Johnson vs Goldsmith

This is what Robert Baird wrote on Digital E.

Since Kent isn’t allowed onto the Buf­falo POET­ICS list, I thought I’d note a con­ver­sa­tion about this book that is taking place there.

Jonathan Ball wrote:

I pre­sume the “blurbs” in sup­port of Johnson’s book are also appro­pri­ated or fab­ri­cated. This is a clever joke, but I don’t see how it is con­cep­tu­ally inter­est­ing. Unlike Goldsmith’s DAY, which recon­tex­tu­al­ized text in an “uncreative” ges­ture (a Duchampian rais­ing of “journalistic” prose into the realm of poetry), and thus pro­duced a rich text, replete with pre­vi­ously dor­mant mean­ing, Johnson’s DAY does little more than repeat the ges­ture, and thus the only sig­nif­i­cance it seems to hold is to ques­tion the valid­ity of assign­ing such a work to any single, par­tic­u­lar author, some­thing already implicit in Goldsmith’s project and only super­fi­cially inter­est­ing in the first place.

And Skip Fox con­curred with the “superficially interesting” char­ac­ter­i­za­tion.

Here’s my response:

It’s inter­est­ing, Jonathan, that you’d defend Goldsmith’s DAY (and dis­miss Johnson’s DAY) in the name of orig­i­nal­ity (”produced a rich text, replete with pre­vi­ously dor­mant meaning”), when this is the regime of value that Gold­smith explic­itly and repeat­edly rejects. (See Gold­smith, inter­net, passim.) I pre­sume that you, like many other people, accept that rejec­tion as a pose, a mere mock­ery of public mod­esty, even though Gold­smith, appar­ently, does not see it that way. (”In fact, every time I have to proof­read [my books] before send­ing them off to the pub­lisher, I fall asleep repeat­edly. You really don’t need to read my books to get the idea of what they’re like; you just need to know the gen­eral concept.”)

Or maybe you take Goldsmith’s word for it that “In con­cep­tual writ­ing the idea or con­cept is the most impor­tant aspect of the work. When an author uses a con­cep­tual form of writ­ing, it means that all of the plan­ning and deci­sions are made before­hand and the exe­cu­tion is a per­func­tory affair.” If that’s the case, then tell me, please, what makes Goldsmith’s idea inter­est­ing? Given that the same idea has been had, and exe­cuted, by thou­sands of others, includ­ing Richard Prince, Sher­rie Levine, and anyone who’s “written” a found poem, why should we see Goldsmith’s project as any more or any less inter­est­ing than Johnson’s?

But here’s a thought: what if the dis­missal of Kent’s DAY as “superficially interesting” was exactly the point of his project? I don’t say that it is; Kent can speak to that (or could, if he weren’t banned from this list, though I’m sure he’ll find a way to par­tic­i­pate some­how). But what if? What if one took the annoyed response to Johnson’s DAY as exactly the reac­tion he wanted, since it proved the fact–which you may take to be obvi­ous, but which no one seems will­ing to pub­licly acknowl­edge [NB: I should have said "con­front" here]–that there is a bright line between the kind of people whose uncre­ative writ­ing allows them to reap every reward the cul­ture indus­try has to offer—publication, glossy mag­a­zine inter­views, fel­low­ships and tenured aca­d­e­mic posi­tions–and those whose *iden­ti­cal* uncre­ative writ­ing gets them shunned as wannabes? And what if that bright line has noth­ing to do with the work, or the ideas behind the work, and every­thing to do with the fact that one has gone to the right schools, lived in the right cities, and licked the right boots? I think you’d have to admit that it’s a super­fi­cially inter­est­ing thought, at the very least.