Synopses & Reviews
In much the same way that photography forced painting to move in new directions, the advent of the World Wide Web, with its proliferation of easily transferable and manipulated text, forces us to think about writing, creativity, and the materiality of language in new ways. In
Against Expression, editors Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith present the most innovative works responding to the challenges posed by these developments.
Charles Bernstein has described conceptual poetry as "poetry pregnant with thought." Against Expression, the premier anthology of conceptual writing, presents work that is by turns thoughtful, funny, provocative, and disturbing. Dworkin and Goldsmith, two of the leading spokespersons and practitioners of conceptual writing, chart the trajectory of the conceptual aesthetic from early precursors including Samuel Beckett and Marcel Duchamp to the most prominent of todays writers. Nearly all of the major avant-garde groups of the past century are represented here, including Dada, OuLiPo, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, and Flarf to name just a few, but all the writers are united in their imaginative appropriation of found and generated texts and their exploration of nonexpressive language. Against Expression is a timely collection and an invaluable resource for readers and writers alike.
Synopsis
In much the same way that photography forced painting to move in new directions, the advent of the World Wide Web, with its proliferation of easily transferable and manipulated text, forces us to think about writing, creativity, and the materiality of language in new ways. In Against Expression, editors Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith present the most innovative works responding to the challenges posed by these developments.
About the Author
Craig Dworkin is the author of
Reading the Illegible (Northwestern, 2003), and the editor of
Architectures of Poetry (2004),
Language to Cover a Page: The Early Writing of Vito Acconci (2006),
The Consequence of Innovation: 21st Century Poetics (2008), and, with Marjorie Perloff,
The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound (2009).
Kenneth Goldsmiths writing has been called "some of the most exhaustive and beautiful collage work yet produced in poetry" by Publishers Weekly. Goldsmith is the author of ten books of poetry. He teaches writing at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is a senior editor of PennSound, an online poetry archive.
Table of Contents
Why Conceptual Writing? Why Now?
Kenneth Goldsmith
The Fate of Echo
Craig Dworkin
Monica Aasprong
from Soldatmarkedet
Walter Abish
from Skin Deep
Vito Acconci
from Contacts/Contexts (Frame of Reference): Ten Pages of Reading Roget's Thesaurus
from Removal, Move (Line of Evidence): The Grid Locations of Streets, Alphabetized, Hagstrom's Maps of the Five Boroughs: 3. Manhattan
Kathy Acker
from Great Expectations
Sally Alatalo
from Unforeseen Alliances
Paal Bjelke Andersen
from The Grefsen Address
Anonymous
Eroticism
Davic Antin
A List of the Delusions of the Insane: What They Are Afraid Of
from Novel Poem
from The Separation Meditations
Louis Aragon
Suicide
Nathan Austin
from Survey Says!
J.G. Ballard
Mae West's Reduction Mammoplasty
Fiona Banner
from The Nam
Derek Beaulieu
from Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
Samuel Beckett
from Molloy
from Watt
Caroline Bergvall
VIA (36 Dante Translations)
Charles Bernstein
from I and The
My/My/My
Tod Berrigan
An Interview with John Cage
Jen Brevin
from Nets
Gregory Betts
from If Language
Christian Bök
from Busted Sirens
from Eunoia
Marie Buch
from Whole Foods
William S. Burroughs
from Nova Express
Davic Buuck
Follow
John Cage
Writing Through The Cantos
Blaise Cendrars
from Kodak
Thomas Claburn
from i feel better after i type to you
Elisabeth S. Clark
from Between Words
Claude Closky
The First Thousand Numbers Classified in Alphabetical Order
from Mon Catalogue
Clark Coolidge
from Cabinet Voltaire
from Bond Sonnets
Hart Crane
Emblems of Conduct
Brian Joseph Davis
from Voice Over
Katie Degentesh
The Only Miracles I Know of Are Simply Tricks that People Play on One Another
Mónica de la Torre
from Doubles
Denis Diderot
from Jacques le fataliste et son maître
Marcel Duchamp
from notes
Craig Dworkin
from Legion
from Parse
Laura Elrick
from First Words
Dan Farrell
Avail
from The Inkblot Record
Gerald Ferguson
from The Standard Corpus of Present Day English Language Usage Arranged by Word Length and Alphabetized Within Word Length
Robert Fitterman
Metropolis
from The Sun Also Rises
Lawrence Griffin
Spinoza's Ethics
Peter Gizzi
Ode: Salute to the New York School, 1950-1970 (a libretto)
Judith Goldman
from dictée
from r'ture/CENTaur
Kenneth Goldsmith
from Day
from No. III 2.7.92-10.20.96
from Soliloquy
from The Weather
Nada Gordon
Abnormal Discharge
Noah Eli Gordon
from Inbox
Michael Gottlieb
from The Dust
Dan Graham
Exclusion Principle
Poem-Schema
Michelle Granguad
from Biographies/Poetry
Brion Gysin
First Cut-Ups
Michael Harvey
from White Papers
H. L. Hix
Poem composed of statements made by George W. Bush in January 2003
Yunte Huang
from Cribs
Douglas Huebler
from Secrets: Variable Piece #4
Peter Jaeger
from Rapid Eye Movement
Emma Kay
from Worldview
Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler
from Apostrophe
Michael Klauke
from Ad Infinitum
Christopher Knowles
from Typings
Joseph Kosuth
from Purloined: A Novel
Leevi Lehto
from Päivä
Tan Lin
from BIB
Dana Teen Lomax
from Disclosure
Trisha Low
Confessions
Rory Macbeth
from The Bible (alphabetized)
Jackson Mac Low
from Words nd Ends from Ez
Stéphan Mallarmé
from La dernière mode
from Le livre
Donato Mancini
Ligature
Peter Manson
from Adjunct: An Undigest
from English in Mallarmé
Shigeru Matsui
Pure Poems
Bernadette Mayer
from Eruditio ex Memoria
Steve McCaffery
Fish Also Rise
The Kommunist Manifesto or Wot We Wukkers Want
Bi Charley Marx un Fred Engels
Stephen McLaughlin and Jim Carpenter
from Issue I
David Melnick
from Men in Aida, Book II
Richard Meltzer
Barbara Mauritz: Music Box
Denny Lile
Maple Leaf Cowpoop Round-Up
Christof Migone
from La première phrase et le dernier mot
Tomoko Minami
from 38: The New Shakespeare
K. Silem Mohammad
Spooked and Considering How Spooky Deer Are
from Sonnagrams
Simon Morris
from Getting Inside Jack Kerouac's Head
from Re-writing Freud
Yedda Morrison
from Kyoto Protocol
Harryette Mullen
Bilingual Instructions
Elliptical
Mantra for a Classless Society, or Mr. Roget's Neighborhood
Alexandra Nemerov
First My Motorola
C. K. Ogden
Anna Livia Plurabelle
Tom Orange
I Saw You
Parasitic Ventures
from All the Names In Search of Lost Time
Georges Perec
Attempt at an Inventory of the Liquid and Solid Foodstuffs Ingurgitated by Me in the Course of the Year Nineteen Hundred and Seventy-Four
M. NourbeSe Philip
from Zong!
Vanessa Place
from Statement of Facts
Bern Porter
Clothes
Raymond Queneau
from The Foundations of Literature
Claudia Rankine
from Don't Let Me Be Lonely
Ariana Reines
from The Cow
Charles Reznikoff
from Testimony, Volume II: The United States (1885-1915) Recitative
Deborah Richards
from The Beauty Projection
Kim Rosenfield
The Other Me
Raymond Roussel
from How I Wrote Certain of My Books
Aram Saroyan
Untitled Poem
Ara Shirinyan
from Your Country Is Great
Ron Silliman
from Sunset Debris
Juliana Spahr
Thrashing Seems Crazy
Brian Kim Stefans
from The Vaneigem Series
Gary Sullivan
Conceptual Poem (WC + WCW)
To a Sought Catepillar
Nick Thurston
He Might Find
Rodrigo Toscano
Welcome to Omnium Dignitatem
Tristan Tzara
from Dada Manifesto on Feeble and Bitter Love
Andy Warhol
from a: a novel
Darren Wershler
from The Tapeworm Foundry
Christine Wertheim
Finnegans Wanke/Finnegans Wake
Wiener Gruppe
ideas for a "record album/functional" acoustic cabaret
11 abecedaries
William Butler Yeats
Mona Lisa
Steven Zultanski
My Death Drive
Vladimir Zykov
from I Was Told to Write Fifty Words
Acknowledgments