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| Kenneth Goldsmith |
Kenneth Goldsmith’s writing has been called “some of
the most exhaustive and beautiful collage work yet produced in poetry.”
Goldsmith is the author of eleven books of poetry, founding editor of the
online archive UbuWeb, and the editor of I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy
Warhol Interviews, which was the basis for an opera, Trans-Warhol, that
premiered in Geneva in 2007. An hour-long documentary on his work, Sucking on
Words, was first shown at the British Library that same year. In 2011, he was
invited to read at President Obama’s “A Celebration of American Poetry” at the
White House, where he also held a poetry workshop with First Lady Michelle
Obama. Earlier this year, he began his tenure as the first-ever Poet Laureate
of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
I recently sat down with Goldsmith to
discuss his new book, Seven American Deaths and Disasters.
Since your practice
emphasizes the value of the selection process over the creation process, how do
you choose what to include and exclude from Seven American Deaths and
Disasters?
I began with the assassination of JFK,
which is arguably the beginning of media spectacle, as defined and framed by
Warhol. His portrait of Jackie mourning iconizes that moment forever. Although
he made Marilyn’ss, he never memorialized her death, thus it never entered into
the realm of media spectacle in the same way. From JFK, I naturally proceeded
to RFK, an eyewitness account of his shooting at the Ambassador Hotel in Los
Angeles. It’s an incredible linguistic document—you really feel the newsman’s
struggle to find words to describe what is unfolding before his eyes. John
Lennon is taken from a cassette tape made by someone scanning the radio the
night of and days following his assassination, which feels like an audio
document from a lost time. Space Shuttle Challenger is from a TV broadcast of
the event and its long, weird, silent aftermath. Columbine is straight
transcript of a harrowing 911 call. The World Trade Center, the longest piece
in the book, is from several sources—talk radio, news radio, color
commentary—stitched together into a multichapter epic, thus mirroring the
gargantuan scale of the event. And Michael Jackson is from a catty FM station,
where the shock jocks have no problem cracking jokes and making racist comments
at his expense.
I wish there were air checks available
from Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, but in those cases, the media doesn’t
show up until well after the assassination and the reporting is pretty slick
stuff, lacking the struggle to find words to express the horrors that they were
witnessing. I do have a great transcript from the shooting of Ronald Reagan,
but it’s mostly Secret Service men talking to each other in numerical code,
which just didn’t fit in well with the other, more transparently textual
pieces.
Sadly, new material keeps on coming. I
heard the language of the Newtown shootings in a very different way after having
written this book.
This book feels both like an
important historical document and a beautiful example of what the Great
American Novel might look like today. Yet you identify it, and much of your
other work, as poetry. I’m curious why that particular genre is so important to
you?
I suppose that the work has become
more novelistic as time’s gone on, but when I started down this path some
twenty years ago, it was only the poets and the poetry world that could accept
what I did. So I hung out with them. You take your love where you get it. But
you’re right, I’ve never really written a poem—I don’t think I’d know how to.
Yet there’s some sort of openness in the poetry world concerning writing that I
haven’t been able to find elsewhere. Some of the Language poets, in particular,
sort of blew apart notions of prescriptive lineation in favor of
margin-to-margin madness. I’m thinking of works like Ron Silliman’s Tjanting.
As with many of your projects, I
notice that time, duration, and history seem rather significant to this book,
especially in terms of the tension created between our personal and cultural
experiences of chronology. I’m curious to hear your thoughts on how Seven
American Deaths and Disasters intersects these issues.
These are all tragedies I lived
through, so each one is tied to very specific memories and periods in my life.
You could say that we are defined by these tragedies—and more so by the
spectacle emanating from them. But it’s curious to see who is moved differently
when I do readings of this work. For younger people, the Kennedys are cold,
distant historical figures while Michael Jackson grabs all the heat. And vice
versa for the older people, who tend to write Jackson off as a joke. As a
result, the book—although based on objective public events—is read and strained
through one’s unique subjectivity.
Following Vanessa Place and
Robert Fitterman’s claim in Notes on Conceptualisms that “failure is the goal
of conceptual writing,” in what ways do you see Seven American Deaths and
Disasters succeeding in failure?
I’m not sure I agree with this
statement. I prefer the definition made by Peli Grietzerhere, when he claimed
that conceptual writing can be evaluated by an “aesthetic of sufficiency.” In
order to succeed, a book must simply fulfill its requirements—no more, no less.
If I set out to, say, retype a day’s issue of The New York Times, and I
actually do just that, then the book is a success. But if I begin to get
“creative” with the text, and I overdo it, the book fails. Likewise, if I skimp
on the task—omitting certain portions of the text—the book also fails. But if I
accomplish what I set out to do, the book is a success.
Regarding your aversion to
“getting creative with the text,” could you clarify what you mean in terms of
your perspective on the boundary between “creative” and “uncreative” writing?
Creativity is about the most worn-out,
abused concept that used to mean something remarkable, something that
differentiated someone, something that made them special. It’s a term that’s
been usurped by the creative class, by people like Richard Florida, and reduced
to a base concept that has come to stand for the opposite of creativity:
mediocre, middle-of-the-road, acceptable, unadventurous, and so forth—so that
creativity is no longer creative. What was once creative is now uncreative.
Calling a practice uncreative is to
reenergize it, opening creativity up to a whole slew of strategies that are in
no way acceptable to creativity as it’s now known. These strategies include
theft, plagiarism, mechanical processes, repetition. By employing these
methods, uncreativity can actually breathe life into the moribund notion of
creativity as we know it.
Of course modernisms used these
strategies, and they were proven fairly resistant to co-optation by mainstream
culture. So you’re starting to see a lot of these inverted terms emerge in
order to describe various attempts to reenvision cultural production—like
Marjorie Perloff’s Unoriginal Genius and Against Expression, the title of the
anthology of conceptual writing that I edited with Craig Dworkin.
I’ve noticed that you often
cite Brion Gysin’s quip about writing being fifty years behind painting. If
it’s safe to say writing is now in its conceptualist stage, what can we expect
next in terms of postconceptualist poetic practices?
You can map this out if you look at
the historical precedents of the art world. Following the period of high, pure
Conceptualism and Minimalism—Judd, LeWitt, et cetera—you get counterreactions
that at once reify and violate the first generation’s precepts. The LeWitt-ian
grid, for instance, gets wrapped in cloth, creating a soft grid. Later, people
start to hang objects off that soft grid, bringing in notions of narrative and
subjectivity. After a while, it gets so covered that you lose the grid
entirely, thus clearing the way for other types of discourses.
If we extend this into a
post-Conceptual narrative for writing—and I’m not sure it’s such a one-to-one
correspondence—we see younger writers melding rigorous strategies with kitschy
and ironic texts in works such as Andy Sterling’s Supergroup, which is 426
pages of nothing but listings of sidemen and engineers from forgotten LPs.
Another example would be Steven Zultanski’s Agony, in which he performs
insanely complicated mathematical equations and applies them to absurd
propositions like how many average-size breasts stacked on top of one another
it would take to get to the height of the Burj Khalifa. For years, Kim
Rosenfield has been constructing quirky, hard-to-categorize texts from
appropriated material. She puts it together in ways that are not explicitly
process-based, leaving a lot to whim and taste. I think these are all ways the
discourse is moving forward. If you want to get a glimpse into the future of
this discourse, have a look at the sites of the young online publishers of this
sort of work, Gauss PDF and the Troll Thread Collective, which are full of
next-generation works.
And for you, any idea what’s
next or where your work is headed?
For the past eight years, I have been
working on Capital, a rewriting of Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project set in
New York City in the twentieth century. As of today, the book is about seven
hundred pages, nearly three-quarters of the way to the thousand-plus pages that
constitutes Benjamin’s book. The idea is to use Benjamin’s identical
methodology in order to write a poetic history of New York City in the twentieth
century, just as Benjamin did with Paris in the nineteenth. Thus, I have taken
each of his original convolutes, and, reading through the entire corpus of
literature written about New York in the twentieth century, I have taken notes
and selected what I consider to be the most relevant and interesting parts,
sorting them into sheaves identical to Benjamin’s. It’s an impossible project,
and if it ever is published—I have my doubts that, due to size and copyright
issues, it’s publishable at all—I’ll be sixty-five before I see it in print.
(Interview
was taken by Christopher Higgs for theparisreview.org)
