Conceptual Poetics: Caroline Bergvall

Caroline Bergvall "Social Engagement of Writing"
(presented at Conceptual Poetry and Its Others Conference, University of Arizona, Tucson)
Caroline Bergvall spoke about several recent projects that correspond to the questions of bilingual awareness and conceptual structure. Her main points touched upon question of multiple languages: where and how does one write when one has not one language of origin, but several? What is the site of such practices, the site multiple forms and spaces of inscription? Bringing poetry through a combination of modes and histories. Some from visual arts, some literary, some sonic. Body representation as a space. Exploring the authored body, giving it signs, finding its signals. Verbal and libidinal. Restrictions and actions of social readings of bodily space on what one calls one's own body. Body as marker of an extended authorial space: performances/sitework/soundwork. Space itself becomes a field of work, a local/e, precise with its own histories.
She discussed her multi-national -- and hence multi-linguistic -- background as a problematic situation of self-definition as an artist and how sending bios & summaries for shows and readings for her is a complex affair; the social and cultural difficulties in calling oneself a poet in the first place.
Bergvall said, "I am inclined to consider conceptualism not primarily along strict critical lines but rather in the open-ended, integrative and often conflicted and socially engaged approaches that have also defined conceptual arts practices... A conceptual writer or conceptual poet so defined has a stake in arts practice, as much as they have one in poetics. Or perhaps one could simply say, they have a stake in broader cultural practice, one in which verbal and non verbal inscriptive methods coexist and are coextensive."
She concluded by showing extensive documentation of her sound and visual works which illustrated the above notions of the multi-lingual, mishearing, translation, and identity.