The Waste-Management Poetics of Kenneth Goldsmith

Abstract

For those who follow closely contemporary American poetry scene, perhaps no recent figure has made a greater intervention in received ideas of poetic excellence than Kenneth Goldsmith. This self-described conceptual has managed to become the most critically well inspected writer now under age of 50 in United States by ceding all claims to authorial originality and practicing instead a procedural, quasi-robotic poetics.1 Warhol famously declared, want to be a machine, and Goldsmith has colonized this desire, importing it into literary realm.2 Goldsmith explains: used to be an artist, then I became a poet; then a writer. Now when asked, I simply refer to myself as a word processor (Perloff). Like Warhol, Goldsmith chooses ephemeral, well circulated, often banal texts as source material; periodicals, radio reports, and his own mundane chatter are some chosen objects of detournement. But Goldsmith's practice?which he calls uncreative writing?is even less transformative than Warhol's.3 In Day, aesthetic acme of Goldsmith's machinic asceticism, poet slavishly retyped an entire volume of The New York Times into an 840-page book, a clear homage to John Cage's writing through of texts like Finnegan's Wake?with difference that Goldsmith elides not a single word in his reproduction, and chooses, instead of high texts of canonical literature, detritus of mass culture.4 Like Warhol's visual recyclings of Photoplay and newspaper photographs, Goldsmith's transposition into poetry of what is often disparaged as fish-wrapping or bird-cage liner stanches news' bleed into ephemerality, literalizing Ezra Pound's dictum that Poetry is news that stays news. But in a defining difference, Goldsmith reproduces The Times' text from left to right, top to bottom, front to back, irrespective of story jump or column boundary. This defamiliarizing of text?what Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky calls ostranenie, or poetic strange-making?ensures that only those accustomed to difficult literature will approach, much less read, Day. A representative passage: