Abstract
Conceptual writing is, in terms of its poetics, very clear in its intention to privilege appropriation as a mode, and it appears to downplay form. The theories (and some ‘uncreative’ works) of Kenneth Goldsmith are expounded in support of its own practice; Vanessa Place’s Statement of Facts, with its grueling accounts of rape, is read against conceptualist theory as a formal entity. The other of conceptual writing’s (self-confirming) poetics is form. The work of British poet John Seed, post-Objectivist appropriations and transformations (by means of poetic artifice) of Mayhew’s accounts of the nineteenth-century London poor, Pictures from Mayhew, serves to show how a successful formal and conceptual project may be achieved.
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsBibliography
Adorno, T.W. 2002. Aesthetic Theory. Eds. G. Adorno and R. Tiedemann, Trans. R. Hullot-Kentor. London: Continuum.
Attridge, Derek. 2004a. The Singularity of Literature. London: Routledge.
———. 2004b. J.M. Coetzee & The Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
Barthes, Roland. 1977. The Death of the Author. In Roland Barthes: Image-Music-Text, Trans. Stephen Heath, 142–148. Glasgow: Fontana/Collins.
Benjamin, Walter. 1999. The Arcades Project. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bernstein, Charles. 1999. My Way: Speeches and Poems. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Chesney, Kellow. 1970. The Victorian Underworld. London: Temple Smith.
Dworkin, Craig, and Kenneth Goldsmith, eds. 2011. Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Goldsmith, Kenneth. 2011. Uncreative Writing. New York: Columbia University Press.
Morris, Simon. 2014. Getting Inside Jack Kerouac’s Head. http://gettinginsidejackkerouacshead.blogspot.in/. Accessed 31 Jan 2014.
Perloff, Marjorie. 2010. Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Place, Vanessa. 2014. http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/2117. Accessed 31 Jan 2014.
Popper, Karl. 1976. Unended Quest. Glasgow: Fontana/Collins.
Rasula, J., ed. 2009. Modernism and Poetic Inspiration. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Rawes, Alan, ed. 2007. Romanticism and Form. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Reed, Brian M 2013. Nobody’s Business: Twenty-First Century Avant-Garde Poetics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Reznikoff, Charles. 1965. Testimony: The United States 1885–1890: Recitative. New York: New Directions/San Francisco Review.
Seed, John. 2005a. New and Collected Poems. Exeter: Shearsman.
———. 2005b. Pictures from Mayhew. Exeter: Shearsman.
———. 2007. That Barrikins—Pictures from Mayhew II. Exeter: Shearsman.
———. 2010. Marx: A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Continuum.
———. 2013. Manchester: August 16th & 17th 1819. London: Intercapillary Editions.
Sheppard, Robert. 2014. Objectivism and John Seed: Reznikoff, Shelley and the Peterloo Massacre. 10 November. http://www.robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/robert-sheppard-objectivism-and-john.html. Accessed 9 Feb 2015.
Woods, Tim. 2002. The Poetics of the Limit. New York: Palgrave.
Zukofsky, Louis. 1981. Prepositions: The Collected Critical Essays. Berkeley: The University of California Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Sheppard, R. (2016). The Trace of Poetry and the Non-Poetic: Conceptual Writing and Appropriation in Kenneth Goldsmith, Vanessa Place, and John Seed. In: The Meaning of Form in Contemporary Innovative Poetry. Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-34045-6_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-34045-6_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-34044-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-34045-6
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)