poach,” becomes “a lined peach patch.” The refrain “will shock (or choke) your troubles away” or “stow [“throw”] your troubles away” thus becomes quite literal. After the buttons disappear, the voice says evenly “fuck fish goose in your bouche suck your oubli away.” It is a riveting performance.

Ambient Fish evidently started out as a text-sound installation commissioned by a festival of mixed media in England. [8] The refrain was used as a drone in the piece. On screen, the interrupted recordings of the voice make the absurd lines even more menacing as do the curious rhymes and repetitions in which French words like oubli (“forgotten”) and bouche (“mouth), here pronounced baush, give the piece a faux-pornographic air. Sucking your oubli—it sounds pretty sinister! But what is especially unsettling is that when the buttons and words disappear within a minute or so, they leave only three words—fish, face, and your as well as a single breast-shape. Then “fish” and “your” disappear, the word “face” circles drunkenly about, and finally disappears too, leaving us with an isolated glowing red-green button.

What, one wants to know, are the relationships here between fish and your, between tirer des eaux and its rhyme partner in “stow” or “throw your troubles away”? The “loveliness” of the language is wholly deceptive —fuckflowers in the context sound pretty, rather like hollyhocks or gillyflowers. As for the buttons, their role is complicated by their technological function. The standard TV remote control has, at the center of the number pad, usually next to the “5” a button with raised little dot within it that looks exactly like the button in Ambient Fish. Press the button and a new channel opens up its picture. But in Ambient Fish, no such thing happens: press the button and you get, not a pleasing image but only broken words and disappearing breasts. The anonymous, impersonal voice, with its proffer of sexual pleasures that will “throw your troubles away” or “suck your oubli away” becomes increasingly threatening.

Another intriguing Bergvall digital text is Flèsh, which can be found in a recent issue of How 2 (I, no. 5, 2001). Flèsh, first called Flèsh A Coeur, illustrates Lev Manovich’s point that if one can make radically different versions of the art object—as is the case with electronic poetries—“the traditional strong link between the identity of an art object and its medium becomes broken.” [9] The project, Bergvall tells us, was first developed to be one of twenty “Volumes of Vulnerability” artist’s books, used in a project produced by Gefn Press (London 2000) to celebrate the Millennium:

It is a tribute to four writers who, for all their cultural differences, share a trance-like understanding of the connections between text and physicality, between violence and verbal illumination, between the intimate and the public facets of sexual desire as also a desire for writing. In each their way, and these were frequently at odds with the declared values of their time, they explored and pushed such connections both in their work and in their body. [10]

The four writers in question are St. Teresa of Avila, the German Surrealist painter Unica Zürn (whose torso tied up with string her artist husband Hans Bellmer transformed into an icon), the visionary language poet Hannah Wiener, and the erotic postmodern novelist Kathy Acker. In its artist’s book version, Flèsh A Coeur was designed as “a set of 4 folded folios, very low-tech, which demands of the readers that they have to use French cuts with a knife or letter-opener to open each level of text.” [11] Hence the “incorrect” French accent over the English word, reminding us that in French flèche means “arrow”; Flèsh A Coeur is thus the arrow to one’s heart—the arrow of Romantic love as well as spiritual revelation, piercing the flesh. Indeed, in Bernini’s famous sculpture, St. Teresa in Ecstasy, the saint’s breast is just about to be penetrated by an arrow.

Cutting–the reader’s need to cut the small yellow pages with a letter opener or knife as well as the cutting up of text we find in Bergvall’s text—insures that the reading experience is intentionally slowed. But onscreen, redesigned with the help of Anya Lewin, Flèsh appears as an impenetrable pink wall, the single word Flèsh suggesting, not only the cliché that it is the French who are best at enjoying the pleasures of the flesh, but that the click on the mere letters of the monosyllabic word will penetrate the flesh. And so, as one clicks on the four instances of Flèsh, first the four names appear, then, with a further click, four extracts from their respective writings, and then, when these texts are opened up by a third click, we have the opposite: underneath the flesh, female desire, it turns out, has a common language.

Here is the St. Teresa section:

Things had been going rather well. Sex loot. Caravans of PushpUsh. Needy machines Easy To Please. Pissabout reFillable. Rubbed a Fff in It long enough to Suck Off thereafter. The stakes we’d lie in about. Everything pruned happy as shaved. Now-caught In The Grip of. JUMP’s the Surf with a StartOff the ace. Oards dig holes in Every SinglePie own I had ed absent mindedly. Row and Row. Torn in the bell heat kicks up spare-Heads. Something’s knocking against the SKin. large persistent bulks In the Air. Brutally pulled innards. Gut seizure GONgs concave. [12]

The language here, as we recognize from Ambient Fish, is Bergvall’s own complex poetic word play–her astonishing, aggressive mix of the intellectual and the erotic, the hard and the soft, the “Needy machines” that are “easy to please.” The harsh phonemic play and eye rhyme give Bergvall’s text a kind of electric charge. Nothing is quite what we think it is: “spare-heads” replace “spare parts”; and “stakes” are not something “we’d lie about” but—oddly– “lie in about.” Half way through the passage, the speaker’s language breaks down so that “I had owned” in line 6 becomes “own I had ed.” Internal capitalization and the running together of words as in PushpUsh” creates curious paragrams and the jamming of sounds and syllables introduces a note of artifice that befits Unica Zürn or Kathy Acker, as well as St. Teresa. In “Brutally pulled innards,” for example, double lls and ns twist the u’s and a’s in their midst. But the violent erotic scene also contains religious possibilities in those “Gut seizure GONGS concave” — possibilities appropriate for St. Teresa, as, in a different way, for Hannah Weiner.

The electronic screen thus brings out aspects of Flèsh that are not as prominent in the artist’s book. In reading the book, the four names are endowed with meanings to be compared, point by point, in what is an atemporal grid. On the screen, however, flesh is always an impenetrable exterior, a blank pink wall that the viewer/auditor must elect to “enter” in time. Then, again, when Bergvall performs Flèsh in a gallery situation, the vocal intricacies subordinate individual words and word images to a powerful sonic pattern. The relation of text to audience is thus markedly differential.

And this brings me to my next example, in which computer technology has been generative of text that is not itself electronic, at least not in its primary version. In 1997, Kenneth Goldsmith decided to record every word he spoke in a single week. For seven days—a unit that gives Soliloquy, as the resulting work is called, its seven-act structure—Goldsmith went about his daily routine, wearing a wire and “collected” what became almost 500 pages of his own speech. The piece was first presented as a text installation, but since it needs to be read rather than seen, its more adequate realization is in the austere and sober gray volume published by Granary Books in 2001. A single long print block, Soliloquy is certainly a monster, if not a loose or baggy one. Indeed, the text is highly structured, the ground rule—that every word Goldsmith speaks, but not one word by his interlocutors or addressees, will be recorded and that periods of non-talking are not designated as such, , creates a seamless and curiously dense language network, a kind of post-Jamesian novel, where we know only what the narrator knows and says. The “characters” in this novel–Goldsmith’s friends, colleagues, associates, relatives, and assorted service people to whom he is speaking, as well as those others referred to in the third person—are given no voice; they can be known only through Goldsmith’s interpretations.

Is he a reliable narrator? Of course not, but what can “reliable” mean in these cyberdays? To read Soliloquy is to infer what prompted question A or disclaimer B or irritated response C? How does the author adjust his speech habits to the different people in his life? And what is the significance of the constant self-interruption, self-cancellation and deprecation that fills this fast, funny, irreverent, and terrifying volume? Terrifying, because, as Goldsmith himself has remarked, it is “humiliating and humbling to see how little of ‘value’ I actually speak over the course of a typical week. How unprofound my life and my mind is; how petty, greedy and nasty I am in my normal speech. It’s absolutely horrifying.” “But,” he adds, “I dare any reader to try the same exercise and see how much more value they come up with in their life. I fear that they might discover, too, that their lives are filled with trivial linguistic exchanges with waiters and taxi drivers. Even those relationships we feel are so vital to our lives – our family and friends – in linguistic terms are really up for grabs.” [13]

The genesis of a text like Soliloquy clearly depends on digital technology as well as on advanced recording systems. Goldsmith’s relatives, friends, and lunch companions (myself included) evidently had no idea he was wearing a wire and thus spoke quite freely. Yet their words had to be eliminated so as to keep to the rules of the chosen frame—one man’s talk for seven days of the week. We think of talk as communal—an experience we share with others—but here the elimination of all those others creates a startling verbal scene. For unlike a real soliloquy or even dramatic monologue, the speech presented here is curiously decontextualized. We often have no idea whom the narrator is addressing and that address may change within a split second as Kenny hangs up the phone and picks up another call with a “Hi, how’re you doin’?” Furthermore, although his talking claims to be random, it is in fact carefully planned, the author setting up the questions and raising the issues that will resound throughout the day. Thus, although the text of Soliloquy does not exploit visual devices, computer graphics, animation, or anything else but stone cold sober print, and although there are no icons to click or dots to connect, Soliloquy is, in fact, the ultimate digitally driven text, programmed as it is to eliminate “noise.’

Consider the following passage in Act 4 (Thursday), in which Kenny and his wife Cheryl (the video artist Cheryl Donegan) are having dinner in a local Indian restaurant:

Oh I didn’t like that guy Alex that we met. The guy with the beard. He was an asshole. Did, you know, he never heard of Alfred Jarry. He goes Ubu? What’s that. Yeah, you know, he never heard of any of that any connection with anything like that. Yeah. They did. Thank you. This food is so good. The crap they were serving up at that place for 20 bucks a plate. That was idiotic. The people in there, you know, it was a really stupid scene. I really gotta pee. OK. Ah, that’s better. Is your chicken good? Tasty? No no no, it’s alright. You like this red chicken? Hey, you know, you can’t say we’re not trying right. I know as if as if if being successful artists and writers isn’t enough. Isn’t it just amazing like all the work that we do to do our work and then all the work that we do to like try to do our work? It’s insane, Cheryl, we’re working two jobs. Yeah, no, I mean work is OK, but, you know, it’s it’s just, you know, you do what you do. No wonder why were are so fucking exhausted every night and every day. Well, I mean, it’s insane. I don’t know how long we’ll keep it up for. It’s like a lot of artists, you know, well they kind of like paint like they get like Debra they get into their studios once a week or something like that, do think about it much. The fact I, we’re doing both things. See this is the cheese. This is paneer. This is what you eat in India all the fucking time. You had paneer? You’ve had it, right? Paneer this is what you eat. You like eat saag paneer like constantly. You constantly eating like on a plane you get saag paneer. Somebody’s milk. I’m tired. I just need some down time I think, you know, like quiet time. When I, when did he say that Cheryl? Oh that’s so long ago? Halil? Liz Kotz was so nice last night. We have so much in common, it’s insane. She’s doing her dissertation. It’s funny, when you scratch the surface of people, man, everybody’s got something to say. I think everybody’s nice. You got to get past the surface. I mean whoever would have thought Liz Kotz was anything, you know, other than what she appears to be? Hardcore man-hater. She’s so nice. No, I didn’t get apprehensive.

This passage allows the reader to be about as close to actually being there as is humanly possible in a retrospective situation. The conversation, or at least Kenny’s side of it, is at once inane and meaningful—meaningful in the context of the rest of the book where Jarry’s Ubu Roi and Kenny’s own Ubuweb play a big part, where Cheryl’s recent art show is discussed again and again, and where Liz Kotz, a critic of avant-garde art/music/poetry, now teaching at the University of Minnesota, then still a graduate student, first appears at a lecture of my own that Kenny attended the night before at Columbia University .

Goldsmith’s “natural” language is nothing if not artificial. The text provides us with all the normal tics of conversation—the prevalence of “like,” “you know,” and “yeah yeah,” as well as the incompletion of sentences, sloppy phraseology, and repetitive excalamations. But it is also artificial in that it splices together all instances of speech, omitting the silences and interruptions. Thus “I really gotta pee” is immediately followed by ‘Ok that’s better,” there having been nothing said in the minutes that elapse between going to the bathroom and returning to the table. The absence of breaks here and when Kenny is addressing the waiter as in “they did [take our order?]. Thank you,” creates a monomaniacal drive as absurd and absorbing as Leopold Bloom’s stream of consciousness in the “Lotus Eaters’ chapter of Ulysses. For the continuity stands in odd relationship to the constant shift in subject matter—the digression from the talk of the red chicken to the serious and somewhat maudlin reflection on Our Lives and how we Overwork and are Underappreciated. Not that Kenny doesn’t mean it. But next thing you know, he’s telling Cheryl all about Paneer cheese and how it’s served in India. Then Liz Kotz’s personality is put to the test, Kenny liking her despite her appearing to be a hard-core man-hater. Life, this text suggests, is like that: we grumble about our fates until the cheese course comes and we try to decide which to sample.

The artifice of Soliloquy’s “random” and “casual” writing becomes clearer if we bear in mind that we have no access to the narrator’s unspoken thoughts, his physical movements, his reading, his looking at art, his day-dreaming. Here, the book suggests, is what life would be like if human beings could do nothing but talk! The electronic version, [14] on the other hand, calls that talk into question. It contains the entire book in seven sections, one for each day of the week, but when one accesses a given page or section, only bits of sentences appear on an otherwise empty screen. We soon discover that text is actually there but it is hidden: unless the mouse is pointed directly at a given word or sentence, it remains invisible. The mouse can obviously track the text word by word, sentence by sentence, but only one bit at a time, so that the reader, pointing at a particular phrase, doesn’t know what comes before or after. Accordingly, the cybertext becomes an inverted Cagean writing-through, a form of play. Find one sentence and another vanishes. Sentences and phrases are thus fragmented and hidden, creating a conscious discontinuity in the interface. In this manner, the “cinema verité” quality of the book version is called into question: if the “talk” in the book version looks “natural,” in the electronic text, the emphasis is on loss and disruption—on a curious kind of secrecy, as if the text doesn’t quite want to be read. Goldsmith’s is not, we should note, the non-sequentiality of Ron Silliman’s “New Sentence,” but rather a dialectic of appearance and disappearance, absence and presence.
What makes a generative text like Soliloquy poetic? Isn’t producing such a monster just a matter of following certain rules and using certain computer operations to eliminate the language of others, the pauses and silences? Couldn’t anyone do it?

There are two answers to this last question. The first is Cage’s “Of course they could. But they don’t” [15] —the willingness to engage in such a project and putting oneself on the line being half the battle. But—and this is true of Cage as well—the fact is that when one studies Goldsmith’s text, one quickly finds that it is much more structured than one might think. For it builds up, metonymically and synecdochically, a network of references that gives us a very particular portrait of the artist as young hustler. A New York artist, dependent on New York, running around the city, talking on his cell phone, making contacts, networking, eating out, trying different foods, meeting people for coffee, running into old acquaintances at all sorts of art galleries and events. How to make it through the day: this is half the battle but the narrator remains for the most part cheerful and purposive in his demeanor. The “Kenny” of this book is not necessarily a nice man—he’s a user and he knows it and he also loves to gossip and lampoon people. But he is remarkably candid and honest with himself. And that draws the reader—even a suspicious reader like myself who did not originally enjoy my “portrait” in this book—into the linguistic web.

Are Goldsmith, Bergvall, and Stefans electronic poets? Yes and no. Certainly, in the examples given, these artists make the most of digital possibilities. But they shift medium easily: Goldsmith has collaborated with Joan La Barbara in producing verbal/musical texts and has made many installations, Bergvall has fused poetic material with theoretical analysis (in ordinary print format), made installations, worked with musicians, and so on. Her Goan Atom is, first and foremost, a book of “poems.” And Stefans has just published a book called Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics (Berkeley: Atelos, 2003), bringing together interviews, lyric poems, and prose “essays” that boast traditional bibliographies of the scholarly model with which we are all too familiar.

In evaluating electronic poetries, therefore, we should not subordinate the second term to the first. “I don’t like the label ‘video artist’,” the great video artist Bill Viola, once remarked. “I consider myself to be an artist. I happen to use video because I live in the last part of the twentieth century, and the medium of video (or television) is clearly the most relevant visual art form in contemporary life.” [16] That was in 1985 and a decade or so later, video has been supplanted by the much greater fluidity and temporal-spatial freedom of electronic space. But Viola’s principle holds: the artist or poet uses a particular medium, not because it is “better” than others, but because it seems most relevant at his or her moment—currently, of course, the electronic screen, with its particular enticing challenge to the printed book. Does this make the poet in question a digital poet? Or, conversely, is the purveyor of the electronic word ipso factor an artist? “Chopsticks,” Viola quipped, “can either be a simple eating utensil or a deadly weapon, depending on who uses them.” [17]

Footnotes

Marjorie Perloff

Published in Parkett, 2007

The first poet in Dworkin’s alphabetically arranged anthology of conceptual writing is Vito Acconci, whose early “poetry,” most of it previously unpublished, has now been edited and assembled, again by Dworkin for a hefty (411-page) volume called Language to Cover a Page, published in MIT Press’s Writing Art Series (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006). I place poetry in quotes here because, strictly speaking, Acconci’s word texts —constraint-based lists, dictionary games, performance scores, or parodic translations– are not so much poems as they are, in the Wittgensteinian sense, complex language games, in which the page has not yet been replaced by the video screen, the tape length, or the gallery space. Indeed, as Dworkin argues in an earlier piece on Acconci for October (95 [Winter 2001], pp. 91-113), there was no sharp break between Acconci the poet, and Acconci the video artist, performer, and recently architect and designer. On the contrary, the later work is best understood as the continuation of the earlier by other means. And if this point is granted, then the writing of the ‘60s takes on added importance: it constitutes, so to speak, the first act of the artist’s complex meditation on the ability of language, whether verbal, visual, aural, or kinetic, to represent emotion and intellect.

To some degree, this preoccupation allies Acconci to Fluxus, but his is a very different trajectory from George Brecht’s or Yoko Ono’s. Born to Italian immigrant parents in 1940, Acconci grew up in the Bronx, graduated from Holy Cross College in Wooster, Massachusetts in 1962 and the University of Iowa Writing Workshop in 1964. The latter was, in Acconci’s day, the place to go for initiation into the poetry establishment: Acconci took a course on translation from Mark Strand, and an exact contemporary of his at Iowa was Charles Wright, whose lyric of the period included lines like the following:

The moon, like a dead heart, cold and unstartable, hangs by a thread
At the earth’s edge,
Unfaithful at last, splotching the ferns and the pink shrubs. [1]

Nothing could be more unlike Wright’s intense, concrete imagistic evocation of the moon over Stone Canyon than Acconci’s “READ THIS WORD” (1969):

READ THIS WORD THEN READ THIS WORD READ THIS WORD NEXT READ THIS WORD NOW SEE ONE WORD SEE ONE WORD NEXT SEE ONE WORD NOW AND THEN SEE ONE WORD AGAIN LOOK AT THREE WORDS HERE LOOK AT THREE WORDS NOW LOOK AT THREE WORDS NOW TOO TAKE IN FIVE WORDS AGAIN TAKE IN FIVE WORDS SO TAKE IN FIVE WORDS DO IT NOW SEE THESE WORDS AT A GLANCE SEE THESE WORDS AT THIS GLANCE AT THIS GLANCE HOLD THIS LINE IN VIEW HOLD THIS LINE IN ANOTHER VIEW AND IN A THIRD VIEW SPOT SEVEN LINES AT ONCE THEN TWICE THEN THRICE THEN A FOURTH TIME A FIFTH A SIXTH A SEVENTH AN EIGHTH
(Acconci, p. 111)

Here the poet tracks the actual process of reading each word, one at a time, until they literally complete the eighth line. Arbitrary as these “instructions” seem, with their permutation of “next,” “now,” “then,” and “again,” and their morphing of “read” into “see,” and then into “look at,” “take in,” and “hold this line in view,” the fact is, as one learns when one tries to reproduce the poem, that Acconci has to work hard, adding spaces so as to produce a justified right margin and make eight, so to speak, equal eight,

Such early experiments paved the way for the publication of 0- 9, the stapled mimeograph journal Acconci edited together with the poet Bernadette Mayer between 1967 and 1969. 0-9 , which went through seven issues, featured poets like Clark Coolidge and Ted Berrigan, Fluxus performers like Dick Higgins and Emmett Williams, and artists like Sol Le Witt, Adrian Piper, Dan Graham, and Robert Smithson. 0 to 9 published Jackson Mac Low’s first poem series governed by chance operations, the “Biblical Poems.” Recognizing the journal’s importance, the small but increasingly important Ugly Duckling Press, based in Brooklyn, has just reprinted the entire run (736 pages) in one volume priced at $40.

Why the reprint of 0-9 and the publication of Acconci’s early writings at this particular moment? Why the new interest in the material word, in proceduralism, dictionary definition, and a dogged literalism that refuses the metaphoric mode of mainstream lyric or the mimeticism of so much Establishment painting and photography? One reason, surely, is the current nostalgia for the Bohemia of the late 60s-early 70s, for the moment when poets and visual artists were still likely to live in Village walk-ups and Brooklyn tenements, defying, not only of the bourgeois world of business, but also the university. The tolerance and eclecticism of our own art world, which embraces abstraction as well as hyperrealism, neo-pop as well as austere conceptualism, was still unheard of: the 0-9 poets were intentionally outrageous and confrontational, defying even the “advanced” aesthetic of Black Mountain and the Beats. Poetry, Acconci declared, contra Charles Olson’s poetics of process, should “use language to cover a space rather than dis-cover a meaning.” [2] And the lyric “I” was replaced by an “I” in dialogue with, and often shaped by, the “you” who confronts the words spoken or the action taken in a given performance, whether live or on video.
A second, more specific source of Acconci’s current appeal is surely its anticipation of the new digital poetics. In recent years, we have witnessed electronically generated text that falls under the rubric of what Kenneth Goldsmith, its chief proponent, has dubbed “uncreative writing.” In such writing—witness Goldsmith’s own Day (Barrington, VT: The Figures, 2003), made by reproducing, word for word, and from first page to last, an entire issue of the New York Times, appropriation is all, or is it? In transforming newsprint into digital text and refusing to discriminate between headlines and snatches of advertising copy, between front-page article using oversized font and the tiny Dow Jones numbers, the Times becomes curiously unrecognizable. Goldsmith has argued that in the information age, the poetic function is not to produce new writing–we have too much already—but to force us to see what the language environment we live in looks and feels like, to make it strange.

According to Dworkin (Language to Cover a Page, p. xvi), Goldsmith produced Day and related texts without any familiarity of Acconci’s early writings, most of them unpublished and hence quite unknown. How uncanny, therefore, that thirty-five years before Goldsmith produced his book The Weather (Los Angeles: Make Now Press, 2005), a transcription of a year’s worth (December 21, 2002-December 20, 2003) of hourly weather bulletins on WINS (1010), New York’s all-news radio station, Acconci should have produced a numbered text called “Act 3, Scene 4,” that begins like this:

1. The sun rises today, Thursday, December 26, 1968.
2. At 7:18 A.M., sets at 4:34 P.M., and will rise
3. tomorrow at 7:18 A.M. The moon sets today at 11:49
4. rises at 12:10 P.M. tomorrow and will set tomorrow
5. at 12:38 A.M. Warmer weather and clear to cloudy skies
6. will cover most of the eastern portion of the nation
7. today while snow is expected to fall on the western
8. lake region, the Northern Plains States, and from
9. the upper Mississippi Valley to the plateau region.

And it goes on in this vein for another ten pages (Language to Cover a Page, 388-97), the sober report cut up into 350 more or less equal line lengths in all. Related texts that follow are based on the New York City Report, as heard on the telephone at a particular moment recorded (see p. 398). And these experiments pave the way for such early video pieces as Filling Up Space (1970, 3 min.), in which, against the backdrop of a brick wall, the artist enters and walks from one side to the other, back and forth, row after row.

What interests me here, however, is less the similarity between “Act 3, Scene 4” and Goldsmith’s The Weather than the difference between them. By taking his language, not from the straightforward facts in the newspaper but from radio, where the announcer must jazz up the weather report so as to attract listeners, Goldsmith gives weather reporting an entirely different spin. For example (p. 26):

Uh, it’s that old Christmas song, “Let it Snow, let it Snow,” not so this afternoon. A lot of cloud cover, twenty-six degrees but see, this is just one piece of
our latest storm system. It’s actually going to move farther away tonight, so the clouds part company, low fifteen to twenty, then clouds quick to return tomorrow.
(p. 26).

Goldsmith further thickens the plot by giving each one-minute broadcast one paragraph, arranging the paragraphs in a seasonal cycle with four chapters, “Winter,” “Spring,” “Summer,” “Autumn,” and—in a curious clinamen—omitting certain days (when he was on holiday or out of town), so that the prediction made in one broadcast is not followed up by the next. Indeed, even when the days recorded are consecutive, the weather forecast is often wrong. And then, in the spring of 2002, the weather news reported suddenly emanate from Baghdad, for the Iraqui war has broken out. So The Weather turns out to be an ironic narrative.

Found text, we discover, can mean many different things, and not all appropriations are equally interesting or amusing. Digital recording and scanning, not yet available to Acconci in 1968, has made a great difference. All the more reason why Language to Cover a Page is such a timely and intriguing book. It provides the missing link between the first forays into a non-representational, non-expressivist poetics and its current incarnations. By the time he was thirty, Acconci seems to have recognized that body language, this time covering the video screen rather than the page, created a more satisfactory relationship between himself and his audience than the straightforward author-reader relationship could accomplish. But the verbal stage. as presented here, was never abandoned; it was merely incorporated into the larger space of such masterpieces as The Red Tapes.

Footnotes

Published in Portuguese, in Sibila II, 3 (October 20020: 139-58.

(Tivemos esta conversa por e-mail nas duas últimas semanas de agosto 2002. Eu lhe enviei algumas questões que ele respondeu de forma descontraída de acordo com seus interesses. Achei as respostas ainda mais estimulantes do que esperava.

KENNETH GOLDSMITH nasceu em 1961. Ele frequentou a Rhode Island School of Design (Bacharel em Belas Artes em escultura, 1984). Seus trabalhos foram expostos em museus e galerias de arte do mundo todo. Entre seus livros estão 73 Poems (Permanent Press, 1993), No. 111 2.7.93-10.20.96 (The Figures, 1997), 6799 (zingmagazine, 2000), Fidget (Coach House Books, 2000), Soliloquy (Granary Books, 2001), Head Citations (The Figures, 2002) e Day (The Figures, forthcoming 2003). Ele é o fundador e editor da UbuWeb Visual, Concrete and Sound Poetry (ubu.com), um crítico de música para o New York Press e DJ na WFMU na cidade de Nova Iorque (wfmu.org). Ele vive na cidade de Nova Iorque com sua esposa, a artista Cheryl Donegan, e seu filho Finnegan.)

Marjorie Perloff: Em seu ensaio, “From (Command) Line to (Iconic) Constellation,” você narra de forma muito interessante a sua “descoberta” da Poesia Concreta, especialmente o trabalho do grupo Noigandres no Brasil como precursores da poética na internet. No entanto, obras comoFidget and Soliloquy não possuem a aparência nem a configuração estrutural de um poema concreto: pelo contrário, a espacialização é substituída pela forma temporal. Poderia explicar esta relação?

Kenneth Goldsmith: Um aspecto importante da poesia concreta era a reconciliação entre a página plana e o movimento dinâmico (e frequentemente consecutivo) implícito da línguagem usada. Desta forma, ela se assemelhava ao plano Greenbergiano de quadro não ilusionista, como aplicada à planura da página. Portanto, a internet – uma experiência dinâmica e quase cinemática baseada em quadros que ocorre num palco achatado (a tela) – era o meio que a poesia concreta estava esperando para realizar plenamente seu potencial. O fato de tantos anúncios – tanto estáticos quanto dinâmicos – na web se parecerem com poesia concreta não é uma coincidência.

Fidget and Soliloquy – textos de cada movimento que fiz em um dia e cada palavra que pronunciei em uma semana – são, por sua natureza, obras temporais. Eles literalmente documentam os eventos lineares durante um determinado tempo. Como tal, a temporalidade da web – o movimento através do tempo, quadro a quadro por assim dizer – se ajusta perfeitamente às restrições de ações análogas baseadas em palavras que precisaram destes textos.

MP: Você fala com frequência sobre a transição da arte visual para a verbal em seu trabalho, principalmente da escultura para a arte de escrever. Ao mesmo tempo, você geralmente comenta que a arte visual está muito adiante da poesia, a qual ainda não tirou vantagem das possibilidades da internet. Se o visual (você cita Warhol várias vezes) está tão mais adiantado que o verbal, por que você optou pelo verbal?

KG: A citação à qual você se refere foi feita por Brion Gysin em 1959 quando ele disse que a arte de escrever estava 50 anos atrás da pintura. Ainda acredito que seja verdade hoje. Se percebermos o quão facilmente as convenções do mundo da arte são quebradas, veremos o quão limitado tem sido o mundo da escrita inovadora.

Não é exatamente uma questão de forma, mas sim de permissões concedidas por qualquer comunidade. O mundo da arte é bastante liberal nesse sentido; o avant-garde é o convencional enquanto que no mundo da escrita existe oposição entre o convencional e o avant-garde. No mundo da arte, as idéias são imediatamente aceitas e o desejo pelo novo nunca é saciado. A desvantagem obviamente é que a voracidade dá às obras de arte uma vida útil mais curta e estabelece uma mentalidade voltada à tendências da estação; no mundo da arte o artista vê sua carreira ascender e decair rapidamente ainda muito jovem.

Minha longa transição do visual para o verbal (entrarei em detalhes mais adiante) tem sido uma experiência incrivelmente idiossincrática e pessoal. Eu nunca poderia imaginar que depois de 20 anos de formado eu me veria como escritor. Por outro lado, eu aprendi a gostar do passo lento e demorado do ato de escrever e publicar livros comparado à pressão do mundo da arte onde esperava-se que sozinho eu produzisse duas exibições por temporada. Depois do esforço para terminar um trabalho, a exibição tem exatamente um mês para causar grande impacto e então o trabalho simplesmente desaparece para sempre – ou em coleções particulares ou no depósito do artista.

Isso tudo é bem diferente dos muito anos que se leva para escrever um livro, seguidos de um processo cansativo para publicá-lo e então uma espera de um a dois anos para que as críticas comecem a sair. A vantagem é que os livros parecem ter uma vida útil eterna; é difícil se livrar deles e eles parecem ficar em circulação para sempre, seja como novo ou usado. Me sinto mais confortável com este passo; de alguma forma ele se torna parte do seu dia a dia ao contrário da intensa maratona para se realizar uma exibição na galeria.

MP: Em sua entrevista com Sergio Bessa (“Introduction” to 6799), você diz: “todo meu trabalho tem um acabamento intelectual embora ele seja fundamentalmente intuitivo, abstrato e poético.” Quais são os aspectos “intuitivo” e “poético” de seu trabalho? Em que ponto, em outras palavras, as regras são quebradas e o método contestado?

KG: Na entrevista com Sergio, estava me referindo especificamente ao meu trabalho na galeria, no qual eu intencionalmente fiz referência à estética da arte conceitual da superfície mas quebrei o rigor com textos poéticos, criando assim uma tensão no trabalho.

Respondendo a sua pergunta, depende do projeto. Algumas obras são ao pé da letra e outras permitem mais liberdade de movimento. No. 111, por exemplo, era bem rigoroso até os dois últimos capítulos do livro, os quais quebram todas as regras expostas até então. Fidget também quebrou todas as regras não por necessidade formal mas para escapar às exigências físicas da tarefa. Precisei me embebedar e quando senti o efeito, ele mudou completamente os parâmetros do livro. Soliloquy, por outro lado, foi feito ao pé da letra. Não me desviei do exercício original. O mesmo aconteceu com Day, o livro baseado no New York Times.

MP: continuando: Quando você diz: “Sou um colecionador de linguagem” o que realmente significa? Certamente não qualquer linguagem. O que torna certas palavras e frases “colecionáveis”? Inversamente, o que faz certas coleções de linguagem entediantes e dispensáveis?

KG: Bem, eu achava que somente algumas palavras eram colecionáveis, que algumas palavras eram “melhores” que outras, mas comecei a questionar esta atitude com o passar dos anos. Deixe-me explicar. O precursor do No. 111 foi um trabalho de galeria chamado No. 109, em que usei o mesmo método de colecionar linguagem do No. 111: qualquer palavra ou frase terminando em “r” ou “schwa” era permitida. Para preparar a exibição na galeria editei a obra para que contivesse somente o que eu considerava palavras “boas” – as palavras “engraçadas”, as palavras “divertidas”, aquelas que realmente “tinham vida”. Achei que a obra estava bem “coerente” e a apresentei na galeria. Infelizmente o público não concordou comigo e o trabalho foi recebido sem muito entusiasmo.

Num momento de introspecção depois da exibição, voltei e olhei todas as palavras que eu tinha omitido. Elas pareciam palavras extremamente boas e deixá-las de fora não fez da obra um sucesso popular. Então eu as incorporei num novo trabalho entitulado No. 111. Mas mesmo assim, após muitos anos no projeto, não conseguia aceitar qualquer palavra ou frase; escolhi apenas as frases que me interessavam. Por isso o No. 111 é um livro agradável de ler; ele doma o extenso mundo de linguagem disponível e o mostra através da lente refinada da experiência de uma pessoa. Assim, é uma coleção bem organizada e nítida.

Mas no final decidi que aquela era apenas uma maneira de se lidar com uma coleção e isso me remete à sua questão sobre método. Ao invés de focar no texto em si, passei a focar no método ou no conceito mais amplo e permitir que a linguagem caísse onde quisesse dentro daquele contexto específico. Consequentemente, nenhuma palavra poderia ser “errada” ou “entediante” se eu pudesse justificar conceitualmente a sua presença. De repente, as preocupações mais tradicionais de linguística com relação à facilidade de leitura, ritmo, expressão, musicalidade, etc. não tinham mais importância para mim e me senti libertado. Após anos contando sílabas num trabalho comoNo. 111, você percebe quando uma abordagem diferente – uma abordagem mais livre – da linguagem se faz necessária.

MP: “Há tanta linguagem por aí para ser usada; se abrirmos nossos olhos e ouvidos, a encontraremos em abundância.” Claro que esta noção vem de Cage mas hoje sabemos que, longe de abrir seus olhos e ouvidos a todos aqueles sons “por aí” na natureza, Cage controlava fortemente suas formas. Qual o processo envolvido em seu trabalho?

KG: Este é um dos meus aborrecimentos com Cage. Se Cage realmente tivesse que aceitar todo som como música, então era o que ele deveria ter feito. Obviamente não foi o caso e é aí que entra a idéia de poÉtica de Joan Retallack. Não tenho problema com uma estrutura ética opressora para guiar o trabalho do artista mas no caso de Cage a ordem ética está em conflito com sua estrutura filosófica de aceitar todos os sons igualmente. Muitos sons não eram aceitos no panteão de Cage e muitas vezes quando os sons aceitos aconteciam em momentos inoportunos, poderia arruinar uma apresentação. Da mesma forma, Cage ficava facilmente irritado quando achava que músicos e orquestras haviam interpretado seu trabalho de forma errada.

Creio que Warhol levou as idéias de Cage mais longe. E embora os resultados não sejam tão belos (ou éticos), sinto que Warhol verdadeiramente aceita o mundo cotidiano – com todas as suas falhas e defeitos (bem como a beleza) – em seu trabalho. Ele era completamene permeável de maneiras que Cage poderia somente teorizar.

Recentemente meu próprio trabalho tem se voltado mais para o modelo de Warhol do que para o de Cage.

MP: “Se não existe na internet, não existe.” Você diz isso em relação ao Livro e sua posição é válida se considerarmos os poetas que esperam anos para publicar um trabalho mas não têm distribuição. Mas agora que temos abundância de poesia/arte na internet, como um Poeta X pode se destacar? Como alguém pode se diferenciar da multidão ou não deveria nem tentar?

KG: Bem, só porque alguém publica um livro não quer dizer que seja bom poeta; há milhares de livros horríveis por aí também. Acho que a internet reflete o mundo “real”; um bom poema é um bom poema independente de onde é publicado. Um bom artista deverá alcançar o sucesso independente do meio de publicação. Se oferecermos a rede a Vito Acconci ou Bruce Nauman, eles deixarão sua marca.

Quanto ao processo de classificação, ainda me surpreende a credibilidade que o mundo da poesia dá a um livro publicado. Com a tecnologia de distribuição disponível – e a estrutura de lucro relativamente pequena na economia da poesia – é de admirar que jovens poetas não organizem sites que publiquem volumes inteiros de poesia de seus colegas. Então, se admirássemos um determinado grupo de escritores, haveria um site cooperativo, por assim dizer, onde encontraríamos seus trabalhos completos. Assim, a comunidade seria localizada e específica, trabalhando num eixo horizontal e não no cânon vertical como estamos acostumados. Isto me lembra do que frequentemente acontece no mundo da arte quando um grupo de pares ou artistas com idéias parecidas entram numa galeria pouco utilizada e introduzem seu programa, criando seu próprio cenário ao qual as pessoas são atraídas no final.

MP: Quando você diz “qualquer um pode escrever 111 usando as regras que estabeleci e o resultado seria completamente diferente,” você quer dizer que qualquer um (eu por exemplo) poderia fazê-lo e seria tão eficiente ou apenas diferente? Ou que o artista é aquele que faz escolhas que criam relações significativas entre palavras?

KG: É Cage novamente. Cage disse algo como “qualquer um pode fazer seu trabalho mas o fato é que ninguém mais o fez.” Creio que ele quer dizer que o verdadeiro trabalho do artista está em estabelecer os parâmetros e executar um determinado projeto. É ter coragem de realizar idéias que transformam pensamentos passageiros – normalmente triviais – em arte.

MP: Você está falando da famosa afirmação de Cage “Claro que poderiam mas não o fazem.” É um ponto bastante importante! E gosto da idéia de “coragem” porque é exatamente isso. E por falar em coragem: em Soliloquy você frequentemente flerta perigosamente com mímese verdadeira. Seus interlocutores são geralmente identificáveis e suas avaliações sobre as pessoas (inclusive eu) são consideradas cruéis, desagradáveis, ou simplesmente embaraçosas. Como você reage a esta acusação?

KG: Soliloquy não é uma mímese real porque foi enquadrado e apresentado como arte em oposição à documentação científica da linguagem ou mera pesquisa sociológica. Assim, Soliloquy faz um trabalho incrível com discursos “reais” e extende a investida para incorporar discurso “real” na poesia que vai de Whitman a Stein, até Ginsberg e Antin. Em comparação a Soliloquy, o discurso tão frequentemente transmitido como “real” parece artificial, arranjado e pomposo. Apesar de ser fã do trabalho de David Antin, não é possível acreditar que seus “poemas conversa” são realmente uma conversa sua. Ele é editado, arranjado na página, limpo e maquiado. Solioquy apresenta o discurso na sua forma mais pura, bruta e maravilhosamente disjuntiva. Quando olhamos para o discurso “real” em Soliloquy, notamos que nossos padrões de discurso normativo são avant garde! Acho estranho que aquilo que o modernismo lutou para conseguir nos últimos 100 anos estava bem embaixo do nosso nariz!

Quanto aos aspectos sociais da obra, é muito complicado. Perdi muitos amigos por causa deste trabalho. Sinto muito que seus sentimentos tenham sido feridos mas ainda assim não posso me desculpar por ter produzido a obra. Os parâmetros do trabalho foram designados para gravar cada palavra que pronunciei durante uma semana, desde o momento em que acordei na segunda-feira de manhã até o instante em que fui dormir na noite do domingo seguinte. Não deveria haver edição. Portanto, eu não pude limpar a desordem do discurso ou torná-lo mais fluente. Deveria ser uma avaliação da linguagem como ela era falada, pura e simplesmente. Se eu tivesse começado a editar, onde começaria? E onde terminaria? Se de fato eu tivesse editado, teria sido uma obra completamente diferente. Então o que exatamente foi dito e como foi dito ficou intacto. Inclusive muita fofoca e calúnia. A atividade foi humilhante e degradante por mostrar que muito pouco do que falo durante uma semana normal tem “valor”. Como minha mente e minha vida são superficiais; como sou pequeno, ganacioso e desagradável em meu discurso corriqueiro. É absolutamente assustador. Mas desafio qualquer leitor a tentar o mesmo exercício e ver como passa a incluir mais valor em sua vida. Temo que possam descobrir também que suas vidas estão cheias de trocas linguísticas triviais com garçons e motoristas de táxi. Mesmo aqueles relacionamentos que achamos vitais para nossas vidas – nossa família e amigos – em termos linguísticos, estão disponíveis para qualquer um.

MP: Sim, me parece que Soliloquy ainda não recebeu o mérito que merece. Não é um trabalho verbal como em 111 mas utiliza ponto de vista e várias técnicas de narrativa para criar uma imagem bastante vívida da vida em Nova Iorque no Milênio, em toda a sua loucura e valor. Porque o ponto de vista é tão rigidamente controlado (afinal você é que faz as perguntas e arranja as conversas), é como um romance de Henry James e você é bem exigente com você mesmo no processo. Você pretende fazer outro trabalho nesta linha?

KG: Gosto da comparação com James em termos de quão complicado e interiorizado o discurso “exteriorizado” pode ser e que impacto podem ter essas trivialidades que inconscientemente deixamos sair de nossa bocas todos os dias. O apelido para o trabalho era “Se cada palavra falada na cidade de Nova Iorque todos os dias fosse de alguma forma materializada como floco de neve, haveria uma nevasca diariamente.” É na acumulação de linguagem que estou interessado. Quanto pesa a linguagem de uma semana? É sobre a concretização do efêmero.

Faz seis anos desde que executei o projeto e já é impressionante como a linguagem mudou. Em alguns aspectos o livro é presciente. Muitos leitores em 2002 podem entender as páginas e páginas da interminável conversa sobre computadores no livro. Na verdade, se tornou jargão comum. Entretanto, em outros aspectos grande parte do livro é completamente obsoleto, baseado em restaurantes que já fecharam, negócios extintos, carreiras, amizades e amores que não existem mais. Escrito assim que surgiu a onda ponto-com, é incrível ver como o panorama mudou desde então.

Depois de Soliloquy eu queria ver se de fato eu não conseguiria me aproximar mais do tipo de trabalho mimético a que você se referiu anteriormente. Ao usar mímese como estrutura eu poderia legitimizar uma apropriação como escritor? Se meu discurso era tão sem valor, eu poderia de alguma forma encontrar uma linguagem com menos valor? Em caso afirmativo, eu poderia teoricamente justificar o uso de tal técnica?

O que a maioria das pessoas não percebe sobre o No. 111 é que enquanto ele é uma alegre brincadeira com a linguagem, parar por aí é não entender a questão. Para mim, o ponto crucial do livro está na inclusão do conto de D.H. Lawrence “The Rocking Horse Winner.” Escolhi este conto porque a última sílaba da última palavra na estória, “winner”, terminava em “er”. Porque a estória tinha mais sílabas do que qualquer outro registro no livro, ela foi usada como último capítulo. Teoricamente senti que poderia ter incluido qualquer conto ou até mesmo um romance inteiro no 111 e teria razão em fazê-lo. Foi apenas uma questão de coragem ou encontrar coragem para fazê-lo.

MP: Você já se sentou e realmente leu “The Rocking Horse Winner”? É uma estória brilhante. Ou, como Cage diante de Finnegans Wake, você preferiu deixar como está?

KG: Sabe de uma coisa? Até hoje nunca “li” essa estória! Contei as sílabas várias vezes mas nunca lhe dei atenção de forma convencional. Acredito quando você diz que é uma bela estória, mas se eu a tratasse como tal abalaria o conceito estrutural e de apropriação que eu procurei passar. Sei que parece pudico ou puritano mas, para mim, ler “The Rocking Horse Winner” como está – dentro do contexto do No. 111 – destruiria alguma parte conceitual crucial do meu livro (a propósito: não aconselharia todos a fazer isso – cada um faz o que quiser. É apenas meu próprio ponto de vista idiossincrático que torna inevitável minhas ações.)

Mas era necessário manter esta linha de pensamento intacta pois foi este questionamento que me levou, cinco anos depois, a escrever a trilogia Day, Week and Month durante 2000-2001. São todas obras reescritas: Day foi reescrita a partir de uma edição do The New York Times, Week foi reescrita a partir de uma edição inteira de Time, eMonth foi reescrita a partir da edição de fevereiro 2001 da Vogue. Como trabalhos baseados em processo, eles maltratam muito mais do que Soliloquy e Fidget. O objetivo do trabalho foi criar uma prática sem valor, que descobri ser impossível visto que o ato de reproduzir os textos tem algum tipo de valor intrínseco.

MP: 111 e Soliloquy poderiam ter sido escritos sem o computador? Eu acho que não pois você usou o computador para compô-los embora você tenha contado as sílabas de 111 sem o computador. Se o computador é indispensável, o que isso nos diz sobre a poética e projetos fictícios no futuro?

KG: Nenhum dos meus trabalhos depois de 73 Poems poderiam ter sido feitos sem o computador. Em 1993, 111 foi iniciado em espaço analógo em que eu coletava informações com papel e lápis. Recordo-me de ir ao cinema e escrever palavras e frases que terminassem em “R”. Já não lia revistas pela informação que continham, simplesmente caçava frases para o meu livro. Nesse período nunca falava ao telefone sem papel por perto. Quando encontrava um amigo para um drink, pegava meu caderno e escrevia trechos de nossa conversa, como se estivesse fazendo uma entrevista. Foi dessa forma que descobri que a linguagem cotidiana à minha volta era concreta e abstrata. Se eu estava procurando por marcas formais na linguagem, não importava o seu significado, somente como soava.

Meu método de caça à linguagem mudou em 1994 quando passei a usar a internet. Na época somente o espaço Gopher e o browser Lynx baseado em texto estavam disponíveis, mas havia uma grande quantidade de linguagem pura disponível. Eu nem precisava digitar, simplesmente cortava e colava. A partir daquele momento ele se tornou um livro que se escrevia.

Entretanto, você está certa quanto a contar as sílabas de 111 sem o computador. Muitos tentaram escrever um programa que contasse sílabas – normalmente baseados na ferramenta de hifenização do Microsoft Word – mas todos falharam. As regras que determinam a contagem de sílabas são extremamente idiossincráticas e no final eu achei mais rápido e mais eficiente contar eu mesmo.

Em meus projetos recentes, tentei fazer com que meu processo de escrever imitasse a mecanização do computador. Já não me vejo como poeta ou escritor mas como um processador de texto, igualando minha prática à idéia de Picabia de desenho mecânico; inesperadamente a escrita mecânica parece interessante.

Em minha prática, passei a acreditar que a linguagem por sua natureza é fluída e assume o formato que quisermos. Portanto minha produção tomou a forma de qualquer coisa desde instalações de galerias até programas de computador para fazer vestidos, CDs e livros, todos usando a mesma linguagem. Antes do computador, a linguagem era muito menos fluída e era quase impossível induzí-la a sair da página. Tecnologias de reprodução como o xerox somente fornecia mais linguagem colada à página. Hoje, como a linguagem é digitalizada, suas tendências transportáveis e mórficas estão em primeiro plano. Grandes partes da linguagem foram derretidas e estão livres para assumir uma variedade de formas. De certa maneira, isso enfatiza as propriedades formais da linguagem mais do que nunca.

MP: Já discutimos o problema do trabalho primeiro escrito de forma “normal” e depois simplesmente transferido para a tela sem fazer uso das possibilidades digitais. O que pode ser feito para tornar a poesia eletrônica melhor, menos parecida com uma propaganda? Ou a poesia não é, no sentido normal, o melhor gênero para a rede?

KG: Uma das tendências mais tristes da arte na rede é a ênfase em possibilidades formais; usa-se demais como critério de sucesso perguntas como “o computador está fazendo o que nunca fez antes?” ou “esta obra está expandindo tecnicamente as possibilidades da área?” Enquanto essas questões são válidas no aspecto científico, não creio que elas tenham relação com a arte. Como pudemos observar nas duas últimas bienais Whitney, há uma preocupação com essas questões. Há uma grande semelhança com o início da vídeo arte quando muitas pessoas estavam apostando nas possibilidades do vídeo como arte. Trinta anos depois aquelas experiências saíram de cena. Ao invés disso, o que sobreviveu foram visões mais primitivas do artista pegando a câmera e fazendo sua arte com ela – Vito Acconci mordendo seu braço ou “Vertical Roll” de Joan Jonas. Eles não são tecnicamente revolucionários mas são trabalhos do período que mais admiramos hoje.

Temos sorte de estar numa área que se adapta à tecnologia de forma relativamente fácil. A poesia naturalmente é atraída pelas formas distributivas da rede (diferente da pintura que ainda deve ser vista pessoalmente para ser totalmente sentida). Poesia eletrônica somente é tão boa quanto os poetas que a escrevem. É óbvio que eu sou entusiasta da rede enquanto sistema de distribuição para a poesia. O formato PDF pode distribuir poemas lindamente compostos – tão belos quanto qualquer trabalho impresso – e por um custo menor. Poucos ousavam expor suas obras quando eu me interessei pela coisa no final dos anos 80 e hoje há uma abundância de materiais disponíveis na rede. Acho que minha adaptação e engajamento na área teriam sido bem mais rápidos. Me lembro que os tipos de materiais naquela época eram obsoletos: páginas mimeografadas amareladas e livros empoeirados dos anos 60 e 70 com capas em branco e preto. Há algo na rede que faz com que este material pareça novo, mais vital, livre do contexto original. Restou o trabalho nu e o bom trabalho retém seu poder no novo meio.

MP: Você expressou antipatia por Oulipo por ter uma narrativa frequentemente “convencional” que seria melhor se revelasse seus códigos. Você já leu W e Life A User’s Manual de Perec? Acho que você gostaria deles. E também Quelque chose noir de Jacques Roubaud, traduzido por Rosmarie Waldrop comoSomething Black.

KG: Sim, eu tenho um assunto a resolver com Oulipo. Aceito o fato de que é realmente “literatura em potencial” mas acho que deveria ser deixado em sua forma conceitual. As idéias são mais radicais e interessantes do que suas poucas realizações. Mesmo com estruturas sistemáticas complexas, por alguma razão os autores sempre tendem a prender seus sistemas em narrativas convencionais. Gostaria que deixassem à mostra os fatos mais importantes (penso o mesmo sobre o nouveau roman – a obra teórica de Robbe-Grillet parece mais radical do que os livros que ele produz).

Acredito em processo e realização. Há algo em passar por um intenso processo da arte de escrever e seguir até o final que abre possibilidades linguísticas de transcender a noção original. Por exemplo, eu poderia ter facilmente mantido Fidget como literatura em potencial publicando a instrução “grave cada movimento do seu corpo por um dia.” Mas se eu não tivesse vivenciado o processo rigoroso de realmente fazê-lo, escrever teria sido bem diferente. Eu certamente não poderia ter inventado a sensação de estar tão cansado de fazer o exercício que não pude evitar de me embebedar!

Meus colegas concordam comigo neste ponto. Christian Bok levou sete anos para produzir Eunoia, seu grande livro que esgota o vocabulário inglês de palavras somente empregando vogais específicas (ele teve que ler o dicionário várias vezes para cumprir seu objetivo!); Craig Dworkin vem trabalhando há muitos anos analisando um livro de gramática de acordo com suas próprias regras e substituindo o texto analisado por novos verbos, substantivos, etc. para criar uma nova narrativa baseada no esqueleto estrutural de um livro de gramática; e Darren Wershler-Henry superou o Oulipo ao escrever The Tapeworm Foundry, um livro composto de centenas de idéias sobre arte e a arte de escrever. Sempre que pensamos ter criado um novo processo, descobrimos para nosso desânimo que Darren já tinha pensado nele!

Fui treinado como escultor e anos atrás assisti uma aula de cerâmica com uma professora que nos alertou para o fato de que o interior do pote é tão importante quanto o exterior. Ela disse: “Se tomarmos tanto cuidado com o interior quanto com o exterior, o pote emitirá um brilho interno que caso contrário ficaria faltando.” Acho que na verdade ela falava da atenção da estrutura reproduzindo integridade nas obras de arte.

MP: Concordo sobre o processo e não gosto da maioria dos poemas de Oulipo mas os trabalhos de ficção de Perec são bem profundos a nível semântico e estrutural. Mas vamos mudar de assunto. Você tem sido maravilhosamente receptivo às memórias que estou escrevendo sobre minha educação de “alta cultura” em Viena e o período após o refúgio, a ser intitulada The Vienna Paradox. Do seu ponto de vista, este não é um projeto um tanto o quanto convencional e antiquado, e se não é, por que não?

KG: Uma das coisas que acho intrigante no seu livro é a idéia de que podemos vir de lugares tão diferentes e ainda estarmos igualmente envolvidos em um mesmo tipo de cultura e arte e sermos igualmente dedicados a elas. Quando leio sobre sua clássica educação Bildung, penso em como minha educação americana foi diferente. Como as gerações anteriores, você teve que enfrentar questões como:

“A discriminação do estético em oposição à sua simulação kitsch era sinal de Bildung: aqueles com a autêntica educação e cultura sabiam farejar o kitsch e sabiam dizer que não era a coisa “verdadeira”. (Perloff, The Vienna Paradox)

Esta linha de questionamento nunca esteve disponível para mim. Cresci nos anos 70 num conjunto habitacional em Long Island numa casa sem nenhuma “alta” cultura. Não visitávamos museus e tínhamos muito poucos livros. Uma peça popular na Broadway (Grease, Hair, The Wiz, etc.) de vez em quando era o meu contato com a “arte” na minha família. Ao invés disso, assistíamos muita televisão.

Numa percepção tardia, muito do que a arte inovadora do século 20 estava tentando fazer – eliminar a divisão entre alto e baixo, aceitar o cotidiano como arte, desmistificar o mito do gênio – foi uma parte importante da minha educação. Eu sabia o que era pop muito antes de saber o que era Pop Art. Depois que estudei Warhol, confirmei aquilo sobre o qual já tinha conhecimento íntimo e implícito. Quando Ginsberg fala de desligar poesia de seus princípios formalistas ao usar o discurso comum, me ocorre que tudo o que eu sabia era discurso comum. E quando Cage falava sobre os méritos do tédio, nada me era mais familiar do que o tédio suburbano – claro, foi isso que me levou a estudar arte em primeiro lugar: a arte era uma ótima maneira de matar o tempo. Gênio ou talentos artísticos não era algo com que se lidava no lugar de onde vim; não havia nada na minha formação que me levasse a acreditar que eu era de alguma forma herdeiro do extraordinário. Meus pais eram comerciantes sujos, não estudantes rabínicos. Como a minha formação é diferente da sua!

MP: Isso tudo é muito interessante! Mas levanta uma série de questões. Considerando nossas formações diferentes, por que você e eu temos quase exatamente as mesmas obras de arte, poesia, etc.? Rimos das mesmas coisas; não gostamos de poesia pseudo líricas pretensiosas e narrativas diretas, e assim por diante. Mas por quê? Certamente as crianças com quem você estudou em Long Island não vão aos concertos de Cage. Eles lêem Gertrude Stein? Nem as pessoas com quem estudei em Fieldston ou Oberlin. Os de Fieldston ainda vão aos mesmos shows da Broadway que você mencionou.

Quanto à minha família, lembro-me que quando eu estava escrevendo meu livro sobre Frank O’Hara in 1975-76, um dia minha mãe veio visitar e deu uma olhada em Collected Poems de O’Hara. Ela ficou chocada e me disse: “Agora vejo como somos diferentes!” Ela falava de todas as palavras de quatro letras, linhas como “Eu acho que fui feito à imagem de um motorista de caminhão maricas,” e assim por diante. Definitivamente não era para ela!

KG: Sua estória sobre O’Hara me lembra da época em que eu estava lendo Tennis Court Oath de Ashbery e meus pais – sócios de carteirinha do country clube de classe média alta – ficaram surpresos ao descobrir que o livro nada tinha a ver com tênis, isto é, com o tênis que eles conheciam! Num caso semelhante, há algumas semanas, meu pai, que tem sofrido de insônia, pegou o Tizzy Boost de Bruce Andrews no meio da noite e ficou boquiaberto. Na manhã seguinte ele me pediu para explicar porque aquilo era poesia. Contei-lhe como eu abordei o livro quando Geoff Young me enviou o manuscrito para saber se eu gostaria de fazer as ilustrações. Depois de tentar entendê-lo da maneira convencional, eu finalmente comecei a perguntar o que ele não era. E desta forma, criando uma definição negativa para ele, eu consegui definir exatamente o que ele estava tentando fazer. Foi uma chave crucial para entender o trabalho de Bruce.

Mas respondendo a sua pergunta, há uma parte da estória que não contei que pode explicar como me tornei o que sou. Meus pais, após terem andado feito sonâmbulos nos anos 60, acordaram nos anos 70 e se tornaram procuradores do new Age original. Meu pai, que tinha ambições para o trabalho social – reforma de penitenciárias, especificamente – foi obrigado por seus pais imigrantes a entrar para o negócio de roupas da família, o que desencadeou décadas de frustração que se manifestou em debilidade física e depressão profunda. Ele e minha mãe começaram a procurar por uma saída, iniciando com EST e nas duas décadas seguintes partindo para controle da mente, Feldenkreis, Reiki, canalização, programação neurolinguística, terapia do grito primitivo, terapia da humilhação, regressão a vidas passadas, cura holística, psicoterapia, caminhar no fogo, retiros zen, entre outros. Na quinta série minha irmã e eu fomos levados a um swami e introduzidos à meditação transcendental. A partir de então nossa família deveria meditar em grupo duas vezes por dia, 20 minutos por sessão. Era terrível fazer com que uma criança que mal podia se sentar imóvel meditar diariamente. Assim que descobri as drogas, desisti da meditação.

Meus pais, tendo rejeitado o judaísmo convencional, nos enviou para Kinder Shul para uma educação judia secular. Kinder Shul nasceu do movimento trabalhador Workman’s Circle e enfatizava a cultura judia acima da religião; assim, aprendemos yiddish ao invés de hebraico. Éramos ensinados por socialistas ultrapassados no porão de uma casa Quaker em Long Island. Além disso fomos mandados ao acampamento de verão do Workman’s Circle, apropriadamente chamado de Acampamento Walt Whitman, onde cantávamos canções folclóricas e de trabalhadores, praticávamos esportes não competitivos, participávamos de reuniões da cidade, etc.

Outro fator excêntrico em minha educação foi meu avô materno, Philip Field (a quem dediquei No. 111). Ele era um advogado empreendedor de Nova Iorque nos anos 40 e 50 e um dos sinais de boa educação na sua época era a aquisição de uma boa biblioteca, que ele começou a montar. Infelizmente, ele investiu todo o seu dinheiro na plantação de cana de açucar cubana e perdeu tudo quando Castro assumiu o poder e acabou arruinado. Ele começou a beber, perdeu sua licença e trabalhou como cobrador de aluguéis armado em Hell’s Kitchen o resto de sua vida. No entanto, mesmo desesperado, ele nunca vendeu sua biblioteca. Na minha infância, eu passava horas entre os livros: Aristophanes ilustrado por Picasso, Dante ilustrado por George Grosz e assim por diante. Quando ele morreu, eu herdei todos os livros.

MP: Antes de conhecê-lo eu tinha lido 73 Poems. Eu o imaginava, a julgar pelo belo livro, uma pessoa austera como Cage – muito quieto, muito sério, um tanto delicado – e certamente não judeu! Aquelas belas palavras em contraste com o fundo cinza e a estampa! A vocalização Joan La Barbara! A questão é como você chegou de A (cultura de TV em Long Island) a B (Cage e Joan La Barbara) e C (uma combinação de alto/baixo?).

KG: Após frequentar um ano de faculdade de artes liberais, fui para uma escola de artes e estudei escultura. Ao retornar a Nova Iorque, comecei a esculpir livros em madeira. Eram esculturas requintadamente entalhadas em compensado, com palavras sobre elas, que passei a exibir com grande sucesso em galerias. Entretanto, estava incomodado porque a idéia do que escrever nos livros me ocorria de repente mas a execução poderia levar vários meses. Então me perguntei no que estava mais interessado – nos objetos em si ou nas palavras sobre os objetos – e escolhi a segunda opção. Parei de fazer escultura e comecei a simplesmente colocar palavras em grandes pedaços de papel.

Nesta época, Ruth e Marvin Sackner começaram a comprar minhas obras. Eles me convidaram para instalar uma peça em sua coleção, uma experiência que mudou o rumo da minha carreira. Embora nessa época – 1992 – eu fosse um participante do mundo da arte em Nova Iorque, eu nunca tinha ouvido falar de Poesia Concreta ou Poesia da Linguagem e levou um tempo para que eu absorvesse e integrasse isso à minha arte. O primeiro passo era deixar de chamar meu trabalho de “arte texto” (“arte texto” na tradição de Kosuth, Weiner ou Holzer), e passar a chamá-lo de “poemas”, enquanto continuava a mostrá-lo em galerias da cidade de Nova Iorque (que na realidade pouco valorizavam a “poesia”).

73 Poems nasceu dessas preocupações e marcou minha transição de um artista estritamente de galeria para alguém com um pé na arte e outro no mundo da arte de escrever. Foi nesse período também que conheci Geoff Young e viria a publicar No. 111 cinco anos mais tarde. Geoff me apresentou a Poesia da Linguagem e foi a primeira pessoa a ver que meu trabalho de galeria se adequava à tradição de escrita inovadora e me incentivou a seguir este caminho.

Finalmente, no início dos anos 90, eu abracei os trabalhos de Cage. Eu tinha feito um mau investimento imobiliário que me destruiu financeiramente. Além disso, estava questionando meu papel como um artista de galeria de sucesso e me perguntando se eu não era na verdade um escritor. Tudo era possível. Eu havia visto Cage na faculdade mas na época eu não estava pronto para entendê-lo. Depois de apanhar um pouco na vida, adotei a idéia de Cage de desistir do controle das coisas na vida e na arte. Seu trabalho e filosofia realmente me ajudaram a atravessar momentos difíceis e abrir perspectivas não disponíveis para mim nos limites relativamente estreitos do mundo da arte em Nova Iorque (lembro-me de uma negociante me contando como ela perdeu dinheiro mostrando os trabalhos visuais de Cage em sua galeria em Nova Iorque). Mais tarde, comecei a ver as limitações do trabalho de Cage e tive vontade de ir além das suas crenças.

MP: E você, sempre na posição de liderança, certamente foi!

Published in Jacket 21 (Feb. 2003), online; also in Portuguese, in Sibila II, 3 (October 2002): 139-58.

This conversation took place by email during the last two weeks of August, 2002. I sent Kenneth some questions, which he attacked in a free- wheeling way, according to his interests. I found the answers even more stimulating than I had expected.

KENNETH GOLDSMITH was born in 1961. He attended the Rhode IslandSchool of Design (BFA Sculpture, 1984). His artworks have been shown in musuems and galleries around the world. His books include 73 Poems (Permanent Press, 1993), No. 111 2.7.93-10.20.96 (The Figures, 1997), 6799 (zingmagazine, 2000), Fidget (Coach House Books, 2000), Soliloquy (Granary Books, 2001), Head Citations (The Figures, 2002) and Day (The Figures, forthcoming 2003). He is the founder and editor of UbuWeb Visual, Concrete and Sound Poetry (ubu.com), a music critic for New York Press, and a DJ on WFMU in New York City (wfmu.org). He lives in New York City with his wife, the artist Cheryl Donegan and their son Finnegan.)

Marjorie Perloff: In your essay, “From (Command) Line to (Iconic) Constellation,” you write very interestingly about your “discovery” of Concrete Poetry, specifically the Noigandres group in Brazil as precursors to internet poetics. Yet pieces like Fidget and Soliloquy have neither the look nor the structural configuration of a Concrete poem: on the contrary, spatiality is replaced by temporal form. Can you try to explain that relationship?

Kenneth Goldsmith: One important aspect of concrete poetry was the reconciliation between the flatness of the page and the implied dynamic (and often sequential) movement of the language used. In this way it ran parallel to the Greenbergian non-illusionistic picture plane, as applied to the flatness of the page. Hence, the internet – a dynamic, almost cinematic frame-based experience that occurs on a flattened stage (the screen) — was the medium concrete poetry was waiting for in order to realize its full potential. It’s no coincidence that so many advertisements – both static and dynamic — seen on the web look so much like concrete poetry.

Fidget and Soliloquy –- texts of every move I made for a day and every word I spoke for a week –- are, by their nature, temporal pieces. They literally document the linear events over the course of a specified time. As such, the temporality of the web – the movement across time, frame by frame so to speak – perfectly fit the formal constraints of the analogue, word-based actions which necessitated these texts.

MP: You have often talked about the transition from the visual to the verbal arts in your work, specifically from sculpture to writing. At the same time, you often remark that visual art is far ahead of poetry, which has not yet taken advantage of the possibilities of the internet. If the visual (you cite Warhol numerous times) is so far ahead of the verbal, why have you opted for language?

KG: The quote to which you are referring was made by Brion Gysin in 1959 when he said that writing was 50 years behind painting. I still believe that this is true today. If we look at how easily the conventions of the art world are bent and apply those to writing, we will see how limited the world of innovative writing has been.

It’s not really a matter of form, it’s more a matter of permissions granted by any given community. The art world is very liberal in that way; the avant-garde is the mainstream as opposed to the writing world’s more oppositional situation between the mainstream and the avant-garde. In the art world, ideas are readily accepted and the hunger for the new never ends. The downside, of course, is that the voraciousness lends a short shelf life to art works and a seasonal fashion-based mentality sets in; careers often flame out quickly in the art world at a very young age.

My long transition from the visual to the verbal (I’ll go into detail about this later in the interview) has been an incredibly idiosyncratic and personal journey. I never could have anticipated, some 20 years out of art school, that I would think of myself as a writer. Having said that, I’ve grown to enjoy the very drawn out, slow pace of writing and publishing books as compared to the pressure-cooking bi-seasonal one-man shows that are standard fare for the art world. After cramming to finish making your work for a show, the exhibition has exactly one month to impact hard and then the work basically disappears forever – either into private collections or is back into the artist’s studio storage bins.

How different this is from the many years it takes to write a book, followed by the tedious process of getting it published and then waiting up to a year or two for the reviews to dribble in. The upside is that books seem to have an eternal shelf life; it’s hard to get rid of them and they seem to remain in circulation forever, either in new or used condition. It’s a pace I’m more comfortable with; somehow it manages to weave its process more into your day-to-day life as opposed to the special event extra-heightened rush of doing a gallery show.

MP: In your interview with Sergio Bessa (“Introduction” to 6799 ), you say, “all my work has a brainy finish to it, though just below the surface, it’s all intuitive, abstract, and poetic.” What are the “intuitive” and “poetic” aspects of your work? At what point, in other words, are rules broken and method undercut?

KG: In the interview with Sergio, I was specifically referring to my gallery work, in which I was intentionally referencing the surface aesthetics of conceptual art but then undercutting that severity with poetic texts, hence creating a tension in the work.

To answer your question, it depends on the project. Some pieces are strict to the letter and others allow for more leeway. No. 111, for example was very strict until the last two chapters of the book, both of which break every rule set forth up to that point. Fidget, too, broke all its rules, this time not out of formal necessity, but out of a need to escape the physical demands of the task. I needed to get drunk and once I let that in, it completely changed the parameters of the book. Soliloquy, on the other hand, was followed to the letter. There was no veering from the original exercise. The same thing happened with Day, the book based on the New York Times.

MP: A follow-up: When you say, “I am a collector of language,” what does that really mean? Surely not in fact just any language. What makes certain words and phrases “collectible”? Conversely, what makes certain language collections boring and dispensable?

KG: Well, I used to feel that only certain words were collectible, that certain words were “better” than others, but I’ve come to question that as the years have passed. Let me explain. The precursor to No. 111 was a gallery work called No. 109, whereby I used the same method of collecting language as I did for No. 111: any word or phrase ending in the sound of “r” or the “schwa” was permitted. In preparation for the gallery show, I edited the piece down to only contain what I considered the “good” words – the “fun” words, the “entertaining” words, the words that really “zinged.” I thought the piece was really “tight” and presented it in a gallery. Unfortunately, the public didn’t agree with me and the work received a lukewarm reception.

In an introspective moment after the show had ended, I went back and looked at all the words and phrases I had omitted. They seemed to be perfectly good words and leaving them out did not make the piece any more of a popular success. So I incorporated them all into a new work which grew to be No. 111. But even then, many years into the project, I found myself not able to accept just any word or phrase; instead, I took only the phrases that interested me. That’s why No. 111 is such a readable book; it tames the wide world of available language and focuses it through the fine lens of one person’s experience. In that sense, it’s a very organized and sharp collection.

But in the end, I decided that that was only one way to go about a collection and it brings me back to your question about method. Instead of focusing on the text itself, I began to focus on the greater method or the concept instead and let the language fall where it may within that specified context. Hence, no words could be “wrong” or “boring” if I could justify it being there conceptually. Suddenly, more traditional linguistic concerns of readerliness, rhythm, phrasing, song, etc. were no longer of importance to me and I found that incredibly liberating. After years of counting syllables in a work like No. 111, you might see where a different approach – a freer approach – to language became necessary.

MP: “There’s so much great language out there for the taking; if we open our eyes and ears to it, we’ll find it in abundance.” This notion comes, of course, from Cage but we now know that, far from opening his eyes and ears to all those sounds “out there” in nature, Cage took strict control over his forms. What is the process involved in your own work?

KG: It’s one of my peeves with Cage. If Cage truly was to accept all incidental sound as music, then that’s what he should have done. Obviously this was not the case and this is where claims for poethics comes into play. I don’t have a problem with an overriding ethical structure guiding an artist’s work, but in Cage’s case, an ethical agenda is in conflict with his philosophical structure of accepting all sounds equally. There were a lot of sounds that weren’t permitted in the Cagean pantheon and a lot of times when the sounds that were permitted happened at inopportune moments, it could ruin a performance. Likewise, Cage’s feathers were easily ruffled at what he considered to be wrongheaded interpretations of his works by musicians and orchestras.

I find that Warhol took Cage’s ideas much further. And although the results aren’t as pretty (or ethical), I feel that Warhol truly accepts the quotidian world – with all its lumps and bruises (as well as beauty) – into his work. He was completely permeable in ways that Cage could only theorize.

My own work has tended recently to move more toward the Warholian model than to the Cagean.

MP: “If it doesn’t exist on the Internet, it doesn’t exist.” You say this contra The Book, and your point is well-taken so far as poets who wait years to have their work published and then have no distribution, are concerned. But now that we have a poetry/art glut on the internet, how can Poet X be distinctive? How does one stand out from the crowd or shouldn’t one try?

KG: Well, just because one is published in a book doesn’t make one a good poet; there’s a glut of horrible books out there too. I think that the internet mirrors the “real” world; a good poem is a good poem regardless of the medium it’s published in. A good artist is going to have make his or her mark regardless of the medium. Give, say, Vito Acconci or Bruce Nauman the web to play with and they’ll make it their own.

As far as the sorting process goes, I’m still surprised by the amount of credibility that the poetry world gives to a book in print. With the distribution technologies available – and the relatively small profit structure around the economies of poetry – it stuns me that younger poets aren’t starting up sites that publish full-length volumes of poetry by their peers. So, if one is attracted to a certain group of writers, there would be a cooperative site, so to speak, where you could find full-length works of theirs. In this way, community is localized and specific, working on a more horizontal axis rather than the vertical canon-building that we’re used to. It reminds me of what often happens in the art world where a group of peers or like-minded artists descend upon an under-utilized gallery and move their program into it, creating their own scene to which people are ultimately drawn.

MP: When you say, “anyone could write 111 using the rules I set up and it would turn out completely different,” do you mean anyone (say, me) could do it and it would be just as effective or just different? Or that the artist is s/he who makes choices that bring out relationships between words that matter?

KG: It’s Cagean again. Cage said something to the effect that anyone can do his work but the fact is that nobody else has done it. I take this to mean that the artist’s real work is in setting the parameters and executing a given project. It’s about the courage to actualize ideas that transform passing thoughts – often trivial – into art.

MP: You’re referring to Cage’s famous statement, “Of course they could but they don’t.” It’s such an important point! And I like the idea of “courage” because that’s just what it is. And speaking of courage: in Soliloquy, you often flirt dangerously with actual mimesis. Your interlocutors are often identifiable and your assessments of people (myself included) have been held to be cruel, nasty, or just plain embarrassing. How do you answer this charge?

KG: Soliloquy is not actual mimesis because it has been framed and presented as art as opposed to a scientific documentation of language or mere sociological research. In this way, Soliloquy does an incredible job with “real” speech and extends the thrust to incorporate “real” speech into poetry that has run from Whitman to Stein, through Ginsberg and Antin. In comparison to Soliloquy, the speech so often passed off as “real” seems artificial, composed and stilted. As much as I’m a fan of David Antin’s work, we can never believe that his “talk poems” are really his talk. It’s edited, composed on the page, cleaned up and sanitized. Solioquy presents speech at its most raw, its most brutal and in its most gorgeously disjunctive form. When we look at “real” speech in Soliloquy, we find that our normative speech patterns are avant-garde! It strikes me odd that what modernism worked so hard to get at for the past 100 years has always been right under our noses!

In terms of the social aspects of the piece, it’s very complicated. I have lost many friends over this work. I do feel bad that their feelings have been hurt but I still cannot apologize for having done the piece. The parameters of the work set out to record every word I spoke during a random week, from the moment I woke up on a Monday morning until I went to bed the following Sunday night. There was to be no editing. As such, I wasn’t able to clean up the messiness of the speech or to streamline it. It was to be an examination of language as it was spoken, plain and simple. If I had begun to edit, where would I start? And where would it end? If, in fact, I had edited at all, it would have been a completely different piece. So exactly what was said and how it was said was left untouched. And that included a lot of gossip and slander. The entire activity was humiliating and humbling, seeing how little of “value” I actually speak over the course of a typical week. How unprofound my life and my mind is; how petty, greedy and nasty I am in my normal speech. It’s absolutely horrifying. But I dare any reader to try the same exercise and see how much more value they come up with in their life. I fear that they might discover, too, that their lives are filled with trivial linguistic exchanges with waiters and taxi drivers. Even those relationships we feel are so vital to our lives – our family and friends – in linguistic terms, are really up for grabs.

MP: Yes, it seems to me that Soliloquy has not yet gotten the credit it deserves. It is not verbal play as in 111 but utilizes point of view and various narrative techniques to create a very vivid image of life in New York at the Millennium, in all its craziness and value. Because point of view is so rigidly controlled (after all, you’re the one who asks the questions and sets up the conversations), it’s rather like a Henry James novel and you are quite hard on yourself in the process. Do you want to do more in this vein?

KG: I like the James comparison in terms of how complicated and interiorized “externalized” speech can be and what profound impact those trivialities that we unthinkingly launch off our lips every day can have. The moniker for the work was “If every word spoken in New York City daily were somehow to materialize as a snowflake, each day there would be a blizzard.” It’s the accumulation of language I’m interested in. How much does an actual week’s worth of language weigh? It’s about concretization of the ephemeral.

It’s been six years since I’ve done the project and it’s remarkable already just how much language has changed. In some ways, the book is prescient. Many readers in 2002 can understand the pages and pages of interminable computer talk in the book. In fact, it’s become common parlance. In other ways, though, so much about the book is completely dated, based on restaurants that are gone, businesses that are defunct, careers, friendships, and lovers that no longer exist. Written in the first blush of the dot-com bubble, it’s incredible to think how the landscape has changed since then.

After Soliloquy, I wanted to see if in fact, I couldn’t get closer to the sort of mimetic work that you were referring to before. Using mimesis as a framing device, could I legitimize an appropriative practice as a writer? If my speech was so valueless, could I somehow push the envelope and find language that had less value than it? And if so, could I theoretically justify the use of such a technique?

The thing that most people don’t realize about No. 111 is that while it’s a gleeful romp through language, to stop there is to miss the point. For me, the crux of the book lies in the inclusion of D.H. Lawrence’s short story “The Rocking Horse Winner.” I only chose that story because the last syllable of the last word in the story, “winner”, ended in an “er.” Because the story had more syllables than any other entry in the book, it was used as the last chapter. So theoretically, I felt that I could have included any short story or even full-length novel into 111 and would have been justified in doing so. It was just a matter of nerve or finding the courage to do so.

MP: Did you ever sit down and actually read “The Rocking Horse Winner”? It’s such a brilliant story. Or, like Cage vis-à-vis Finnegans Wake, did you prefer to leave it as it is?

KG: You know something? To this day I have never “read” that story! I’ve counted the syllables several times but have never paid attention to it in a conventional way. I trust you when you say it’s a great story, but for me to treat it as such would be to undermine the structural and appropriative concept that I was trying to get across. I know it sounds prudish or puritanical, but for me to read “The Rocking Horse Winner” as is — within the context of No. 111 – it would destroy some crucial conceptual part of my book (by the way: I don’t prescribe this for everyone – they can do as they choose. It’s just my own idiosyncratic point of view that necessitates my actions…).

But it was important to keep this line of thought intact because it was this inquiry that led me, about five years later, to write the trilogy of Day, Week and Month during 2000-2001. They are all retyping pieces: Day is a retyping of a day’s copy of The New York Times, Week is a retyping of an entire issue of Time, and Month is a retyping of the February 2001 issue of Vogue. As process-based works, they are more punishing by far than Soliloquy and Fidget. The object of the work was to create a valueless practice, which I found to be an impossibility since the act of reproducing the texts in and of itself has some sort of intrinsic value.

MP: Could 111 and Soliloquy have been written without the computer? I would think not since you used the computer to get it all in, although you did hand-count the syllables of 111? If the computer is indispensable, what does that tell us about future poetic and fictional projects?

KG: None of my works after 73 Poems could have been done without the computer. In 1993, 111 started off in analogue space with me collecting information around me with a pad and pencil. I can remember going to see movies and scribbling down words and phrases that ended in “R.” I was no longer reading magazines for the information they contained but rather to simply hunt down phrases for my book. During this period, I never spoke on the phone without a pad close by. When I’d meet a friend for a drink, I’d take my notebook and scribble down bits of our conversation, almost as if I was doing an interview. It was in this way that I discovered the quotidian language around me to be concrete and abstract. If I was hunting only for formal ticks in the language, it didn’t matter at all what it meant, only how it sounded.

My method of language hunting changed in 1994 when I started using the internet. Back then only gopher space or the text-based Lynx browser was available, but suddenly there was reams and reams of raw language available. I didn’t even have to type, I just had to cut-and-paste. From that point on, it literally became the book that wrote itself.

However, you’re right about having to hand-count the syllables in 111. Many people tried to write me programs that would count syllables – mostly based on Microsoft Word’s hyphenation feature – but they all failed. The rules determining syllable counts are extremely idiosyncratic and I ultimately found it quicker and more efficient to do it by hand.

In my recent projects, I’ve tried to have my writing processes imitate the mechanization of the computer. I no longer think of myself as a poet or a writer, but instead as a word-processor, likening my practice to Picabia’s idea of mechanical drawing; suddenly mechanical writing seems interesting.

In my practice, I’ve come to believe that language by its nature is fluid and will assume any form it’s poured into. Hence my production has taken the form of everything from gallery installations to computer programs to couture dresses to CDs and books, all using the same language. Before the computer, language was much less fluid and it was almost impossible to coax it off the page. Reproducing technologies such as xerox just gave you more language glued to the page. Now, once language is digitized, its transportative and morphic tendencies are foregrounded. Great chunks of language have been melted and are free to assume a myriad of forms. In a way, it highlights the formal properties of language more than has ever been realized before.

MP: I know we’ve discussed the problem of work first written in “normal” ways and then merely transferred to the screen without doing anything with the digital possibilities. What can be done to make e-poetry better, less like advertising copy? Or is poetry, in the normal sense, not the best genre for the net?

KG: One of the most unfortunate tendencies in net art is the emphasis on formal possibilities; it so often uses as a criterion of its success questions like “is this making the computer do things that it’s never done before?” or “is this piece technically expanding the possibilities of the field?” While those are valid questions in a scientific sense, I don’t think they have anything to do with art. As witnessed by the last two Whitney Biennials, we see a preoccupation with those questions. It has a strong parallel to the early days of video art where many people were staking out the technical possibilities of video as art. Some 30 years later, those experiments have dropped out of sight. Instead, what’s survived are the more primitive visions of an artist grabbing the camera and doing his or her art with it – Vito Acconci biting his arm or Joan Jonas’ “Vertical Roll.” They are in no way technically ground-breaking but are the works from the period that we most admire today.

We are fortunate to be in a field that is able to adapt itself to technology relatively easily. Poetry naturally takes to the distributive forms of the web (unlike painting which still has to be seen in person to be fully experienced). E-poetry will only be as good as the poets writing the work. Of course, I’m most enthusiastic about the web as a distribution system for poetry. The PDF format can deliver beautifully typeset poems – as gorgeous as anything that’s been done in print – and for a fraction of the cost. I just think about the scarcity of adventurous writing materials when I was first getting interested in this stuff in the late 80s and I compare it to the abundance of them available today on the net. I think that my adaptation and embrace of the field would have been much quicker. I recall that the sorts of materials floating around back then were very dated: yellowing mimeographed sheets and dusty books from the 60s and 70s with black and white covers. There’s something about the medium of the web that makes this material feel new again, more vital, shorn of its original context. We’re left with the work, naked, and the good work retains its power in the new medium.

MP: You have expressed dislike for Oulipo as too often “conventional narrative” that would be better off revealing its codes. Have you read W and Life A User’s Manual by Perec? I would think you’d love those. Also Jacques Roubaud’sQuelque chose noir, translated by Rosmarie Waldrop as Something Black.

KG: Yeah, I have a personal bone to pick with Oulipo. I accept the fact that it is truly “potential literature” but think it’s best left in its conceptual form. I find the ideas to be much more radical and interesting than the relatively few realizations of it. Even with complex systematic structures, for some reason the writers always tend to wrap their systems in conventional narratives. I always wish they’d leave more of the bare bones showing (I feel the same way about the nouveau roman – Robbe-Grillet’s theoretical writing seems so much more radical than the actual books that he produced).

I’m a believer in process and realization. There’s something about going through an intense writing process and following it through to the end that opens up the linguistic possibilities of transcending the original notion. For example, I could have easily kept Fidget as potential literature by issuing the instruction “Record every move your body makes for a day.” But if I hadn’t gone through the rigorous process of actualizing it, the writing would have been very different. I certainly could never have invented feeling so fed up with doing the exercise that I couldn’t help but get drunk!

My peers agree with me in this respect. Christian Bok took seven years to actualize Eunoia, his great book that exhausts the English vocabulary of words only employing specific vowels (he had to read the dictionary several times in order to accomplish this!); Craig Dworkin has been working for several years parsing a grammar book according to its own rules then replacing the parsed text with new verbs, nouns, etc. to create a new narrative based on the structural skeleton of the grammar book; and Darren Wershler-Henry out-potentialized the Oulipo by writing The Tapeworm Foundry , a book that is nothing but hundreds of art and writing ideas. Every time we think we’ve thought up a new process, we discover to our dismay that Darren has already thought it up!

I was trained as a sculptor and years ago I once took a pottery class with a teacher that made us aware that the inside of the pot is just as important as the outside. If, she said, the inside has had as much care taken with it as the outside, the pot will glow an inner radiance that would have otherwise been lacking. I think she was really talking about the attention of structure breeding integrity into works of art.

MP: I agree about process and I don’t care for most Oulipo poems but Perec’s fictions are quite profound on the semantic level as well as the structural one. But let’s shift ground. You have been wonderfully responsive to the memoir I’m writing about my “high culture” Vienna upbringing and the refugee aftermath, to be called The Vienna Paradox. Isn’t this, by your lights, an old-fashioned, somewhat conventional project, and if not, why not?

KG: One of the things I find so intriguing about your book is the idea that we can come from such different places and yet be equally invested in and devoted to the same kind culture and art. When I read about your classical Bildung education, it makes me reflect on how different my own American upbringing was. Like generations before you, you had to struggle with issues such as:

“The discrimination of the aesthetic as opposed to its kitschy simulacrum was the sign of Bildung: those with genuine education and culture, could sniff out the kitsch, could tell that it was not the ‘real’ thing.” (Perloff, The Vienna Paradox)

This line of questioning was never an option for me. I grew up in the 1970s in a tract home on Long Island in a house that was bereft of any “high” culture. We didn’t visit museums, we had very few books. An occasional popular Broadway play (Grease, Hair, The Wiz, etc.) was the extent of my exposure to “art” in my family. Instead, we watched an enormous amount of television.

In hindsight, so much of what 20th century innovative art was trying to do — breaking down the division between high and low, accepting the quotidian as art, demystifying the myth of genius — was part and parcel of my upbringing. I knew what pop was long before I knew what Pop Art was. After I studied Warhol, it was a confirmation of what I already had an intimate and implicit knowledge of. When Ginsberg talks about unhinging poetry from its formalist tenets by bringing common speech to play, it strikes me that all I ever knew was common speech. And when Cage famously talked about the merits of boredom, nothing could be more familiar to me than suburban ennui – of course, that’s what led me to making art in the first place: art was a great way to kill time. Genius or artistic gifts were never something to grapple with where I came from; there was nothing in my background that ever led me to believe that I was in any way heir to the extraordinary. My grandparents were grubby merchants, not rabbinical scholars. How different, then, this is from your background!

MP: This is all very interesting! But it raises many questions. Given our different backgrounds, why do you and I like almost exactly the same artworks, poetry, etc.? We laugh at the same things; we don’t like pretentious pseudo-lyric poetry and straight narrative, and so on. But why? Surely the kids you went to school with on Long Island don’t go to Cage concerts? Do they read Gertrude Stein? And neither do they people I went to Fieldston or Oberlin with. The ones from Fieldston are still going to those same Broadway shows you mention.

As for my family, I recall that when I was writing my book about Frank O’Hara in 1975-76, one day my mother was visiting and happened to look at O’Hara’s Collected Poems. She was shocked and said to me, “Well, now I see how different we are!” She was referring to all the four-letter words, lines like “I think I was made in the image of a sissy truck driver,” and so on. Not her thing at all!

KG: Your O’Hara story reminds me of the time I was reading Ashbery’s Tennis Court Oath and my parents — card carrying upper-middle class country clubbers — were astonished to find that the book had nothing to do with tennis, that is, as they knew it! Similarly, just a few weeks ago, my father, who has been having insomnia problems, picked up Bruce Andrews’ Tizzy Boost in the middle of the night and was baffled. The next morning he asked me to explain why this was poetry. I told him the story of how I approached the book when Geoff Young sent me the manuscript to see if I wanted to do the illustrations for it. After trying to understand it in every conventional way, I finally began to ask what it wasn’t. And in that way by creating a negative definition of it I was able to define exactly what it was trying to do. It was a big key into understanding Bruce’s work.

But to answer your question, there’s a part of the story I haven’t told that might make more sense as to how I turned out the way I did. My parents, after having sleep-walked through the 60s, woke up in the early 70s and emerged as proto-New Age seekers. My father, who had ambitions to do social work–prison reform,specifically –was forced by his immigrant parents into the family garment business, hence starting decades of frustration manifesting itself in physical debilitation and deep depression. He and my mother began looking for ways out starting with EST and then moving on over the next two decades into Silva Mind Control, Feldenkreis, Reiki, channeling, Neurolinguistic Programming, primal scream therapy, humiliation therapy, past-life regression, holistic healing, psychotherapy, firewalking, zen retreats, just to name a few. In the 5th grade, my sister and I were taken to a swami and inducted in the ways of transcendental meditation. From then on, our family was required as a group to meditate two times a day, 20 minutes each session. It was really awful making a kid who could barely sit still as it was meditate daily. As soon as I discovered drugs, I quit meditation.

My parents, having rejected conventional Judaism, sent us for a secular Jewish education, called Kinder Shul. Kinder Shul grew out of the Workman’s Circle labor movement and emphasized Jewish culture over religion; hence we learned Yiddish instead of Hebrew. We were taught by old-fashioned Socialists in the basement of a Quaker Meeting House on Long Island. Coupled with this was the fact that we were sent to a Workman’s Circle summer camp, appropriately named Camp Walt Whitman, where we sang folk and labor songs, practiced non-competitive sports, met in town meetings, etc.

The other oddball factor in my upbringing was my maternal grandfather, Philip Field (to whom No. 111 is dedicated). He was an up-and-coming New York lawyer in the 40s and 50s and one of the signs of good breeding, in his day, was the acquisition of a good library which he started building. Sadly, though, he invested all his money in the Cuban sugar fields and lost everything when Castro took over and ended up a ruined man. He began drinking, lost his practice and ended up as a gun-wielding rent-collector in Hell’s Kitchen for the rest of his life. However, as desperate as he was, he never sold his library. As a child, I would spend hours amongst these volumes: Aristophanes illustrated by Picasso, Dante illustrated by George Grosz, and so forth. When he died, I inherited all of these books.

MP: Before I met you, I had read 73 Poems. I pictured you, judging from that lovely book, as a rather austere Cagean type–very quiet, very serious, rather delicate–and certainly not Jewish! Those lovely words against the gray ground and the overprint! The Joan La Barbara vocalization! The question then is, how did you get from A (TV culture in Long Island) to B (Cage and Joan La Barbara) and C (a combination of high/low?).

KG: After attending a year of liberal arts college, I went to art school and studied sculpture. Upon returning to New York, I began making wooden sculptures of books. They were exquisitely carved plywood sculptures with words on them, which I began showing with great success in galleries. However, I was bothered by the fact that the idea of what to put on the books came in a flash, but then the execution could take up to several months of work to realize. In response, I began to question what I was more interested in — the objects themselves or the words on the objects — and chose the latter. I stopped making sculpture and began simply putting words on large pieces of paper.

About this time, Ruth and Marvin Sackner began purchasing pieces from me. They invited me down to install a piece in their collection, an experience which changed the course of my career. Although by this time-1992–I was a player in the New York art world, I’d never heard of Concrete Poetry or Language Poetry and it took a while for me to absorb and integrate this into my art work. The first step was instead of calling my art works “text art” (“text art” in the tradition of Kosuth, Weiner or Holzer), I began referring to them as “poems”, while continuing to show them in the NYC gallery context (which really had little use for “poetry”).

73 Poems grew out of these concerns and marked my transition from strictly a gallery artist into someone who had feet in both the art and the writing world. It was about this time, too, that I met Geoff Young was to publish No. 111 five years later. Geoff introduced me to Language Poetry and was the first person who saw my gallery work as fitting into the tradition of innovative writing and encouraged my work in that direction.

Finally, some time in the early 90s, I came to embrace the works of Cage. I had made a bum real estate investment and had been wiped out financially. Also, I was questioning my role as a successful gallery artist and wondering if indeed I wasn’t really a writer. Everything was up for grabs. I had looked at Cage in college but at the time, I really wasn’t ready to understand it. After life had dealt me some blows, I became devoted to the Cagean idea of giving up control of things in both life and art. His work and philosophy really helped me transition through some hard times, as well as open up vistas unavailable to me in the relatively narrow confines of the New York art world (I recall a dealer telling me how she lost so much money by showing Cage’s visual works in her gallery in New York…). Much later, I began to see even the limitations in Cage’s work and had a desire to move beyond his ethos.

MP: As you, always at the cutting edge, certainly have!

YOUNG AMERICAN POETS

Marjorie Perloff

Yang (Antwerp, Belgium), 182 (Summer 1998): 183-85.

Peter Gizzi’s “Caption” takes its epigraph from one of Ezra Pound’s great favorites–François Villon–a gesture that, so to speak, aligns Gizzi with Modernist lyric. At the same time, Gizzi’s meditation on the proximity of death, whether real or imagined, is presented in a series of disjunctive images. The narrative is occluded but the reader participates in the difficulty of the threshold experience, the coming into being of a new relationship, marked though it is by a “severed line.” “Caption” ends with the recognition of difference: “Grief unlike truth, truth unlike snow / Body unlike its outline.” Gizzi’s “Tous Les Matins du Monde,” similarly brings together the indeterminacy of Ashberyian narrative (“Something must be moving at incredible speed”) with distinct Keatsian echoes, as in “a distracted mind unable to doze in fitful sleep,” and an absence of “explanation” that makes Gizzi’s striving for self-understanding so moving.

Gizzi and Willis write an open, highly variable free verse; by contrast, Star Black, a New York photographer who came to poetry in the last decade, writes sonnets although their lines rarely rhyme. She likes the look of her three Shakespearean quatrains and in “Hoopla,” she also makes the most of the expected couplet, with its punchline, “You never know about men.” But, in the spirit of the nineties (and, like Gizzi, Black has learned much from John Ashbery) Black produces pastiche sonnets. “Employment” is a comic send-up of the Petrarchan love sonnet : here the speaker calculates how appropriate it would be “to love and live with an assistant professor”–the golden mean, so to speak, between the famous (the “top-flight” professor) and the lowly fellow-student. “Hoopla” plays similar games with Shakespeare’s Tempest, pondering what Ferdinand might have accomplished if he hadn’t been such a wimp and done all of Prospero’s bidding.

Cole Swensen is another post-language poet (this time from the San Francisco area) for whom the personal is not so much the political (as it was for such precursors Ron Silliman and Barrett Watten) but an interior landscape one can people with one’s fantasies. Swensen has been writing a series of “Opera Notes”: reimaginings of her favorite operas that splice bits of narrative with song echoes and visual notations of stage decor. As in the case of John Cage’s Europeras, Swensen’s opera fragments are wonderfully absurd, what with Orpheus (not Eurydice) “remain[ing] as salt,” elusive love scenes between Salome and John the Baptist, and “gorgeous” arias punctuated by irrelevant commentary. And although her “subject” is musical, her poetic impetus is visual, the placement of words and lines in space so as to create a charged page design.

If Swensen takes her inspiration from a traditional form like opera, Kenneth Goldsmith, a visual artist again with Cagean leanings, uses specific generative devices, often chosen by means of chance operations. Soliloquy is a project in which Goldsmith tape recorded every word he spoke for a week from the moment he woke up Monday morning to the moment he went to sleep Sunday night. For the transcription, he edited every other voice out but his own and his own was completed unedited. The result is a devastating tour de force: in the extract here we have Kenny telling someone about his adventures with his super-exensive suit and the tailor who almost ruins it for him. In the course of the little narrative, we get the perfect flavor of what actual conversation sounds and looks like, with all its “It’s like it’s like midnight,” it’s way of evading tough issues, its racy, up-to-date, colloquial quality. Not a simulation of speech but speech itself: it is not only fun to read but one admires Goldsmith’s discipline in refusing to evade what he actually said, and its modes of saying. No prettying things up here.

Craig Dworkin, the youngest poet in the group, is in his late twenties, and his prose poem, “The Ossature of Memory,” from which the extract here is taken, is the most austere and paragrammatic piece in the group. Every word is, so to speak, x-rayed, mined for the possibilities of punning and allusion. Dworkin has studied Dada and Situationist poetics carefully. Primarily a visual poet, here he uses words as visual counters. The opening “At rain, leaves: she can go travelling” may refer to leaves in the rain or someone leaving in the rain, even as “At rain,” can be respaced to read “A train.” “Travelling,” moreover,” contains all the letters of “At rain, leaves,” its sign of difference being the single letter “g.” From here on in, Dworkin proceeds to give us remarkably acute linguistic play, ranging from echoes of childrens’ games (“One potato”), to mock aphorisms (“The difference between prose and promise is the insertion of the ego”), citations from Marx in the original German, and mock recipes (About two months or until browned on top. it is done when a toothipick inserted in the center comes out clean.” The first sentence “At rain, leaves” reappears near the end in the “normal” “A train leaves Chicago travelling 60 mph.” And to remind us that we live in a world of email, FAX, and answering machines, the poem moves to the refrain “End of messages.”

What can we expect of American poetry as we come to the end of the century? Judging from the poems here, we can anticipate (1) a return to narrative–but a highly fractured variant; (2) much less resistance to the lyric “I” as operative principle, (3) enormous care for the materiality of words; the look of language as well as to the asyntactic, disjunctive modes we have learned to expect from language poetry, and (4) a return to literary allusion, scorned in the seventies and eighties as too well-bred, together with a new interest in Beauty, the aesthetic, the pleasure of the text. It is an exciting moment for lyric poetry.

“Moving Information”:

On Kenneth Goldsmith’s The Weather

Marjorie Perloff

Open Letter: “Kenneth Goldsmith & Conceptual Poetics,” 2005

I used to be an artist, then I became a poet; then a writer.  Now when asked, I simply refer to myself as a word processor.[1]

Exactly thirty years ago, John Cage received a commission from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to write a piece of music in celebration of the American Bicentennial and devised his remarkable Lecture on the Weather, the parent text—but also the foil–of Kenneth Goldsmith’s 2005 book calledThe Weather.[2] Lecture on the Weather is, of course, no lecture at all: the composer subjected Thoreau’s Essay on Civil Disobedience, Walden, and his Journal to I Ching chance operations to obtain collage texts to be performed simultaneously by twelve vocalists.   While these passages were recited, according to strict instructions as to text choice and time-length, Cage introduced, again using numerical constraint, recordings of breeze, rain, and finally thunder, and in the last (thunder) section, a film, representing lightning by means of briefly projected negatives of Thoreau’s drawings.

The resulting “lecture” is thus a systematic, constraint-based “verbivocovisual” (Joyce’s term) performance. It varies, as I have noted elsewhere,[3] according to the time and place of its venue.  At the California Institute of the Arts (Valencia) performance in March 1984, the “theatre” was a large empty room with bare floorboards and a platform at one end on which the vocalists were placed; in the course of the performance, the audience, milling around the room, gradually formed a huddle, so as to keep out of the “storm. “  At the Strathmore Hall “Cagefest” in Rockville, Maryland (May 1989), in contrast, the performance space was a much smaller conference room, in which the audience was seated conventionally in rows, with open French windows to one side.  Halfway into the piece, a storm took place, its thunder claps blending nicely with the recorded storm signals, much to the delight of the composer and his audience.  But whatever the venue, Cage’s is essentially a mimetic text, one that simulates “weather,” as we know it in the “real” world.  It wants, at least for the time span of its performance, to enact weather, the atmosphere in which we live.   As such, Cage’s Lecture on the Weather presents itself as an opening to the natural world, even though its creation and production are, of course, the very opposite of natural.

Like Cage’s Lecture, Goldsmith’s The Weather is a constraint-based, constructed composition.  Since Goldsmith’s source text, the hourly weather bulletins on 1010 WINS, New York’s all-news radio station, last exactly one minute, he has recorded a year’s worth of weather reports, one paragraph per one-minute report. Like Cage’s Indeterminacy, whose one-minute segments demand that some stories will be speeded up, others slowed down by “er” and “um” interjections so as to satisfy the constraint, the WINS time frame provides the form.   In a 2003 statement, Goldsmith tells us that he began to record the radio weather forecasts on December 21, 2002 and continued for exactly a year.  And, logically enough, the book has four chapters for the four seasons—Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall.

Within its Cagean framework, however, Goldsmith’s little book manages to turn the phenomenology of Lecture on the Weather inside out.  Whereas Cage uses the most elaborately artful means (the “writing through” of Thoreau’s journals and their vocalization, the recorded weather sounds, the intermittent visual images) to simulate the feel of weather in all its uncertainty and changeability, for Goldsmith, discourse is all: the transcription and reproduction of a year’s worth of radio weather reports, left intact.   Nothing, one surmises, is invented or added or even altered (although Goldsmith evidently left out a few asides and jokes): what you see (or in the case of Goldsmith’s reading on MP3, what you hear) is what you get.  And, after all, Goldsmith himself has repeatedly insisted that his aim is to be as “uncreative” as possible, indeed downright “boring.” [4]

But wait a minute!  Take up The Weather as you might any other book, and you will soon find that what seems to be boring, straightforward, and incontrovertible fact is largely fiction.  The book’s division into four chapters, one for each season, is already an artifice, for of course we don’t experience the seasons this way.  Nothing happens on December 21^st that couldn’t just as well happen on December 20^th, the last day of fall.  The seasonal cycle, moreover, is, as David Antin notes in his jacket comment, presented as “a classical narrative,” moving from the bitter freeze of Winter 2002 through a moderate New York spring, to the summer season of thunderstorms and hurricanes threatening the coast, to the autumn of World Series weather (fortunately, fairly dry), back to a winter that seems, at least so far, not as cold as the previous one.  The larger narrative thus mimes the familiar myth of “in like a lion, out like a lamb”

Within this frame, the struggle to survive, as defined by the daily weather within which, rich or poor, young or old, citizens of the New York area function, is dramatized in all its boring detail: rare is the week that there isn’t an unexpected shower, a crust of frozen snow, a swollen river, or some other impending disaster.   Listen to the weather forecast and you cannot avoid the beginnings, middles, and ends of Aristotelian narrative:  “The storm is approaching! (beginning). . .  The storm is getting closer! (middle). . .  The storm is here!”  (climax) “Oh, boy, what a storm that was!” (dénouement).

But in 2003, quite by coincidence, given Goldsmith’s original design, the structure of his narrative was heightened by an unanticipated event.   On the first day of spring (in fact, though it isn’t cited here, March 20, 2003 or the evening of March 19, Baghdad time) the U.S. launched its war against Iraq.  Military experts had warned that the attack should not be delayed until the hot season (which comes in early May in Iraq and is long and intense), and late March was already borderline.  Bagdhad weather bulletins, in any case, suddenly infiltrate the New York weather news, even as our troops were infiltrating Iraqi soil:

Oh we are looking at, uh, weather, uh, across, uh Iraq obviously here for the next several days, uh, we have, uh actually some good, good weather is expected.  They did have a sandstorm here earlier, uh, over the last twelve to twenty-four hours those winds have subsided and will actually continue to subside.  Uh, there will

Be enough of a wind across the southern portion of the country that still may cause some blowing sand tomorrow.  Otherwise we’re looking at clear to partly cloudy skies tonight and tomorrow, uh, the weekend, uh, it is good weather and then, we could have a storm, uh, generating some strong winds, uh, for Sunday night and Monday, uh, even the possibility of a little rain in Baghdad.  Uh, currently we have, uh, uh, increasing cloudiness, uh, forecast locally night, uh, its gonna be brisk and chilly, temperatures getting down into the middle-thirties, and then some uh, intermittent rain is expected tomorrow and tomorrow night.  It’ll become steadier and heavier late in the day and, uh, actually a pretty good soaking tomorrow night.  It’ll become steadier and heavier late in the day, and, uh, actually a pretty good soaking tomorrow night.  Uh, temperatures getting into the mid-forties tomorrow, and then staying in the forties tomorrow night.  Friday it’s a breezy and warmer day but, uh, still a few more showers maybe even a thunderstorm, the high of sixty degrees.  Currently we have sunshine and forty-four with an east wind of ten.  Repeating the current temperature forty-four, going up to forty-six in midtown.  (39)

This passage nicely exemplifies the powers of “mere” transcription, mere copying, to produce new meanings.  From the perspective of the weather forecaster, Iraq is experiencing some “good good weather”—good visibility, no doubt, for bombing  those targeted sites, and not too much wind.  The risk of “blowing sand” is slight.  After the reference to “a little rain in Baghdad,” the “we” shifts back to the New York area, as if the Baghdad rain or wind were merely a brief diversion from everyday life in the Tri-State area where it’s a nice average day with temperature in the forties and a chance of rain.

In the next report, “Middle East weather . . . continues to be favorable for military operations, and that’ll remain the case through Sunday, but Monday and Tuesday, there may be another episode of strong winds, poor visibilities, and, uh, even some sandstorms” (39-40). And a few days later, the weather is turning “nasty” in Baghdad, with “strong winds . . . kicking up the sand and making for poor visibility.”  Within a week, the region is “sunny and hot,” highs in the “middle-to-upper nineties” (43).  Perhaps, it seems, the U.S. waited too long after all, what with “one hundred degrees plus, in the southern and eastern deserts.”    But, whatever the realities of military strategy, within less than three weeks, Iraq weather literally disappears from the WINS radar screen.   No further mention of sandstorms or rain or the sizzling heat in Kuwait is made, no doubt because on April 9, the fall of Baghdad is announced: for weather purposes, the “war” is over.

At this writing in July 2005, with the postwar (often more deadly than the war itself) dragging on day by day, this weather tale could hardly be more ironic. Yet it is perfectly accurate: as soon as the statue of Saddam Hussein was pulled down amid jubilation, “Iraq” was presumed to be no longer a primary concern to residents of the Tri-State Area, tuning in to the Weather Forecast on their morning commute or weekend get-away.  Within days, the “real” news——an item of April 15, for example, that daytime TV was about to get “its first lesbian kiss” — was competing with Iraq for airtime, and that meant that, so far as weather reports were concerned, it would be all weather, all the time.  Not Baghdad but Bergen, New Jersey, not Kuwait, but Danbury, Connecticut (55).  And it has remained that way ever since.

In the wake of such “consumer minimalism,” as Goldsmith calls the mode of these one-minute weather reports, those sound  bytes that “take our most complex, life-sustaining environment, and simplify it in a way that either aids or abets your commute” (email 14 July), the poet need provide no moralizing on the horrors of war; the actual discourse of the day says it all.   The Baghdad thread is thus the clinamen that gives the “classical narrative” of The Weather its piquancy.  But this is not to say that Goldsmith needed such outside interference to enhance the intrigue of his tale.  For the transcriptions themselves, the “mere” retypings of the daily reports, have their own poetic force—a force that relates them to science fiction rather than to the boredom of everyday fact.

First, how daily is our experience of the daily weather report?  In theory, it is constant, but in practice, it all depends on the listener.  There should, for example, be 365 reports in this annual record, but I count only 293 entries, with summer being the shortest season (sixty-four entries) and winter the longest with eighty-four.  What can this mean?  And how can the reader, trying to “date” individual weather reports, know where s/he is?  Is Goldsmith suggesting that summer feels shorter than winter?  But that hardly seems likely, given that the summer of 2002 was a special weather challenge, what with terrible hurricane Isabelle coming in from the Carolina coast and the storms plaguing the New York Area.  What is more plausible is that Goldsmith was out of town—say, at Christmas time, which has a paucity of entries, or for the 4^th of July.   Then, too, sometimes there seem to be two or more weather reports for the same day, so similar are the descriptions in question.

The neat four-season cycle thus turns out to be anything but neat; the text assembles, not the weather but Kenny’s weather, witnessing his comings and goings in the course of a year. Goldsmith is the first to admit this.  “The act of transcription,” he  remarks, “as a hands-off, bone-dry act of coldness is a fallacy; no matter what we do, we leave our imprint—and a very personal imprint at that—on our work” (email 7/14).  Central to this “imprint” is the poet’s decision to provide no dates or even the month in question (is entry x made in January or February?) —a decision that challenges the reader to find logic and coherence in what turns out to be a curiously illogical and incoherent narrative.   For try to establish the actual sequence of these weather reports and you will be startled to find that the 1010 Weather Forecast is mostly wrong or at least confusing!

In mid-February, for example  (about fifteen entries past Groundhog Day, which falls on February 2), we read:

We’re gonna get a break in the weather, not only for today but for the next, uh, well, three days as clouds, uh, thin out for partial sunshine today.  We’ll get the temperature up close to forty this afternoon, certainly above freezing and well into the thirties.  Might be a sprinkle or flurry this evening then clearing tonight.  Tomorrow a mostly sunny day, I’ll tell ya, if you’re outside tomorrow afternoon, there won’t be much of a breeze, the sun will be out, temperatures into the forties, it will feel good.  And then a, uh, nice day Friday but increasing clouds.  Rainy and windy Saturday, and that combination of rain and melting snow can cause street and highway flooding Saturday.  Dry Sunday but blustery and colder.  Right now it’s thirty-two and party sunny in Central Park, temperature today going up to thirty-eight.  (25)

But the next entry announces “arctic air tonight, some clouds, thirty-four in midtown, we’re heading down to twenty-four.  We’ll be hard pressed to get, uh, close to the freezing mark tomorrow.”  And then the forecast looks ahead to “single digits in many suburbs” coming “tomorrow night” (25).  What’s happened to the “feel good” weather with its “mostly sunny day” predicted above?

Again and again the elaborate and laborious five-day forecast turns out to be incorrect.  Or is it just that the omission of an entry or two makes nonsense of the forecast?  In the extract above, it should be Thursday, since the forecast looks ahead to Friday and then to the weekend.  But in the very next entry there is talk of “precipitation Thursday, Thursday night, early Friday.”  Does this already refer to the next Thursday, the report coming on Wednesday?  Or does Goldsmith skip a number of forecasts?  Give two or three for a single day?  Again and again, talk of upcoming days of the week conflicts with prior “evidence,” and so the book begins to feel like the elaborate fantasy, which in fact it is.

For even though Goldsmith invents nothing and merely transcribes, there are constant «artistic» decisions to be made, beginning with the omission of the date, time of day, day of the week, and month.  It is an omission that makes it impossible to orient oneself vis-à-vis actual weather events, and, without changing a single word of a given report, it heightens a particular phenomenon: the chanciness of the weather.   «Chance» is, of course, one of the most common words in any weather report: a chance of showers, a chance of rain, a chance of a thunderstorm, a chance of snow flurries.  The tension that animates weather discourse is thus a tension between number and chance.  After an announcement that «we could see some snow by the weekend» (22), the next sentence tells us, «Right now it’s partly sunny, thirty-one in Central Park, humidity forty-one percent, a west wind gusting to thirty-one, gives us our RealFeel temperature of about nineteen.»

Whose RealFeel is this?  Does everyone realfeel 19º when the temperature is 31º, the humidity 41%, and winds gusting thirty-one miles per hour?  Who decides, and doesn’t specific predisposition, location, or clothing have anything to do with it?   More important, how do we process all this accurate information, given the continuous references to chance, to the possibility of this or that happening?   Indeed, the further we read into The Weather, the more we note that the only certainty has to do with present time and place (but whose present?), whereas the forecast is always, so to speak, under a cloud.  Consider the last day of «Summer,»  whose Weather Report concludes as follows:

And a chance of showers lingers into Tuesday, high on Tuesday seventy-two degrees.   Currently seventy-two degrees at LaGuardia, sixty-eight at Newark, in Central Park a cloudy sky, seventy degrees, relative humidity eighty-four percent, and we have a calm wind.  Repeating the current temperature seventy going up to eighty-two in midtown.   (90)

There’s chance again, but reassuringly linked to a particular day and those wonderfully precise temperatures at LaGuardia, Newark, and Central Park.  Numbers and place names:  these circumscribe weather discourse and make it seem nothing of not informative.  But when the current temperature is repeated just seconds after its first mention,  the data is confusing because the location—Central Park, where it is 72º–is not the location which was the original point of departure—LaGuardia Airport.  So even these numbers demand qualification.

Now suppose that, as I write this, I had on my desk the necessary tools to measure weather conditions: thermometer, barometer, anemometer, etc.   Obviously, I could determine, without listening to WINS or any other station, precisely what «my» weather is.   Indeed, the newer automobiles all register on their dashboards the outside temperature, and soon, no doubt, they will be able to register the humidity and wind velocity as well.  Why, then, do we continue to tune in to the weather report?  What is it we enjoy about its frequently fabulist narrative?

Here pronouns play a major role. Consider the following, from «Summer»:

Well, you can aready feel that heat and humidity out there as the sun, uh, has been really warmins us up and, uh, we’ll stay that way today.  Some clouds and parts of the area could get a thunderstom this afternoon or early tonight, as a cold front passes through, but not all of us seeing any shower activity.  (71)

What rapport!  We’re all in this weather game together, right?  And the wise reporter knows that «not all of us» are «seeing any shower activity.  S/he knows «we»  feel that «heat and humidity.»  Then, too, this impersonal voice has insight:

We’re going to have very strong winds today.  The winds are going to gust past fifty miles per hour at times and this is going o bring down some tr . . . tree limbs, power lines.  Already thousands of people as close as Philadelphia are without power, across parts of New Jersey as well.  This all spreading north-eastward (108)

Again, what wisdom!  The godlike weather forecaster seems to be witnessing those trees coming down: he (on radio, it usually is a he) is a prophet who «already» knows the fate of Philadelphia, where thousands are without power!

Weather is thus the most intimate and yet the most impersonal of «news.»   On the one hand, it draws «you» into the magic circle of «us,» who have insight into the air movements of far-away Philadelphia.  On the other,  the weather forecast is wholly non-judgmental.  Not for the forecaster to tell us how to feel about the Iraq War, the fate of Kuwait, or even the outcome of the World Series.  The weather cycle is , after all, the same in war and peace; it is wholly independent of our human attempts to control it or steel ourselves against it.  And precisely because it is thus independent, we marvel at its excesses:  year in and year out, we express surprise and outrage over ninety-five degree heat in July and subzero temperature in January.  Amazing!  Who would have thought it?    Let’s listen to the weather forecast and find out what happens next!  Maybe.

*****************************

Like Goldsmith’s word-for-word reproduction of a single day’s New York Times in Day (2003)  or his transcription of his every spoken word during a given week in Soliloquy (2001), The Weather is a work of radical defamiliarization.  It forces the reader to think about weather in entirely new ways.  Whereas Cage could still find it useful to «create» a weather situation that would seem «real» and alive, that would force us to open our ears to the sounds we actually hear, Goldsmith is responding to a later, rather different situation—an electronic envirnoment where appropriation and sampling are simply par for the course.  Nothing in our environment can now be «natural,» not even the weather over which we have no control, because it is transmitted to us through particular channels that are continuously packaging and monitoring meterological events.

For many artists and writers, this situation spells the endgame of art.  Here we are, so the pessimists would claim, the victims of the consciousness industries, of a relentless commercial and political spin that controls our every action and denies our freedoms.  But Goldsmith knows better.  «Suddenly,» he remarks in a discussion of Soliloquy, «the familiar or quotidian is made unfamiliar or strange, without really blasting apart the sentences.  Forget the New Sentence.  The Old Sentence, if framed properly, is really odd enough.»  Or again, «Writing needs to be a simple as possible—just put a net up and catch it.» [5]

The notion of putting up a net to «catch it,» of framing the «old sentence» is not as absurd as Goldsmith’s detractors  would have us think. I doubt that the author of The Weather has spent much time poring over Wordsworth’s famed «Preface to Lyrical Ballads,» but much of Wordsworth ’s case for defamiliarization applies nicely to Goldsmith’s work.  Consider the following passage:

It is supposed, that by the act of writing in verse an Author makes a formal engagement that he will gratify certain known habits of association; that he not only thus apprises the Reader that certain classes of ideas and expressions will be found in his book, but that others will be carefully excluded. . . . . they who have been accustomed to the gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers, if they persist in reading this book to its conclusion, will, no doubt, frequently have to struggle with feelings of strangeness and awkwardness: they will look round for poetry, and will be induced to inquire by what species of courtesy these attempts can be permitted to assume that title. [6] (my italics)

Wordsworth famously goes on to explain that his «principal object» was «to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them . . . in a selection of language really used by men; and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way» (869).

But, the skeptical reader will ask, how can the «colouring of imagination» Wordsworth speaks of so eloquently be thrown over words that were not invented by the poet, how can it transform sheer copying?  Goldsmith recalls that a student once approached him and complained, «Your poem doesn’t contain a single word of your own!»   Here a  comment in a recent Goldsmith interview on «uncreativity» may be apposite:

Creativity as we’ve come to know it is bankrupt. . . . Think of the flood of worn-out narratives, passing for originality, be it novels, films or music, and you’ll find that what we term creative is nothing more than repetitious formulas, spun over and over. Should something appear that’s truly “creative” it doesn’t stand a chance of selling and as such, is rendered culturally insignificant and marginalized to the point of invisibility. By opposing creativity as commonly accepted — in a sense by constructing a negative notion of creativity — perhaps we can breathe new life into this practice. Hence, my concept of the uncreative. [7]

The «flood of worn-out narratives» reminds me of Wordsworth’s strictures on writing that merely «gratifies certain known habits of association.» Indeed, just as I was completing this essay, the mail brough a copy of the winner of the 2004 Walt Whitman Award of The Academy of American Poets, a slim volume by Geri Doran called Resin.  According to the dustjacket,  «the [poet's] voice . . . tells how the natural world . . . expresses and mediates human longing.»   Given these parameters, weather would seem to be involved, as it is in the first poem, «Tonight Is a Night Without Birds»:

The sky fell open to a map of the constellations.

Earlier the snowmelt reconfigured the field.

I tried to describe it, but the field transformed

into the plains of the soul pressed flat. [8]

This is, I’m afraid, sleight-of-hand.  Skies, no matter how much we strain, don’t «fall open to a map of the constellations,» and, had the poet really «tried to describe it, « the field in question would not so easily morph into the «plains of the soul.»   Indeed, Doran’s are the «repetitious formulas, spun over and over»  that Goldsmith rejects, the «gaudiness and inane phaseology» Wordsworth is determined to replace.

Reading such strained comparisons, one turns with relief to the found text of The Weather.  Here, a given «crooked tree / small with wild spikes and a covering of snow,» is not said, as in Resin, to «look like a deranged bonsai»(45); trees are always and only trees.  But the text has its own pleasures.  Consider the «getaway day for the Memorial Day holiday weekend» (what date is that exactly?), a day on which «We’re waiting, actually, on a storm system organizing in Georgia right now to bring the real rain of consequence» (58).   The real rain of consequence: it sound ominous indeed, coming as it does all the way from Georgia.   Will it really hit New York?  There is no telling, but its «consequence» is everywhere to be found in this delightful and creatively «uncreative» little book.

Footnotes