Kenny Goldsmith in The New Yorker: 'An artist’s right to make a mistake is much more sacred than anyone’s feelings'

A piece in the October 5 issue of The New Yorker looks at Kenneth Goldsmith's recent "challenging behavior." "Goldsmith, who is fifty-four, likes pranks and provocations and making people uncomfortable—challenging behavior, he thinks, is an artist’s prerogative," writes Alec Wilkinson, who spoke to fellow poets, writers, and critics like Cathy Park Hong–who in a few quotes he characterizes as resentful–and Christian Bök, who is written up as a co-founder of conceptual poetry.

After an explanation of Bök's breakdown of poetry into four modes--the lyric, automatic or subconscious, constraint-based, and appropriative--Wilkinson looks at criticism of Goldsmith on aesthetic terms, e.g., from his friend Marjorie Perloff ("I love Gertrude Stein, but most of the time I’d rather read Tolstoy”) and fellow New Yorker writer and poet Dan Chiasson ("I associate him with a certain kind of avant-garde spectacle")--and then to Goldsmith as exemplary of another problem, where it can seem as if no one else works within, or can reimagine, conceptual or avant-garde frameworks other than white writers.

Goldsmith’s hegemony as a conceptual poet, achieved with Perloff’s support—his appearance at the White House and on “The Colbert Report”; the perception that he receives the best-paying offers for readings, and the best invitations, and gets the most attention; his association with the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches; the way he dresses and his studied nonchalance; his aggressive pleasure in upsetting people, his eagerness to promote himself, and his air of self-satisfaction—has led a number of other conceptual poets to feel that he monopolizes a territory that excludes them. Many of these writers identify themselves as poets of color. A poet named Tan Lin wrote me, “The conceptual program, as it has been developed and codified by critics in the past ten years or so, and I am really talking about the institutionalization of conceptual poetry in academia, has focused mainly on the work of white authors.” Dorothy Wang, a professor at Williams, said that poets of color have grown “pissed off by the stranglehold white people have on avant-garde poetry.”

Further inflaming the exchange is Goldsmith’s belief that a hallmark of uncreative writing is the irrelevance of inescapable identity, since the Internet allows a person to hide behind a multiplicity of names and profiles. Some poets of color feel that Goldsmith is subtly denying selves that they wish to assert and explore. Only a white person, these writers say, has the ability to shed his or her identity or to wear it casually. Their experience is that to be a person of color in America is to be constantly reminded of who you are. Dorothy Wang feels that identity in conceptual poetry “is a code word for racial or ethnic identity.” She says, “Often, the assumption is that good experimental avant-garde work is bereft of identity markers, and that lead-footed, autobiographical, woe-is-me, victim poetry is minority poetry.”

Wilkinson also writes of the response to and from Goldsmith after his reading of Michael Brown's autopsy at Brown last spring:

Al Filreis, the head of the contemporary-writing center at the University of Pennsylvania, thought that the reaction had something to do with the ambiguity of Goldsmith’s method. “Kenny’s version of N+7 is retyping,” Filreis said. “It’s N+0. No one reading Rosmarie Waldrop would think that she had no problem with the declaration ‘All men are created equal.’ But, with N+0, you don’t always know what he’s doing. The question for an artist becomes: How certain do I have to be to make it clear that I intend to make this text work a certain way? How much complicity is there in reading a horrifying text?”

Other academics were pleased that Goldsmith had been set upon. “I am hoping that there has been enough anger that he won’t survive,” Cathy Park Hong, at Sarah Lawrence, told me. “Maybe he really did mean to be sympathetic, who knows. Two, three years ago, it would have been ‘That’s Kenny being Kenny,’ but in this racial climate you don’t get away with it.”

Marjorie Perloff said that when she heard about the reading she thought “it was a terrible mistake and certainly in bad taste.” The larger fault, however, lay with the obsession in the poetry community with political correctness. “It began with, You’re not allowed to criticize a poem by a woman,” she said. “Then it was poets of color. Now a poet is an activist who writes in lines. That has nothing to do with poetry. It’s just provocation and proclamation.”

About the only poet to defend Goldsmith publicly was an African-American named Tracie Morris, whom he knows. In an Internet exchange with a black man who identified himself as an artist and a curator, Morris said that Goldsmith was right to read the report, because there was no correct way to approach such material. For white people to ignore Brown’s death would be just as damaging, she wrote. What made the piece difficult for her was that she regarded it as “the truth of what happened,” she wrote. “It’s not poetic ‘interpretation’—it’s not a speech. It’s what we are ‘left with,’ the dispassionate, painful truth of this child’s lifeless body.”

Goldsmith considers his next steps. "When this happened, I realized I had hurt people. But an artist’s right to make a mistake is much more sacred than anyone’s feelings.” Perhaps the art world is less "politically correct": “'Sometimes I think I might be headed back to the art world,' he said ruefully. 'I don’t deny that possibility. They still seem to like me there.'"

Read it all at The New Yorker.