Conceptual writing (often used interchangeably with conceptual poetry) is a style of writing which relies on processes and experiments. This can include texts which may be reduced to a set of procedures, a generative instruction or constraint, or a "concept" which precedes and is considered more important than the resulting text(s). As a category, it is closely related to
conceptual art
Conceptual art, also referred to as conceptualism, is art in which the concept(s) or idea(s) involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic, technical, and material concerns. Some works of conceptual art, sometimes called inst ...
.
History of the term
Although ''conceptual poetry'' may have freely circulated in relation to some text-based
Conceptual art
Conceptual art, also referred to as conceptualism, is art in which the concept(s) or idea(s) involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic, technical, and material concerns. Some works of conceptual art, sometimes called inst ...
works (during the heyday of the movement), "conceptual writing" was coined as an idea in 2003, while ''The UbuWeb Anthology of Conceptual Writing'' was created by
Craig Dworkin
Craig Dworkin is an American poet, critic, editor, and Professor of English at the University of Utah. He is founding senior editor of Eclipse, an online archive of 20th-century small-press writing and 21st-century born-digital publications.
Ed ...
and
Kenneth Goldsmith
Kenneth Goldsmith (born 1961) is an American poet and critic. He is the founding editor of UbuWeb and since 2020 is the ongoing artist-in-residence at the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing (CPCW) at the University of Pennsylvania, where ...
(the on-line anthology differs from the 2011 print anthology).
Marjorie Perloff
Marjorie Perloff (born September 28, 1931) is an Austrian-born poetry scholar and critic in the United States.
Early life
Perloff was born Gabriele Mintz into a secularized Jewish family in Vienna. The annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany exacer ...
organized a conference with the title ''Conceptual Poetry and Its Others'' in the summer of 2008, at the
University of Arizona
The University of Arizona (Arizona, U of A, UArizona, or UA) is a public land-grant research university in Tucson, Arizona. Founded in 1885 by the 13th Arizona Territorial Legislature, it was the first university in the Arizona Territory. ...
Poetry Center.
Derek Beaulieu,
Robert Fitterman and
Vanessa Place
Vanessa Place (born 1968) is an American writer and criminal appellate attorney. She is the co-director of the Los Angeles-based Les Figues Press. Place has also worked as an occasional screenwriter on television shows such as '' Law & Order: S ...
have also used the terms "conceptual poetry" or "conceptual poetics" in the following years.
Conceptual art and conceptual writing
The first notable difference from conceptual art is that textual-orientated gestures (such as copying, erasing or replacing words) prevail in conceptual writing. The second difference is that, while conceptual strategies "are embedded in the writing process", recent conceptual writing has a relationship with the development and rise of the computers and especially of the
Internet
The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a ''internetworking, network of networks'' that consists ...
: "With the rise of the Web, writing has met its photography.
..Faced with an unprecedented amount of available digital text, writing needs to redefine itself to adapt to the new environment of textual abundance.
..The computer encourages us to mimic its workings."
The third difference is the concept of ''thinkership''.
Robert Fitterman writes that: "Conceptual Writing, in fact, might best be defined not by the strategies used but by the expectations of the readership or thinkership." "Pure conceptualism negates the need for reading in the traditional textual sense—one does not need to 'read' the work as much as think about the idea of the work."
The term ''conceptual poetry'' is most often used for two reasons: it brings out the etymological meaning of the
Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic p ...
word
poiesis
In philosophy and semiotics, ''poiesis'' (from grc, ποίησις) is "the activity in which a person brings something into being that did not exist before."
''Poiesis'' is etymologically derived from the ancient Greek term ποιεῖν, wh ...
("to make") and it emphasises the fact that this kind of writing has developed historically as a mode of avant-garde poetry (from
Stéphane Mallarmé
Stéphane Mallarmé ( , ; 18 March 1842 – 9 September 1898), pen name of Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of t ...
’s ''Le Livre'' and
Dada
Dada () or Dadaism was an art movement of the European avant-garde in the early 20th century, with early centres in Zürich, Switzerland, at the Cabaret Voltaire (Zurich), Cabaret Voltaire (in 1916). New York Dada began c. 1915, and after 192 ...
to
Oulipo
Oulipo (, short for french: Ouvroir de littérature potentielle; roughly translated: ''"workshop of potential literature"'', stylized ''OuLiPo'') is a loose gathering of (mainly) French-speaking writers and mathematicians who seek to create works ...
and
concrete poetry
Concrete poetry is an arrangement of linguistic elements in which the typographical effect is more important in conveying meaning than verbal significance. It is sometimes referred to as visual poetry, a term that has now developed a distinct mea ...
) and, let aside the visual artists who also explore or have explored writing (historical examples include
Marcel Duchamp
Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp (, , ; 28 July 1887 – 2 October 1968) was a French painter, sculptor, chess player, and writer whose work is associated with Cubism, Dada, and conceptual art. Duchamp is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso ...
,
Joseph Kosuth
Joseph Kosuth (; born January 31, 1945), an American conceptual artist, lives in New York and London, and especially
Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol (; born Andrew Warhola Jr.; August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987) was an American visual artist, film director, and producer who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. His works explore the relationsh ...
), is now practiced also within the literary field. It is significant though that many of these writers, including
Kenneth Goldsmith
Kenneth Goldsmith (born 1961) is an American poet and critic. He is the founding editor of UbuWeb and since 2020 is the ongoing artist-in-residence at the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing (CPCW) at the University of Pennsylvania, where ...
, are often supported by art institutions and may still come from art backgrounds.
''Conceptual poetry'' (or ''ConPo'') is often used as a name for the entire movement which has more recently emerged and largely originates in the American academic scene of the 2000s (although conceptual writers are present today in most countries with avant-garde traditions). Both the new conceptual writers and their well-established models, the
Language poets
The Language poets (or ''L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E'' poets, after the magazine of that name) are an avant-garde group or tendency in United States poetry that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The poets included: Bernadette Mayer, Leslie Scal ...
(among which
David Antin
David Abram Antin (February 1, 1932 – October 11, 2016) was an American poet, critic and performance artist.
Education and early career
Antin was born in New York City in 1932. After graduating from Brooklyn Technical High School, he earned hi ...
,
Clark Coolidge
Clark Coolidge (born February 26, 1939) is an American poet.
Background
As a teenager, Coolidge attended Classical High School in Providence, Rhode Island. Coolidge attended Brown University, where his father taught in the music department. After ...
,
Lyn Hejinian
Lyn Hejinian (born May 17, 1941) is an American poet, essayist, translator and publisher. She is often associated with the Language poets and is known for her landmark work ''My Life'' (Sun & Moon, 1987, original version Burning Deck, 1980), as ...
,
Bernadette Mayer
Bernadette Mayer (May 12, 1945 – November 22, 2022) was an American poet, writer, and visual artist associated with both the Language poets and the New York School.
Early life and education
Bernadette Mayer was born in a predominantly Ge ...
or
Ron Silliman
Ron Silliman (born August 5, 1946) is an American poet. He has written and edited over 30 books, and has had his poetry and criticism translated into 12 languages. He is often associated with language poetry. Between 1979 and 2004, Silliman w ...
also authored conceptual writings), have been placed by the critic
Marjorie Perloff
Marjorie Perloff (born September 28, 1931) is an Austrian-born poetry scholar and critic in the United States.
Early life
Perloff was born Gabriele Mintz into a secularized Jewish family in Vienna. The annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany exacer ...
in an American tradition dating back to
Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein (February 3, 1874 – July 27, 1946) was an American novelist, poet, playwright, and art collector. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the Allegheny West (Pittsburgh), Allegheny West neighborhood and raised in Oakland, Calif ...
and the
Objectivists
Objectivism is a philosophical system developed by Russian-American writer and philosopher Ayn Rand. She described it as "the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievemen ...
. The
Flarf poetry
Flarf poetry was an '' avant-garde'' poetry movement of the early 21st century. The term ''Flarf'' was coined by the poet Gary Sullivan, who also wrote and published the earliest Flarf poems. Its first practitioners, working in loose collaboration ...
group is often mentioned in the same context and at least some of their works are considered conceptual, but are different in some aspects to the "pure" conceptualists.
Kenneth Goldsmith
Kenneth Goldsmith (born 1961) is an American poet and critic. He is the founding editor of UbuWeb and since 2020 is the ongoing artist-in-residence at the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing (CPCW) at the University of Pennsylvania, where ...
places emphasis on the concept of ''unoriginality'' and has dubbed his own course (where students learn ways to appropriate texts) as ''uncreative writing'', described in the book ''Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age'' (2011). Marjorie Perloff, to whom
Craig Dworkin
Craig Dworkin is an American poet, critic, editor, and Professor of English at the University of Utah. He is founding senior editor of Eclipse, an online archive of 20th-century small-press writing and 21st-century born-digital publications.
Ed ...
and Goldsmith have dedicated ''Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing'' (2011), considers in ''Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century'' (2012) that the "paradigmatic work" of the "unoriginal genius" is
Walter Benjamin
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin (; ; 15 July 1892 – 26 September 1940) was a German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic and essayist.
An eclectic thinker, combining elements of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism, and Jewi ...
’s
Arcades Project
''Passagenwerk'' or ''Arcades Project'' was an unfinished project of German philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin, written between 1927 and 1940. An enormous collection of writings on the city life of Paris in the 19th century, it wa ...
(which inspired the concept of Goldsmith’s 2015 book, ''Capital'').
Criticism
In ''The Poetry Project Newsletter'', #231 of April/May 2012,
Johanna Drucker
Johanna Drucker (born May 30, 1952) is an American author, book artist, visual theorist, and cultural critic. Her scholarly writing documents and critiques visual language: letterforms, typography, visual poetry, art, and lately, digital art aest ...
publishes an article named "Beyond Conceptualisms: Poetics after Critique and the End of the Individual Voice", in which she considers that "Conceptual writing was intriguing and provocative. In the last few years, its practices have generated much debate. But as its outlines have become more defined, it seems to be passing into another phase. Institutionalization often signals that energetic innovation is becoming history or at least has ceased to break new ground.
..Conceptualism is probably over now, even in its newest iterations".
Canadian poet and essayist,
Alan Davies
Alan Roger Davies (; born 6 March 1966) is an English stand-up comedian, writer, actor and TV presenter. He is best known for his portrayal of the title role in the BBC mystery drama series '' Jonathan Creek'' (1997–2016) and as the only pe ...
published on the blog of
Poetry Foundation
The Poetry Foundation is an American literary society that seeks to promote poetry and lyricism in the wider culture. It was formed from ''Poetry'' magazine, which it continues to publish, with a 2003 gift of $200 million from philanthropist R ...
(known for publishing regularly texts by/on
Flarf
Flarf poetry was an ''avant-garde'' poetry movement of the early 21st century. The term ''Flarf'' was coined by the poet Gary Sullivan, who also wrote and published the earliest Flarf poems. Its first practitioners, working in loose collaboration o ...
and Conceptual poets) a satire called ''Notes on Conceptualism'' (after the same-titled book by Fitterman and Place), containing lines such as "Conceptual poetry is mainly about unearthing neuroses in the minds of the people who make it. By far and away / the most common of these is obsessive-compulsive disorder" and "Conceptual poetry is constructed primarily by tools – by reason. There is relatively little in it of the less blatant faculties – imagination / emotion / memory".
In ''Theses on Antisubjectivist Dogma'',
Keston Sutherland
Keston M. Sutherland is a British poet, and Professor of Poetics at the University of Sussex
, mottoeng = Be Still and Know
, established =
, type = Public research university
, endowment = £14.4 million (2020)
, budget = £319.6&n ...
considers that "Conceptual poets and antisubjectivists of every other poetical stripe
..are indifferent or oblivious to the history of poetic technique", as "there is no such thing as 'traditional poetry' and there is no such thing as 'the Lyric I'. The use of the first person pronoun in poetry is as various and complex as the use of language itself".
Largely critical of the "closed" and "exclusive" politics of avant-garde groups,
Amy King points out the strategies through which the American conceptual writers have achieved institutionalization:
"Now crowned the descendants of
Language Poetry
The Language poets (or ''L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E'' poets, after the magazine of that name) are an avant-garde group or tendency in United States poetry that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The poets included: Bernadette Mayer, Leslie Scalapi ...
, both of these groups have calculated and curated a lineage, garnering attention by using the capitalist pop culture tool of sensationalism, specifically a faux-conflict, curated imitative performances of artists who successfully achieved status via the cult of personality
.. along with prolific referencing, reviews, and applause for each other’s efforts.
..What took the Language poets a few decades, these two groups have achieved within a fraction of the time: the paved road to institutional acclaim, centrality, and canonization."
Amy King continues in this article to denounce the "reductive" narratives of the Conceptualists, the questionable "institutional critique or capitalist unrest / disruption" they have brought and "the seamless perpetuation of commodification", doubting whether "Conceptual performances would hold up without the theory that explains and contextualizes it" or whether "the work sustain without the institutions they are framed in and supported by". A recurrent critique regards "the limited locus and demographic".
In the second part of her article, Amy King criticizes a large number of claims authored by
Marjorie Perloff
Marjorie Perloff (born September 28, 1931) is an Austrian-born poetry scholar and critic in the United States.
Early life
Perloff was born Gabriele Mintz into a secularized Jewish family in Vienna. The annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany exacer ...
and notes
Kenneth Goldsmith
Kenneth Goldsmith (born 1961) is an American poet and critic. He is the founding editor of UbuWeb and since 2020 is the ongoing artist-in-residence at the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing (CPCW) at the University of Pennsylvania, where ...
’s recent appearances on the TV and at the
White House
The White House is the official residence and workplace of the president of the United States. It is located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest, Washington, D.C., NW in Washington, D.C., and has been the residence of every U.S. preside ...
. She provides here the following clarification:
"Like many poets, I continue to use a number of techniques over which these groups have become proprietary. The techniques themselves are neutral; how one employs them is where poetics begins. Attempting to trademark these techniques (i.e. "Conceptualism," "Flarf") is precisely a form of capitalist
reification
Reification may refer to:
Science and technology
* Reification (computer science), the creation of a data model
* Reification (knowledge representation), the representation of facts and/or assertions
* Reification (statistics), the use of an id ...
. I'm not out to deny anyone institutional participation or access to resources; rather, I want to call attention to the claim these groups purport to block capitalism while intentionally employing capitalist techniques
..to achieve and secure status within the capitalist structure."
2015 controversy
Following the concept of ''Seven American Deaths and Disasters'',
Kenneth Goldsmith
Kenneth Goldsmith (born 1961) is an American poet and critic. He is the founding editor of UbuWeb and since 2020 is the ongoing artist-in-residence at the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing (CPCW) at the University of Pennsylvania, where ...
read on March 13 ''The Body of Michael Brown'', a text consisting of
Michael Brown’s
St. Louis County autopsy report rearranged as to end with the phrase "The remaining male genitalia system is unremarkable". This caused strong negatives reactions not among the audience, but on
Twitter
Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...
and other social network
Apparently, the recording of the performance was not made public by the
Brown University (where the text was read) according to Goldsmith's wish; he also claimed that "my speaker’s fee from the Interrupt 3 event will be donated to the family of
Michael Brown".
In 2009,
Vanessa Place
Vanessa Place (born 1968) is an American writer and criminal appellate attorney. She is the co-director of the Los Angeles-based Les Figues Press. Place has also worked as an occasional screenwriter on television shows such as '' Law & Order: S ...
had started tweeting
Margaret Mitchell
Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell (November 8, 1900 – August 16, 1949) was an American novelist and journalist. Mitchell wrote only one novel, published during her lifetime, the American Civil War-era novel ''Gone With the Wind (novel), Gone with t ...
’s
Gone With the Wind
Gone with the Wind most often refers to:
* ''Gone with the Wind'' (novel), a 1936 novel by Margaret Mitchell
* ''Gone with the Wind'' (film), the 1939 adaptation of the novel
Gone with the Wind may also refer to:
Music
* ''Gone with the Wind'' ...
in order to highlight its racist language and stereotypes, according to an artist statement that was posted on
Facebook
Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin ...
. However, a Change.org petition from 2015 demanded the blacklisting of Place from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs for "propagating offensive material", as the authors of the petition consider that her ''Gone With the Wind'' project is "racially insensitive, if not downright racist" and that it "re-inscribes that text’s racism". On May 18, 2015, the Association announced that Place had been removed from the committee.
In spite of
African-American
African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans and Afro-Americans) are an Race and ethnicity in the United States, ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa. The term "African American ...
poet
Tracie Morris publicly defending Goldsmith's gesture and, while
Faith Holland and Goldsmith himself have argued against this kind of non-literary reading,
both Goldsmith and Place's projects have been considered by many unacceptable, politically incorrect h. Voices from the poetry community have also expressed strong criticism. In the article ''There's a New Movement in American Poetry and It's Not Kenneth Goldsmith'',
Cathy Park Hong
Cathy Park Hong (born August 7, 1976) is an American poet, writer, and professor who has published three volumes of poetry. Much of her work includes mixed language and serialized narrative. She was named on the 2021 Time 100 list for her writing ...
writes that:
"Poetry is becoming progressively fluid, merging protest and performance into its practice. The era of Conceptual Poetry’s ahistorical nihilism is over and we have entered a new era, the poetry of social engagement."
Post-conceptual poetry
In ''Notes on Post-conceptual Poetry'',
Felix Bernstein (son of the
Language poet Charles Bernstein) writes about a recent wave of "second-generation Conceptual poetry", "in dialogue with" and reacting to ''Conceptual poetry'', as part of a "turn" to what Bernstein calls "
queer structuralism". These poets may often combine "confessional/affective/lyrical" and "mechanical/conceptual" aspects, while engaging with the "death of work" (in symmetry with the "death of the reader" of previous theory):
"This would mean falling into the messy muck of libidinal flows (or the Internet or ‘whatever’) without leaving a trace of authorship and without giving in to those dominant modes of leftist discourse (that mark the academy, the art world, and politics), which require the artwork to pave the way for didactic redemption, and require that art be boxed into the framings of
queer theory or speculative
materialism
Materialism is a form of philosophical monism which holds matter to be the fundamental substance in nature, and all things, including mental states and consciousness, are results of material interactions. According to philosophical material ...
or
poststructuralism
Post-structuralism is a term for philosophical and literary forms of theory that both build upon and reject ideas established by structuralism, the intellectual project that preceded it. Though post-structuralists all present different critique ...
or affect studies or
Badiousian-
Zizekian, etc. That is to say, that the Post-conceptual poet could make works that are not afforded privilege of ‘example’ in the seemingly endless war between ‘neoliberal versus subversive’ or ‘subjective/affective versus mechanical’ or the various attempts to wield both subject and object
..together vis-à-vis universalized particulars like the term ‘
queer’."
Felix Bernstein cites as examples
Sophia Le Fraga
Sophia means "wisdom" in Greek. It may refer to:
*Sophia (wisdom)
*Sophia (Gnosticism)
* Sophia (given name)
Places
*Niulakita or Sophia, an island of Tuvalu
* Sophia, Georgetown, a ward of Georgetown, Guyana
* Sophia, North Carolina, an unincor ...
,
Andrew Durbin
Andrew Durbin is an American poet, novelist, and editor. As of 2019, he has served as editor-in-chief of Frieze magazine. Prior to his position at Frieze, he co-founded Company Gallery, served as the Talks Curator at the Poetry Project, and ser ...
,
J. Gordon Faylor,
Trisha Low
Trisha Low is an American author and poet.
Life and career
Low graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a BA and New York University with an MA in Performance Studies.
She contributed to the 2011 publication, ''Against Expression: An ...
,
Josef Kaplan Josef may refer to
*Josef (given name)
*Josef (surname)
* ''Josef'' (film), a 2011 Croatian war film
*Musik Josef
Musik Josef is a Japanese manufacturer of musical instruments. It was founded by Yukio Nakamura, and is the only company in Japan spe ...
,
Joey Yearous-algozin
Joey may refer to:
People
*Joey (name)
Animals
* Joey (marsupial), an infant marsupial
* Joey, a Blue-fronted Amazon parrot who was one of the Blue Peter pets
Film and television
* ''Joey'' (1977 film), an American film directed by Horace ...
,
Holly Melgard,
Danny Snelson
Danny is a masculine given name. It is related to the male name Daniel. It may refer to:
People
* Danny Altmann, British immunologist
*Danny Antonucci, Canadian animator, director, producer, and writer
*Danny Baker (born 1957), English journali ...
,
Steve McLaughlin
Steven John McLaughlin (born October 2, 1971) is a former American college and professional football player who was a placekicker in the National Football League (NFL) and the Arena Football League. He played college football for the Universi ...
,
Steve Zultanski
''yes'Steve is a masculine given name, usually a short form (hypocorism) of Steven or Stephen
Notable people with the name include:
steve jops
* Steve Abbott (disambiguation), several people
* Steve Adams (disambiguation), several people
* Steve ...
, while also mentioning in a footnote the Goldsmith-curated project ''Poetry Will Be Made By All'', which contains 1,000 books by 1,000 young poets (in English and several other languages). Containing both conceptual and lyrical writings (or a mix of both), the books published in this collection may be considered in some ways ''Post-conceptual''.
Works classified as conceptual writings
Historical examples
*
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot (; ; 5 October 171331 July 1784) was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer, best known for serving as co-founder, chief editor, and contributor to the ''Encyclopédie'' along with Jean le Rond d'Alembert. He was a promine ...
: ''
Jacques le fataliste et son maître'' (1796) – direct appropriation of segments of
Laurence Sterne
Laurence Sterne (24 November 1713 – 18 March 1768), was an Anglo-Irish novelist and Anglican cleric who wrote the novels '' The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman'' and '' A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy'', publish ...
's ''
Tristram Shandy Tristram may refer to:
Literature
* the title character of ''The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman'', a novel by Laurence Sterne
* the title character of '' Tristram of Lyonesse'', an epic poem by Algernon Charles Swinburne
*"Tristr ...
''
*
Stéphane Mallarmé
Stéphane Mallarmé ( , ; 18 March 1842 – 9 September 1898), pen name of Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of t ...
: ''Le livre'' (1893-1898, unfinished) – generative procedures of a modular book whose actual content, besides poetic fragments, is not mentioned at all in the draft manuscripts
*
Marcel Duchamp
Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp (, , ; 28 July 1887 – 2 October 1968) was a French painter, sculptor, chess player, and writer whose work is associated with Cubism, Dada, and conceptual art. Duchamp is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso ...
: ''Rendez-vous du Dimanche 6 Février 1916'' (published in 1937) – four typewritten fragments from inexistent whole text(s); ''Man Before the Mirror'' (published in 1934) – literary ready-made, a text supposedly written by a German friend of Man Ray, translated into English and signed by
Rrose Sélavy
Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp (, , ; 28 July 1887 – 2 October 1968) was a French painter, sculptor, chess player, and writer whose work is associated with Cubism, Dada, and conceptual art. Duchamp is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso ...
*
Louis Aragon
Louis Aragon (, , 3 October 1897 – 24 December 1982) was a French poet who was one of the leading voices of the surrealist movement in France. He co-founded with André Breton and Philippe Soupault the surrealist review '' Littérature''. He w ...
: ''Suicide'' (1920) – transcription of the alphabet, ordered in five lines (a continuous version was published by
Aram Saroyan
Aram Saroyan (born September 25, 1943) is an American poet, novelist, biographer, memoirist and playwright, who is especially known for his minimalist poetry, famous examples of which include the one-word poem "lighght" and a one-letter poem comp ...
under the title ''STEAK'', in the 1968 volume ''Aram Saroyan'')
*
Tristan Tzara
Tristan Tzara (; ; born Samuel or Samy Rosenstock, also known as S. Samyro; – 25 December 1963) was a Romanian and French avant-garde poet, essayist and performance artist. Also active as a journalist, playwright, literary and art critic, comp ...
: ''Pour faire un poème dadaïste'', from ''Dada manifeste sur l'arnour faible et l'amour amer'' (1920) – instructions for the creation of a Dadaist collage poem, followed by an example
*
Blaise Cendrars
Frédéric-Louis Sauser (1 September 1887 – 21 January 1961), better known as Blaise Cendrars, was a Swiss-born novelist and poet who became a naturalized French citizen in 1916. He was a writer of considerable influence in the European mo ...
: ''Kodak (Documentaire)'' (1924) – 20 poems appropriating phrases from
Gustave Le Rouge
Gustave Henri Joseph Le Rouge (22 July 1867 - 24 February 1938) was a French writer who embodied the evolution of modern science fiction at the beginning of the 20th century, by moving it away from the juvenile adventures of Jules Verne and incor ...
's ''Le Mystérieux Docteur Cornelius''
*
C.K. Ogden: ''Anna Livia Plurabelle'' (1931) – homolinguistic translation, in
Basic English
Basic English (British American Scientific International and Commercial English) is an English-based controlled language created by the linguist and philosopher Charles Kay Ogden as an international auxiliary language, and as an aid for teac ...
, of a fragment from
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic. He contributed to the Modernism, modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important ...
's
Finnegans Wake
''Finnegans Wake'' is a novel by Irish writer James Joyce. It is well known for its experimental style and reputation as one of the most difficult works of fiction in the Western canon. It has been called "a work of fiction which combines a bod ...
*
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats (13 June 186528 January 1939) was an Irish poet, dramatist, writer and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival and became a pillar of the Irish liter ...
: ''Mona Lisa'' (1936) – a transcription of a passage of Walter H. Pater's ''Studies in the History of Renaissance'' into
Poundian free verse
*
Wiener Gruppe
The Wiener Gruppe (''Vienna Group'') was a small and loose avant-garde constellation of Austrian poets and writers, which arose from an older and wider postwar association of artists called Art-Club. The group was formed around 1953 under the influ ...
(Bayer / Rühm / Wiener): ''Akustisches Cabaret'' (1959) – list of "ideas" for an "acoustic cabaret"
*
Brion Gysin
Brion Gysin (19 January 1916 – 13 July 1986) was a British-Canadian painter, writer, sound poet, performance artist and inventor of experimental devices.
He is best known for his use of the cut-up technique, alongside his close friend, the ...
: ''Minutes to Go'' (1960) – cut-ups (technique also applied by
William S. Burroughs
William Seward Burroughs II (; February 5, 1914 – August 2, 1997) was an American writer and visual artist, widely considered a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodern author who influenced popular cultur ...
)
*
Raymond Queneau
Raymond Queneau (; 21 February 1903 – 25 October 1976) was a French novelist, poet, critic, editor and co-founder and president of Oulipo (''Ouvroir de littérature potentielle
Oulipo (, short for french: Ouvroir de littérature potentiell ...
:
Cent mille milliards de poèmes
Cent may refer to:
Currency
* Cent (currency), a one-hundredth subdivision of several units of currency
* Penny (Canadian coin), a Canadian coin removed from circulation in 2013
* 1 cent (Dutch coin), a Dutch coin minted between 1941 and 1944
* ...
(1961) – sonnets whose lines which may be recombined to obtain 100,000,000,000,000 sonnets (see
Oulipo
Oulipo (, short for french: Ouvroir de littérature potentielle; roughly translated: ''"workshop of potential literature"'', stylized ''OuLiPo'') is a loose gathering of (mainly) French-speaking writers and mathematicians who seek to create works ...
constraint-based writing); ''Les fondements de la literature'' (1976) – appropriation of
David Hilbert's ''Foundations of Mathematics'' with replaced words
*
Clark Coolidge
Clark Coolidge (born February 26, 1939) is an American poet.
Background
As a teenager, Coolidge attended Classical High School in Providence, Rhode Island. Coolidge attended Brown University, where his father taught in the music department. After ...
: ''Bond Sonnets'' (1965) – collage sonnets using words from
Ian Fleming’s 1961 novel
Thunderball (which plagiarized the same-titled collaborative screenplay) selected with a random number generator
*
Ted Berrigan
Ted Berrigan (November 15, 1934 – July 4, 1983) was an American poet.
Early life
Berrigan was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on November 15, 1934. After high school, he spent a year at Providence College before joining the U.S. Army. After t ...
: ''A Conversation with
John Cage'' (1966) – a fake interview misattributing to
John Cage quotes by
Fernando Arabel
Fernando is a Spanish and Portuguese given name and a surname common in Spain, Portugal, Italy, France, Switzerland, former Spanish or Portuguese colonies in Latin America, Africa, the Philippines, India, and Sri Lanka. It is equivalent to the G ...
,
William S. Burroughs
William Seward Burroughs II (; February 5, 1914 – August 2, 1997) was an American writer and visual artist, widely considered a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodern author who influenced popular cultur ...
,
Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol (; born Andrew Warhola Jr.; August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987) was an American visual artist, film director, and producer who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. His works explore the relationsh ...
and others.
*
Dan Graham
Daniel Graham (March 31, 1942 – February 19, 2022) was an American visual artist, writer, and curator in the writer-artist tradition. In addition to his visual works, he published a large array of critical and speculative writing that spanned ...
: ''Exclusion Principle'' and ''Poem-Schema'' (1966)
*
Joseph Kosuth
Joseph Kosuth (; born January 31, 1945), an American conceptual artist, lives in New York and London, : ''Purloined: A Novel'' (1966-2000) – collage of single pages photocopied from over 100 different novels (the only addition is changed page numbering)
*
Pedro Xisto
Pedro is a masculine given name. Pedro is the Spanish, Portuguese, and Galician name for '' Peter''. Its French equivalent is Pierre while its English and Germanic form is Peter.
The counterpart patronymic surname of the name Pedro, meani ...
: ''Vogaláxia'' (1966) – transcription of every possible 5-letter combination of the 5 vowels
*
León Ferrari: ''Palabras Ajenas'' (1967) – a collection of quotes from diverse sources
*
David Antin
David Abram Antin (February 1, 1932 – October 11, 2016) was an American poet, critic and performance artist.
Education and early career
Antin was born in New York City in 1932. After graduating from Brooklyn Technical High School, he earned hi ...
: ''Novel Poem'' (1968) – poem composed of phrases copied from contemporary popular novels
*
Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol (; born Andrew Warhola Jr.; August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987) was an American visual artist, film director, and producer who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. His works explore the relationsh ...
: ''
A, A Novel
''a, A Novel'' is a 1968 book by the American artist Andy Warhol published by Grove Press. It is a nearly word-for-word transcription of tapes recorded by Warhol and Ondine over a two-year period in 1965–1967.
The Novel
''a, A Novel'', Warh ...
'' (1968) – transcription (by different typists, not by Warhol himself) of recordings done by Warhol following Ondine with a tape recorder (similar concepts have later been enacted by Ed Friedman in The Telephone Book and by Kenneth Goldsmith in Soliloquy)
*
Vito Acconci
Vito Acconci (, ; January 24, 1940 – April 27, 2017) was an influential American performance, video and installation artist, whose diverse practice eventually included sculpture, architectural design, and landscape design. His foundational ...
: ''Transference'' (1969) – transcription of the single letters lining the margins of pages from various pages in Roget’s ''Thesaurus'' (also see other works gathered in the 2006 edition ''Language to Cover a Page: The Early Writings of Vito Acconci'')
*
Peter Handke
Peter Handke (; born 6 December 1942) is an Austrian novelist, playwright, translator, poet, film director, and screenwriter. He was awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature "for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored ...
: ''
Die Aufstellung des 1. FC Nürnberg vom 27.1.1968'' (1969) - poem consisting of the players' from the
1. FC Nürnberg
1. Fußball-Club Nürnberg Verein für Leibesübungen e. V., often called 1. FC Nürnberg (, en, 1. Football Club Nuremberg) or simply Nürnberg, is a German association football club in Nuremberg, Bavaria, who currently compete in the 2. Bunde ...
names as printed in sports magazines
*
J. G. Ballard
James Graham Ballard (15 November 193019 April 2009) was an English novelist, short story writer, satirist, and essayist known for provocative works of fiction which explored the relations between human psychology, technology, sex, and mass me ...
: ''Mae West’s Reduction Mammoplasty'' (1970), ''Princess Margaret’s Facelift'' (1970), ''Queen Elizabeth's Rhinoplasty'' (1976) – appropriation of medical case studies, in which anonymous subjects ("patient X") were replaced with the names of the celebrity in each title
*
Gerald Ferguson
Gerald Ferguson (January 29, 1937 – October 8, 2009) was a conceptual artist and painter who lived and taught in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Born in Cincinnati he was both a Canadian and US citizen.
Background
After receiving his MFA from Ohio Un ...
: ''The Standard Corpus of Present Day English Language Usage Arranged by Word Length and Alphabetized Within Word Length'' (1970) – dictionary of English words sorted by word length
*
Michael Harvey: ''White Papers'' (1971)
*
Ulises Carrión: ''tatatá'' (1972)
*
Bernard Heidsieck Bernard Heidsieck (November 28, 1928 – November 22, 2014)
was a French sound poet, associated with various movements throughout a long career: including Beat, American Fluxus, and minimalism.
Heidsieck was born in Paris. In the course of his ca ...
: ''Vaduz'' (1974)
*
Charles Bernstein: ''My/My/My'' (published in ''Asylums'', 1975) – list of objects beginning with the first-person possessive; ''I and The'' (published in ''The Sophist'', 1979) – 1,350 words compiled from ''Word Frequencies in Spoken American English'' by
Hatvig Dahl
*
Georges Perec
Georges Perec (; 7 March 1936 – 3 March 1982) was a French novelist, filmmaker, documentalist, and essayist. He was a member of the Oulipo group. His father died as a soldier early in the Second World War and his mother was killed in the Holo ...
:
Tentative d'épuisement d'un lieu parisien
''An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris'', (French: ''Tentative d'épuisement d'un lieu parisien'') is a short (roughly 60 pages) book by Georges Perec written in October 1974 and published in 1975. It is a collection of observations which Per ...
(1975) – description of all the things observed by Perec in Place Saint-Sulpice during three days, at different times of the day
*
Bernadette Mayer
Bernadette Mayer (May 12, 1945 – November 22, 2022) was an American poet, writer, and visual artist associated with both the Language poets and the New York School.
Early life and education
Bernadette Mayer was born in a predominantly Ge ...
: ''Eruditio ex Memoria'' (1977) – novel composed of "notes from Catholic school classes, letters from school officials, quotations, definitions, commonplaces" (also read List of Journal Ideas and Writing Experiments)
*
Charles Reznikoff
Charles Reznikoff (August 31, 1894 – January 22, 1976) was an American poet best known for his long work, ''Testimony: The United States (1885–1915), Recitative'' (1934–1979). The term Objectivist was coined for him. The multi-volume ''Test ...
: ''Testimony'' (1978) – transcription and editing of various court documents (similar concept enacted by
Vanessa Place
Vanessa Place (born 1968) is an American writer and criminal appellate attorney. She is the co-director of the Los Angeles-based Les Figues Press. Place has also worked as an occasional screenwriter on television shows such as '' Law & Order: S ...
in ''Statement of Facts'')
*
Christopher Knowles: ''Typings'' (1979) – transcriptions of radio broadcasts
*
Kathy Acker
Kathy Acker (April 18, 1947 isputed– November 30, 1997) was an American experimental novelist, playwright, essayist, and postmodernist writer, known for her idiosyncratic and transgressive writing that dealt with themes such as childhood tr ...
: ''Great Expectations: A Novel'' (1983) – passages from
Charles Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens (; 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian e ...
’
Great Expectations
''Great Expectations'' is the thirteenth novel by Charles Dickens and his penultimate completed novel. It depicts the education of an orphan nicknamed Pip (Great Expectations), Pip (the book is a ''bildungsroman''; a coming-of-age story). It ...
and
Pierre Guyotat
Pierre Guyotat (9 January 1940 – 7 February 2020) was a French writer.
Early life
Pierre Guyotat was born on 9 January 1940 in Bourg-Argental, Loire.
Literary career 1960s–1970s
Guyotat wrote his first novel, ''Sur un cheval'', in 1960. ...
’s ''Eden, Eden, Eden'' are plagiarized and rewritten in the opening of the book
*
John Cage:
X (1983) – collection of mesostics and examples of writing through
*
José Luis Ayala Olazaval
José is a predominantly Spanish and Portuguese form of the given name Joseph. While spelled alike, this name is pronounced differently in each language: Spanish ; Portuguese (or ).
In French, the name ''José'', pronounced , is an old vernacu ...
: ''Canto Sideral'' (1984) – combinatory book
*
Sergio Pesutic
Sergio may refer to:
* Sergio (given name), for people with the given name Sergio
* Sergio (carbonado), the largest rough diamond ever found
* ''Sergio'' (album), a 1994 album by Sergio Blass
* ''Sergio'' (2009 film), a documentary film
* ''S ...
: ''La hinteligencia militar'' (1986) – blank book
*
Michael Klauke: ''Ad Infinitum'' (1988) – appropriation of
Balzac’s short story
Sarrasine
''Sarrasine'' is a novella written by Honoré de Balzac. It was published in 1830, and is part of his '' Comédie Humaine''.
Introduction
Balzac, who began writing in 1819 while living alone in the rue Lesdiguières, undertook the composition o ...
(1830) in which each word was replaced "with vocabulary randomly drawn from ten other books in rotating sequence:
Lewis Carroll
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (; 27 January 1832 – 14 January 1898), better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English author, poet and mathematician. His most notable works are ''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'' (1865) and its sequel ...
’s
Alice in Wonderland
''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'' (commonly ''Alice in Wonderland'') is an 1865 English novel by Lewis Carroll. It details the story of a young girl named Alice who falls through a rabbit hole into a fantasy world of anthropomorphic creature ...
,
William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner (; September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962) was an American writer known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, based on Lafayette County, Mississippi, where Faulkner spent most ...
’s
Absalom, Absalom!
''Absalom, Absalom!'' is a novel by the American author William Faulkner, first published in 1936. Taking place before, during, and after the American Civil War, it is a story about three families of the American South, with a focus on the life o ...
,
Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr. ( , ; born May 8, 1937) is an American novelist noted for his dense and complex novels. His fiction and non-fiction writings encompass a vast array of subject matter, Literary genre, genres and Theme (narrative), them ...
’s
The Crying of Lot 49
''The Crying of Lot 49'' is a 1966 novel by American author Thomas Pynchon. The shortest of Pynchon's novels, the plot follows Oedipa Maas, a young Californian woman who begins to embrace a conspiracy theory as she possibly unearths a centuries-o ...
,
Roland Barthes
Roland Gérard Barthes (; ; 12 November 1915 – 26 March 1980) was a French literary theorist, essayist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. His work engaged in the analysis of a variety of sign systems, mainly derived from Western popul ...
’s
Mythologies
Myth is a folklore genre consisting of Narrative, narratives that play a fundamental role in a society, such as foundational tales or Origin myth, origin myths. Since "myth" is widely used to imply that a story is not Objectivity (philosophy), ...
,
Homer
Homer (; grc, Ὅμηρος , ''Hómēros'') (born ) was a Greek poet who is credited as the author of the '' Iliad'' and the '' Odyssey'', two epic poems that are foundational works of ancient Greek literature. Homer is considered one of ...
’s
Odyssey
The ''Odyssey'' (; grc, Ὀδύσσεια, Odýsseia, ) is one of two major Ancient Greek literature, ancient Greek Epic poetry, epic poems attributed to Homer. It is one of the oldest extant works of literature still widely read by moder ...
,
Tom Wolfe
Thomas Kennerly Wolfe Jr. (March 2, 1930 – May 14, 2018)Some sources say 1931; ''The New York Times'' and Reuters both initially reported 1931 in their obituaries before changing to 1930. See and was an American author and journalist widely ...
’s
Radical Chic
Radical chic is the fashionable practice of upper-class people associating with politically radical people and causes. Coined in the 1970 article "Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's" by journalist Tom Wolfe, the term has become widely used in l ...
,
Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy (2 June 1840 – 11 January 1928) was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, including the poetry of William Wo ...
’s
The Return of the Native
''The Return of the Native'' is Thomas Hardy's sixth published novel. It first appeared in the magazine ''Belgravia'', a publication known for its sensationalism, and was presented in twelve monthly installments from January to December 1878. Be ...
, J.L. Austin’s
Sense and Sensibilia,
Eric Hoffer
Eric Hoffer (July 25, 1902 – May 21, 1983) was an American moral and social philosopher. He was the author of ten books and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in February 1983. His first book, ''The True Believer'' (1951), was widel ...
’s
The Temper of Our Time
''The'' () is a grammatical article in English, denoting persons or things that are already or about to be mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite article in E ...
and
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic. He contributed to the Modernism, modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important ...
’s
Ulysses"
*
Claude Closky
Claude Closky (born 22 May 1963) is a French Contemporary Artist who lives and works in Paris, France.
Reception
Closky won the "Grand prix des Arts plastiques" (1999) and the Marcel Duchamp Prize (2005) awarded by the ADIAF.
Dike Blair w ...
: ''Les 1000 premiers nombres classés par ordre alphabétique'' (1989) – self-explanatory title (the first 1000 numbers classified in alphabetical order); ''Mon Catalogue'' (1999) – catalogue of ads (on products the author claims to own) in which the second-person pronouns have been changed to first-person pronouns
Recent examples
In the USA
*
Craig Dworkin
Craig Dworkin is an American poet, critic, editor, and Professor of English at the University of Utah. He is founding senior editor of Eclipse, an online archive of 20th-century small-press writing and 21st-century born-digital publications.
Ed ...
, ''Dure'' (2004); ''Strand'' (2005); ''Parse'' (2008)
*
Robert Fitterman, ''Metropolis'' (2000-2004); ''Rob the Plagiarist: Others Writing'' (2008); ''No, Wait. Yep. Definitely Still Hate Myself.'' (2014)
*
Kenneth Goldsmith
Kenneth Goldsmith (born 1961) is an American poet and critic. He is the founding editor of UbuWeb and since 2020 is the ongoing artist-in-residence at the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing (CPCW) at the University of Pennsylvania, where ...
, ''No. 111 2.7.92-10.20.96'' (1997); ''Fidget'' (2000); ''Soliloquy'' (2001); ''Day'' (2003); ''The Weather'' (2005); ''Traffic'' (2007); ''Sports'' (2008); ''Seven American Deaths and Disasters'' (2013); ''Capital'' (2015)
*
Vanessa Place
Vanessa Place (born 1968) is an American writer and criminal appellate attorney. She is the co-director of the Los Angeles-based Les Figues Press. Place has also worked as an occasional screenwriter on television shows such as '' Law & Order: S ...
, ''Dies: A Sentence'' (2005); ''Tragodía 1: Statement of Facts'' (2010); ''Boycott'' (2013)
For an exhaustive list, check the author index of ''Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing'' and ''I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women'' (edited by
Caroline Bergvall
Caroline Bergvall (born 1962) is a French-Norwegian poet who has lived in England since 1989. Her work includes the adaption of Old English and Old Norse texts into audio text and sound art performances.
Life and education
Born in Hamburg, Ge ...
,
Laynie Browne,
Teresa Carmody and
Vanessa Place
Vanessa Place (born 1968) is an American writer and criminal appellate attorney. She is the co-director of the Los Angeles-based Les Figues Press. Place has also worked as an occasional screenwriter on television shows such as '' Law & Order: S ...
).
Around the worl
*
Michelle Grangaud, ''Poèmes fondus'' (1997); ''Calendrier des poètes'' (2001); ''Calendrier des fêtes nationales'' (2003) (
France
France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans. Its metropolitan ar ...
)
*
Gary J. Shipley
Gary may refer to:
*Gary (given name), a common masculine given name, including a list of people and fictional characters with the name
*Gary, Indiana, the largest city named Gary
Places
;Iran
*Gary, Iran, Sistan and Baluchestan Province
;Unit ...
, ''Serial Kitsch'' (2014) (
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the European mainland, continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotlan ...
)
*
S. R. Jimmy, ''Conversation'' ''between'' ''Vladimir'' ''and'' ''Estragon''
(2016), (
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the European mainland, continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotlan ...
)
*
Emma Kay
Emma Kay (born 1961) is a British artist working with subjectivity and memory.
Biography
Kay studied art at Goldsmiths College, working toward a bachelor's of arts degree from 1980 to 1983 and a master's of arts degree from 1995 to 1997. Her earl ...
, ''Worldview'' (1999) (
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the European mainland, continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotlan ...
)
*
Christian Bök
Christian Bök, FRSC (; born August 10, 1966 in Toronto, Canada) is a Canadian poet known for unusual and experimental works. He is the author of ''Eunoia'', which won the Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize.
Life and work
He was born "Christian Boo ...
,
Eunoia
In rhetoric, ''eunoia'' ( grc, εὔνοιᾰ, eúnoia, well mind; beautiful thinking) is the good will speakers cultivate between themselves and their audiences, a condition of receptivity. In Book VIII of the ''Nicomachean Ethics'', Aristotl ...
(2001); ''Busted Sirens''; ''The Xenotext Experiment'' (
Canada
Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by tota ...
)
*
Cia Rinne, ''zaroum'' (2001) (
Finland
Finland ( fi, Suomi ; sv, Finland ), officially the Republic of Finland (; ), is a Nordic country in Northern Europe. It shares land borders with Sweden to the northwest, Norway to the north, and Russia to the east, with the Gulf of Bo ...
)
*
Alejandro Cesarco
Alejandro is the Spanish form of the name Alexander.
Alejandro has multiple variations in different languages, including Aleksander ( Czech, Polish), Alexandre (French), Alexandros ( Greek), Alsander ( Irish), Alessandro ( Italian), Aleksandr ...
, ''Index (a novel)'' (2003) (
Uruguay
Uruguay (; ), officially the Oriental Republic of Uruguay ( es, República Oriental del Uruguay), is a country in South America. It shares borders with Argentina to its west and southwest and Brazil to its north and northeast; while bordering ...
)
*
Anamaría Briede, ''Escritura clarividente'' (2004) (
Chile
Chile, officially the Republic of Chile, is a country in the western part of South America. It is the southernmost country in the world, and the closest to Antarctica, occupying a long and narrow strip of land between the Andes to the eas ...
)
*
Moez Surani
Moez Surani (born April 10, 1979) is a Canadian poet and artist. He is the author of the poetry collections ''Reticent Bodies'' and ''Floating Life'', and the booklength poem ''عملية Operación Opération Operation 行动 Операция''. ...
, ''عملية Operación Opération Operation 行动 Операция'' (2016) (
Canada
Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by tota ...
)
*
Christof Migone
Christof Migone is a Swiss-born experimental sound artist and writer, formerly based in Montreal, now living in Toronto.
He is assistant professor at the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Western Ontario
Migone's solo recordings i ...
, ''La première phrase et le dernier mot'' (2004) (Canada)
*
Caroline Bergvall
Caroline Bergvall (born 1962) is a French-Norwegian poet who has lived in England since 1989. Her work includes the adaption of Old English and Old Norse texts into audio text and sound art performances.
Life and education
Born in Hamburg, Ge ...
, ''Fig'' (2005) (United Kingdom)
*
, ''Ligature'' (2005) (Canada)
*
Simon Morris, ''Re-writing Freud'' (2005) (United Kingdom)
*
Derek Beaulieu, ''fractal economies'' (2006); ''Flatland'' (2007); ''Local Colour'' (2008); ''Please, No More Poetry: the Poetry of derek beaulieu'' (2013) (Canada)
*
Shigeru Matsui
Shigeru (written: , , , in hiragana or in katakana) is a masculine Japanese given name. Notable people with the name include:
*, a Japanese architect
*, a Japanese voice actor
*, Japanese karateka
*, Japanese sport wrestler
*, Japanese socialist ...
, ''Quantum Poem'' (2006) (
Japan)
*
Pablo Katchadjian, ''El Martín Fierro ordenado alfabéticamente'' (2007); ''El Aleph engordado'' (2009); ''Mucho trabajo'' (2011); ''La cadena del desánimo'' (2013) (
Argentina
Argentina (), officially the Argentine Republic ( es, link=no, República Argentina), is a country in the southern half of South America. Argentina covers an area of , making it the second-largest country in South America after Brazil, t ...
)
*
Leevi Lehto, ''Päivä'' (2007) (Finland)
*
Paal Bjelke Andersen, ''Til folket'' (2000-2008); ''Dugnad'' (2010); ''The Grefsen Address'' (2010) (
Norway
Norway, officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic country in Northern Europe, the mainland territory of which comprises the western and northernmost portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula. The remote Arctic island of Jan Mayen and t ...
)
*
Peder Alexis Olsson
Peter is a common masculine given name. It is derived directly from Greek , ''Petros'' (an invented, masculine form of Greek ''petra,'' the word for "rock" or "stone"), which itself was a translation of Aramaic ''Kefa'' ("stone, rock"), the new n ...
, ''Tändstickor'' (2008) (Sweden)
*
Ida Börjel
Ida Börjel (born 1975) is a Swedish poet.
Börjel was born in Lund. She made her literary debut in 2004 with the poetry collection ''Sond'', for which she was awarded in 2005. Further books are ''Skåneradio'' from 2006, and ''Konsumentköp ...
, ''Konsumentköplagen: juris lyrik'' (2008) (Sweden)
*
Anna Hallberg, ''Mil'' (2008) (Sweden)
*
Rasmus Graff
Rasmus may refer to:
People
* Rasmus (given name)
* Rasmus (surname)
Arts and entertainment
* The Rasmus, a Finnish rock band formerly called Rasmus
** ''The Rasmus'' (album), a self-titled studio album by the Finnish band
* the title cha ...
, ''patchwork'' (2008) (Sweden)
*
Riccardo Boglione Riccardo Boglione (born 7 July 1970 in Genoa) is an Italian art curator, lecturer, writer, and art critic.[Belén Gache Belén Gache (Buenos Aires, 1960) is a Spanish-Argentinian novelist and experimental writer.
Of Spanish and Gibraltarian descent, she was born in Buenos Aires. She lives in Madrid. She graduated from the University of Buenos Aires where she was pro ...](_blank)
, ''Meditaciones sobre la revolución'', (2014), ''After Lorca'', (2019), (Spain)
*
Martin Glaz Serup, ''Marken'' (2010); ''Fredag'' (2014) (Denmark)
*
Pejk Malinovski, ''Den store danske drømmebog'' (2010) (Denmark)
*
Ulf Karl Olov Nilsson
Ulf, or Ulv is a masculine name common in Scandinavia and Germany. It derives from the Old Norse word for "wolf" (''úlfr'', see Wulf).
The oldest written record of the name's occurrence in Sweden is from a runestone of the 11th century.
The fe ...
, ''Hjälp, vem är jag? – anteckningar ur en terapi'' (2010) (Sweden)
*
Alberto Pimenta, ''al Face-book'' (2012) (
Portugal
Portugal, officially the Portuguese Republic, In recognized minority languages of Portugal:
:* mwl, República Pertuesa is a country located on the Iberian Peninsula, in Southwestern Europe, and whose territory also includes the Macaronesian ...
)
*
Piotr Marecki, ''Wiersze za sto dolarów'' (2017), ''Sezon grzewczy'' (2018), ''Polska przydrożna'' (2020) (
Poland
Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, , is a country in Central Europe. Poland is divided into Voivodeships of Poland, sixteen voivodeships and is the fifth most populous member state of the European Union (EU), with over 38 mill ...
)
*
Daniele Pantano
Daniele Pantano (born February 10, 1976) is a poet, essayist, literary translator, artist, editor, and scholar. He was born in Langenthal, Switzerland, of Sicilian and German parentage. Pantano holds degrees in philosophy, literature, and cr ...
, ''ORAKL'' (2017), ''Ten Million and One Silences'' (2021), ''333'' (2022), ''HIMMEL-BIMMEL-BAM-BAM'' (2022) (
Switzerland)
See also
*
Appropriation (art)
Appropriation in art is the use of pre-existing objects or images with little or no transformation applied to them. The use of appropriation has played a significant role in the history of the arts (literary, visual, musical and performing arts ...
*
Conceptual art
Conceptual art, also referred to as conceptualism, is art in which the concept(s) or idea(s) involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic, technical, and material concerns. Some works of conceptual art, sometimes called inst ...
*
Concrete poetry
Concrete poetry is an arrangement of linguistic elements in which the typographical effect is more important in conveying meaning than verbal significance. It is sometimes referred to as visual poetry, a term that has now developed a distinct mea ...
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Cut-up technique
The cut-up technique (or ''découpé'' in French) is an aleatory literary technique in which a written text is cut up and rearranged to create a new text. The concept can be traced to the Dadaists of the 1920s, but it was developed and populariz ...
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Dada
Dada () or Dadaism was an art movement of the European avant-garde in the early 20th century, with early centres in Zürich, Switzerland, at the Cabaret Voltaire (Zurich), Cabaret Voltaire (in 1916). New York Dada began c. 1915, and after 192 ...
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Deconstruction
The term deconstruction refers to approaches to understanding the relationship between text and meaning. It was introduced by the philosopher Jacques Derrida, who defined it as a turn away from Platonism's ideas of "true" forms and essence ...
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Fluxus
Fluxus was an international, interdisciplinary community of artists, composers, designers and poets during the 1960s and 1970s who engaged in experimental art performances which emphasized the artistic process over the finished product. Fluxus ...
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Found poetry
Found poetry is a type of poetry created by taking words, phrases, and sometimes whole passages from other sources and reframing them (a literary equivalent of a collage) by making changes in spacing and lines, or by adding or deleting text, thus ...
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Language poets
The Language poets (or ''L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E'' poets, after the magazine of that name) are an avant-garde group or tendency in United States poetry that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The poets included: Bernadette Mayer, Leslie Scal ...
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Post-structuralism
Post-structuralism is a term for philosophical and literary forms of theory that both build upon and reject ideas established by structuralism, the intellectual project that preceded it. Though post-structuralists all present different critiques ...
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Sound poetry
Sound poetry is an artistic form bridging literacy and musical composition, in which the phonetic aspects of human speech are foregrounded instead of more conventional semantic and syntactic values; "verse without words". By definition, sound poe ...
References
{{Reflist, 30em
Sources
Charles Bernstein’s "wreading" experimentsKenneth Goldsmith books available on MonoskopWelcome to Literature's Duchamp MomentWelcome to The Concept Writer
Schools of poetry
Poetry movements
American poetry
Random text generation
20th-century poetry
21st-century poetry
American literary movements
20th-century American literature
21st-century American literature