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Dale Smith and Kenneth Goldsmith Parse Slow and Fast Poetries

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Dale Smith and Kenneth Goldsmith Parse Slow and Fast Poetries Jacket 38 — Late 2009 Jacket 38 Contents page Jacket Homepage Search Jacket This piece is about 10 printed pages long. It is copyright © Dale Smith and Kenneth Goldsmith and Jacket magazine 2009. See our [»»] Copyright notice. The Internet address of this page is http://jacketmagazine.com/38/iv-smith-goldsmith.shtml JACKET INTERVIEW The Tortoise And The Hare: Dale Smith and Kenneth Goldsmith Parse Slow and Fast Poetries Monday, July 6, 2009 – Saturday, July 25, 2009 If any Jacket readers would like to take issue with the main cultural and historical currents in this discussion, please let me know. No ad hominem comments, please. Kenneth Goldsmith is the Email to: John Tranter, editor. author of ten books of poetry and the founding editor of UbuWeb. An hour-long documentary on his work, “Sucking on Words” premiered at the British Library in 2007. Section 1 Kenneth Goldsmith: I’m interested in engaging in a He teaches writing at The dialogue with you in spite of — or because of — the University of Pennsylvania, fact that we see things very differently. Too often, I’m in where he is a senior editor of PennSound. A book of critical discourse with people who feel the exact same way I do. essays, Uncreative Writing, is forthcoming from Columbia Dale Smith: Kenny, thank you for inviting me to share 2 University Press. Photo of these words with you. It’s important that we see things Kenneth Goldsmith by David Velasco. differently, but also that we look for points of intersection and shared vitalities. KG: To start, I approach poetry with everything I learned 3 in the art world where I had my training. When I moved into the poetry world in the mid-90s — in comparison to the art world — the work seemed shockingly passé: either disjunctively modernist or else depressingly academic and blandly subjective, full of “special moments.” Both ways of writing seemed pointless to me at the dawn of the internet age. DS: I admire that you bring the perspective of the art 4 world to poetry. The study of rhetoric has helped me Dale Smith (born 1967) is an tremendously in how I read and write poetry, and how I look American poet, editor, and critic. Smith was born and at it as potential public documents that influence our belief raised in Texas and studied and desire or, conversely, challenge us to expand our poetry at New College of California in San Francisco. He capacities as thinkers, writers, and just ordinary people. I now lives in Austin, Texas with really like some of the ideas behind Conceptual Poetry. his wife, the poet Hoa Nguyen, Maybe you could talk a little about how your art school and is working on a PhD at the University of Texas. After experience influenced your poetry, and perhaps say moving to Austin in 1998, he something about why you chose poetry — or language — as and Hoa Nguyen started the the medium for your art? small press publishing venture Skanky Possum. Smith’s poetry and essays have been widely KG: What I learned in the art world is that anything goes. 5 published, including an The further you can push something, the more it is appearance in The Best rewarded: to shoot for anything less in the art world is American Poetry 2002. career suicide. The art that is deemed the most valuable is rarely the most finely-crafted, the most expressive, or the most “honest” works, but rather those which either attempt to do something that’s never been done before or those that synthesize older ideas into something new. Risk is rewarded. Those who follow tradition in a known, dogged, and obligatory manner are ignored. Unlike the poetry world, the mainstream of the art world since the dawn of modernism has been the avant-garde, the innovative, the experimental. The most cutting- edge work — the work with the biggest audience and historical import — has been the most challenging. One only needs to think of the biggest names of twentieth century art to confirm this: Duchamp, Pollack, Warhol, Koons, etc. all made outrageous propositions that became the mainstream history. I find this inspiring. These terms that I use quite often to situate my practice— “impact,” 6 “audience,” career,” “radically important,” “historical,” “experimental,” “cutting-edge"—might have different meanings for you. DS: The narrative we both want to tell relies on very different assumptions 7 about poetry, art, modernism, and the avant-garde. And those differences interest me tremendously. I treat poetry as something composed of specific worlds, communities, environments, publics. I’m interested in what poetry reveals to us of the worlds we live in, and insofar as poetry can provide witness to those worlds, I am compelled by its potential for social change. But I think that we have different notions of an avant-garde, for instance. 8 While you value formal evolution — the “new”—I associate an avant-garde with social change, though I have a wide and diverse sense of what “change” here can mean. This dialectic of an aesthetic avant-garde in conflict with a historical avant-garde interests me as a poet and as a rhetorical scholar. I’m not sure we have to condemn one or the other, but perhaps by evaluating them with some purpose in mind we can expand our knowledge of how new work enters the world for specific people. My own experience as a reader relies on diverse trails, following voices, 9 building trust, looking for peculiarities of experience and oppositional points-of-view. I am compelled by what is buried in the historical record, or by what has been eroded in the cultural forces of oppression. As a writer I look for points of intersection, too, between intimacies of feeling and the shape of public thought. The aesthetic or formal experience of this is secondary. New is news, but not necessarily “new” in the way you said it a moment ago. But my enthusiasm for poetry could be blinding me to what you mean, and I welcome your perspective at this point in the conversation. KG: Well, regarding public intersection, there’s different ways to look at 10 it. In my group of peers, the only poet I know who has connected with the general public is Christian Bök, whose wildly experimental book Eunoia is the bestselling book of poetry in Canadian history. In fact, when the British edition of the book was released last year around Christmas, it hit the UK top ten list, just under Barack Obama! Most of Christian’s readers are not poets at all; they’re just folks who are stunned by the achievement of his book. Christian is a populist and an avant-gardist; someone who shows us that these two don’t necessarily need to be oppositional. I’m going to take it a step further. A common accusation hurled at the 11 avant-garde is that it is elitist and out of touch, toiling away in its ivory tower, appealing to the few who are in-the-know. And I’d agree that a lot of “difficult” work has been made under the mantle of populism only to be rejected by their intended audience as indecipherable, or worse, irrelevant. But conceptual writing is truly populist. Because this writing makes its intentions clear from the outset, telling you exactly what it is before you read it, there’s no way you can’t understand it. My books make a case for this: who, for example, cannot understand a book that is a transcription of every word broadcast during a complete baseball game? Or a day’s newspaper that has been transcribed word for word? Or a record of what one man said over the course of a week? It’s very simple. Anyone can understand these books. But then the real question emerges: Why? And with that, we move into conceptual territory that turns away from the object and toward the realm of speculation. At that point, we could easily throw the book away and carry on with a discussion, a move conceptual writing applauds. The book as a platform to leap off into thought. And this, then, is the real social space of conceptual writing: the conversation. DS: Yes, I agree: conceptual poetry can be seen as a populist form: there’s no 12 mistaking what’s taking place. But this is where I think you’re either misleading your readers, yourself, or me in terms of the experience of the text. In many ways, your writing associates closely with ideas that have been discussed around this thing I’ve been calling Slow Poetry. By taking traffic, or weather reports, or a Yankees-Red Sox game, and transcribing those texts laboriously, and carefully arranging them, you submit books that bring aspects of the world into new perspective. If Language Poetry took language as its primary concern, you go out of your way to shape language with new conditions of context: and I find that absolutely appealing. Instead of calling it Conceptual Poetry, perhaps you should have named it Contextual Poetry, though, perhaps, it’s not as sexy. The “concepts,” then, don’t appeal to me as much as the strategies of writing you employ: transcriptions of radio broadcasts, tape-recorded body sounds, printed media, etc., and the resulting delivery. In a way — and this contextualizes your practice more within a realm of 13 poetics than of art — but what you have accomplished in Weather, Traffic, and Sports in some ways picks up on certain aspects of writers like Philip Whalen or Joanne Kyger.
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