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Join NOW!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 and appropriation. In a profile for the New Yorker, Alec Wilkinson dives into Goldsmith’s humble […]
...moreOver 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 T.S. Eliot. A fascinating look at what may be the crisis of the millennial age.
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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.
...moreThe 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 final form. The resulting poetry has exploited the web, but does not fetishize it. Kenneth […]
...moreIn 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.
...moreOn 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 era of YouTube, to which she replies: ….one of the nicest thing about YouTube is […]
...moreSteven 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 crafted infomercials for poetry.” While some might question Roggenbuck’s improvised style, Goldsmith writes, “This type […]
...morePoetry 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 extreme forms of modernism than modernism ever dreamed of. In the New Yorker, poet Kenneth Goldsmith […]
...moreKenneth 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 between the two.” Known for composing poems out of re-appropriated transcriptions of news articles, weather reports, […]
...moreNo 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 significant literary event this month is not going to be the Poetry Foundation’s splashy new […]
...moreThe 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 speech, because I’d like to see how far he pushes the comparison. Kenneth Goldsmith links […]
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