Conceptual Writing

Abstract

(Peter Nicholls interviewed Marjorie Perloff on Conceptual Writing. Professor Nicholls focused his questions on the idea of in modernist writings.) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] P.N.: Your new book, Unoriginal Genius, is likely to annoy some readers of poetry by its enthusiastic embrace of which is citational and often constraint-based and which quite candidly takes as its primary material other people's words. What's really at stake in the claim to unoriginality? We may recall Eliot's dictum that poem which is absolutely original is absolutely bad, but he would never have thought of a poem as straightforwardly a transcription of another text.... M. P.: A few days ago, on the McNeill-Lehrer News Hour, a poet was featured (I can't remember his name but had never heard of him), who was trained in Creative Writing Programs and then found one fine day that he had of his own, but, next thing you know, he began circling items in newspapers and assembling these words and phrases, rather like Tom Phillips in A Humument, and now he is considered an interesting new poet and on national TV. This is a kind of reductio ad absurdum, but it points to the problem poets are experiencing in the early 21st Century. The media world has created an atmosphere where everything one wants to say has already been said, where the display of unique private emotions seems gratuitous, and originality of utterance hence all but impossible. But it is also the case that no work of art is pure transcription: current poetry, as I describe it, is no more than the logical fulfillment of Duchamp's decision to purchase a urinal from the JL Mott plumbing fixtures store and then to turn it upside down and give it the name Fountain by R. Mutt. As the anonymous commentator in The Blind Man remarked, He [the artist] chose it. Such choice is very difficult and ever since 1917, when Fountain was rejected by the Society of Independents and then photographed (and hence aestheticized) by Stieglitz in front of the Mardsen Hartley painting, artists and poets have been trying to match Duchamp. So unoriginal genius was already a Modernist issue, but it has taken the better part of the century for a Duchampian aesthetic to come fully into its own. P.N.: And, of course, we've started by talking about though many of the key texts of what's now called writing are actually exercises in prose. M. P.: Touche! This is a tricky issue. Many of the works in question certainly don't look like in the usual sense. But if you define the poet in Aristotelian terms, as a maker, POETES, then the long or hybrid works in question are certainly poems in that they are highly structured and rely on repetition in ways not found in, say, prose fiction. The word verse comes, of course, from versus, and refers to the return that characterizes lineated poetry. A long conceptual poem like Craig Dworkin's Dure is certainly structured around points of return in this sense. P.N.: In an early chapter of the book you give a wonderful quotation from Walter Benjamin: Only the copied text commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened up by the text. Why is copying such a vital process? Kenneth Goldsmith has spoken about his own work in rather similar ways, but what's involved is something quite different from, say, eighteenth-century imitation or modernist translation. M. P.: When you copy a text you really come to know it in a unique way. You can't just focus on one word or sentence but take in the whole thing. You become someone else. But it's also the case, and I'll take this up in my next answer, that all the talk of pure copying is itself a performance; there is always some element of transformation; if a given work is really just copied wholesale, it's not going to be very interesting. …