Thanks for the heads up. Love the "100% teddy bear" comment; Kenny is very funny and very necessary. But what is up with Bruce Andrews?!! Zoiks! Not sure his "venomous diatribe against creative writing" is all that venomous. It's pretty much just crap. What century does he live in? Does he just trot out the same diatribe, decade after decade, without taking stock of what's actually happening around him? Christ, and that hair! He has a fin! He needs a stylist.
Frevr yr srvnt,
Lord M. Flatley

Kenneth Goldsmith's voice is like rich, rich butter. Thanks for posting this, I intend to share it with others.

Still, to assert (as the filmmakers do) that conceptual writing is the poetics of the moment, they must be referring to folks over, say 35. While it's not hard to construct an argument that shows that many leading poets are not following the path of modernism, it's difficult to say that this is them being out of touch. Why can't we assume that they're purposefully avoiding modernism? One of the recent trends in mainstream rock, started years back by the underground punk rock revival of rockabilly and ska, was mining the abandoned styles of yesteryear to express the sentiments of today. I feel there are respectable poets of a decidedly non-conceptual strain who are doing exactly that.

I am just not sure why it would be a faux pas for an individual to stall just before the trappings of modernism and stake her or his claim on those styles. I would rather poetry not buy into the mainstream attitude that new is better. Instead, I'd like to read good poetry. No matter what it takes to produce it.

Beyond that, many academic poets concerned with "the poetry of now" haven't quite realized that post-modernism is on the way out, and those of us under the age of 30 are not scowling in horror at what those older are doing, we're just beginning to explore new modes of thinking beyond post-modernism. Conceptual poetics is, while still very important to Western poetry, nothing new.

Carter,

You seem to forget that Goldsmith in his manifesto of conceptual poetics here on the Poetry Foundation disclaims newness or originality:

"Conceptual writing obstinately makes no claims on originality. On the contrary, it employs intentionally self and ego effacing tactics using uncreativity, unoriginality, illegibility, appropriation, plagiarism, fraud, theft, and falsification as its precepts; information management, word processing, databasing, and extreme process as its methodologies; and boredom, valuelessness, and nutritionlessness as its ethos."

The effect, then, is a paradox in the Duchampian tradition -- you can call it nothing new and it agrees with you. Smart, yet infuriating.