Kenneth Goldsmith
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Canonized Outrage
Can one speak about suffering if one hasn’t experienced it? Kenneth Goldsmith has long been a figure of tension in the literary community: at once a savior for the conceptual intellectualists and avant-garde, and a malicious clown bent on provocation…
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Too Much For Leopold Bloom to Keep Track Of
Over at Guernica, Paul Stephens looks at the current state of “information overload,” and how it’s been explored in art from the avant-garde poetry of Lyn Hejinian to the conceptual writing of Kenneth Goldsmith, with additional commentary from Ezra Pound and…
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One American Death Threat and Disaster
It is difficult to tell when Goldsmith is being genuine. That is the nature of his work, which he has suggested people don’t need to read to understand, and of his online presence.
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Post-Internet Poetry
The Internet is no longer a magical, shiny new gizmo, but just another tool in the artist’s box. For poets like Steve Zultanski and Vanessa Place, their poetry begins with the web, but that tangential relationship recedes away from the…
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“Short Attention Span is the New Avant-Garde”
In the final installment of its “What Would Twitter Do?” series, The Believer talks to MoMA Poet Laureate Kenneth Goldsmith about how he views Twitter and its relationship to writing.
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Painting in the Time of YouTube
On the Believer‘s blog, Kenneth Goldsmith, Poet Laureate of the MOMA, interviews painter and filmmaker Margaux Williamson. The conversation is filled with interesting insight into contemporary art. At one point, Goldsmith asks Williamson the role of the painter in the…
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Meet the Internet Bard
Steven Roggenbuck has been producing poetry “that is made, distributed, and viewed almost exclusively on the Web” since 2010. In this article in the New Yorker, Kenneth Goldsmith calls Roggenbuck’s videos, with their shaky camerawork and rough jump cuts, “meticulously…
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World Wide Poetry
Poetry as we know it—sonnets or free verse on a printed page—feels akin to throwing pottery or weaving quilts, activities that continue in spite of their cultural marginality. But the Internet, with its swift proliferation of memes, is producing more…
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On Being “Smart Dumb”
Kenneth Goldsmith, who was recently appointed MoMA’s “poet laureate,” shares over at The Awl a manifesto of sorts advocating for “smart dumb,” which he claims is an alternative to “both smart smart and dumb dumb, choosing instead to walk a tightrope…
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Politics and Post-Modernism?
No one can know for sure what literary historians will make of it, least of all me as I pound out an editorial about poetry every week. But if I were a betting man, I would wager that the most…
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Poetic Lives Online: Links by Brian Spears
The Irish Times reports on Seamus Heaney’s Irish Human Rights Commission lecture, in which he argues that the work of writers has been crucial in keeping alive the spirit of freedom. I’m looking forward to seeing a transcript of this…