Sucking on Words

Simon Morris at Information as Material has just released a DVD entitled "Sucking on Words"—a documentary film that introduces viewers to the career of Kenneth Goldsmith (a provocative contributor to discussions here at Harriet). Goldsmith has gone on to make the entire film freely available for viewing online at UbuWeb….

Morris takes the viewer on a grand tour of "uncreative literature," showcasing excerpts of work by Goldsmith, including (among others), such notorious endeavours as No. 111., Fidget, Soliloquy, The Weather, and Traffic. Goldsmith answers questions in interviews and recites passages from his entire oeuvre, while Morris intersperses, among these samples, numerous comments made by the likes of Bruce Andrews (who offers a venomous diatribe against creative writing), Rob Fitterman (who offers some very thoughtful commentary about the necessity of reading itself), and finally Barbara Cole (who discusses the act of teaching uncreative literature in the classroom). The film might serve as an interesting, pedagogical tool for academics who might want to introduce students to some of the principles of "conceptualism" in millennial literature.
Goldsmith has, of course, earned much notoriety for his argument that poets have so heavily invested in the idea of artful labour that they no longer consider writing according to some of the most difficult, but otherwise forbidden, constraints—like being “uncreative” or being “unengaging” (two of his own, apparently impossible, poetic values, in which one must write by restricting oneself exclusively to the repetition of both the already said and the totally dull, doing so in a way that still creates surprise and engages interest). Goldsmith describes such “nutritionless” documentation as an act of “uncreativity” on a par with the readymade exercises of Warhol (who records the ennui of events themselves)—and consequently Goldsmith has described his own practice as a kind of "word processing" or "data management," suggesting that, for writers in the arising century, poetry itself has evolved to the point where it has now become a hybrid subset of both kleptomania and stenography….