Kenneth Goldsmith’s Sports and Conceptual Baseball Writing

Abstract

Kenneth Goldsmith’s Sports and Conceptual Baseball Writing Justin D. Edwards (bio) Bullpen Motto: Have Lead, Will Win With John Franco and Armando Benítez leading the way, the Mets’ late-inning relief has been among the best in baseball. METS’ RECORD WHEN LEADING AFTER 6 INNINGS 56–7 METS’ RECORD WHEN LEADING AFTER 7 INNINGS 58–3 METS’ RECORD WHEN LEADING AFTER 8 INNINGS 69–3 Barton Silverman, New York Times1 1 What is this? A sports motto? A description of baseball pitching? A fragmented narrative from a New York Mets’ season? A baseball poem? It is of course all of the above. A copied excerpt from the sports section of the New York Times, it conveys information about the team’s relief pitching and the success of its players by referring to the records of games earlier in the MLB season of the year 2000. But it is also more than just information. It is a poem as well, for it is a passage from page 497 of Kenneth Goldsmith’s long poem, Day [End Page 132] (2003), which is a transcribed copy of the entire edition of the New York Times for September 1, 2000. As the extract shows, moving these snippets of information out of the context in which they first appeared and juxtaposing three different types of discourse– pithy motto, a whole sentence and statistics rendered in capital letters— draws attention to the language used in sports writing and invites questions about the relationship between form and content in this particular type of information delivery. Goldsmith’s selection of his source material is based on an element of randomness, for September 1, 2000, was simply the day that he happened to be free to start a new project. Moreover, his poetic version of the newspaper edition indiscriminately includes every single letter printed in the original text, from ads and headlines to articles and contributors’ names, just as it transcribes the words on the page in strict accordance with the rules of horizontal reading and writing that govern English language approaches to most prose and poetry. Beginning with the upper left-hand corner of the front page and ending on the lower right-hand corner of the last page, Goldsmith copies the content line by line without allowing for the vertical dimension of newspaper layout where separate items are arranged next to as well as above or beneath each other. The result is a truthful yet defamiliarizing mix which, as the above quotation illustrates, strings together various forms of discourse from the borrowed, recycled and reused page material and allows them to blend into each other. The “bullpen motto: Have lead, /Will win” frames the passage in the general discussion of the particular sport and provides an overview, offering irrefutable truth in a humorously hackneyed cliché. The fourth line abruptly shifts to a specific comment about two individual players: the Mets’ relief pitchers John Franco and Armando Benitez, both of whom were star players in the 2000 season (with Franco having a season ERA of 3.40 and Benitez 2.61). Then, moving into the objective language of statistics and factual information, the rest of the excerpt focuses on the Mets’ record throughout the season and, in this part of the poem, the image of the text changes, moving to upper case letters. This shift in typography signals a new narrative: these statistics are a series of codes that can be read as culturally expressive beyond their basic denotation, for they form a narrative by percentage that is unexplained to an audience assumed to be able to decipher them on their own. Day is eight hundred and thirty-six pages long: it took a year to type. Rather than art about art, it would be more accurate to say that Day is art whose content is already a formed textual, cultural and ideological artifact that, once disseminated and consumed on 09/01/2000, would have simply been archived in the annals of NYT history. The only direct experience of the art arises out of the process of reading and repetition, processing the words into the poem. It [End Page 133] is a lived concrete experience...