"How fortunate we are to exist in the moneyless economy of poetry!": an interview with Kenneth Goldsmith

Kenneth Goldsmith -- conceptual poet, copyright provocateur, founding editor of UbuWeb, and noted sartorialist -- is interviewed in this month's Believer Magazine by friend and fellow WFMU DJ Dave Mandl.

Goldsmith talks about why he prefers a "thinkership" to a readership, discusses his love of unreadable books, and urges us all to consider words for more than mere meaning:

The moment we shake our addiction to narrative and give up our strong-headed intent that language must say something “meaningful,” we open ourselves up to different types of linguistic experience, which, as you say, could include sorting and structuring words in unconventional ways: by constraint, by sound, by the way words look, and so forth, rather than always feeling the need to coerce them toward meaning. After all, you can’t show me a sentence, word, or phoneme that is meaningless; by its nature, language is packed with meaning and emotion. The world is transformed: suddenly, the newspaper is détourned into a novel; the stock tables become list poems.

Goldsmith, known for his painstaking catalogs of re-purposed information, also drops a few secrets, like this one:

Shh… the new radicalism is paper. Right? Publish it on a printed page and no one will ever know about it. It’s the perfect vehicle for terrorists, plagiarists, and for subversive thoughts in general. If you don’t want it to exist—and there are many reasons to want to keep things private—keep it off the web. But if you put it in digital form, expect it to be bootlegged, remixed, manipulated, and endlessly commented upon. Expect spiders to pick it up and use it as ad-bait on spoof web pages. The moment you put it out there, all bets are off; it’s way out of your control.

Read on for why radio's off-switch makes it the perfect medium for experimentation and Kenny G's thoughts on the freedom of the margins. Or let him test your patience at WFMU's upcoming radiovision festival in New York.