The Waste-Management Poetics of Kenneth Goldsmith

For those who follow closely the contemporary American poetry scene, perhaps no recent figure has made a greater intervention in received ideas of poetic excellence than Kenneth Goldsmith. This self-described “conceptual poet” has managed to become “the most critically well-inspected writer now under the age of 50 in the United States” by ceding all claims to authorial originality and practicing instead a procedural, quasi-robotic poetics.¹ Warhol famously declared, “I want to be a machine,” and Goldsmith has colonized this desire, importing it into the literary realm.² Goldsmith explains: “I used to be an artist, then I became a poet; then a writer. Now when asked, I simply refer to myself as a word processor” (Perloff). Like Warhol, Goldsmith chooses ephemeral, well-circulated, often banal texts as source material; periodicals, radio reports, and his own mundane chatter are some chosen objects of détournement. But Goldsmith’s practice—which he calls “uncreative writing”—is even less transformative than Warhol’s.³ In Day, the aesthetic acme of Goldsmith’s machinic asceticism, the poet slavishly retyped an entire volume of The New York Times into an 840-page book, a clear homage to John Cage’s “writing through” of texts like Finnegan’s Wake—with the difference that Goldsmith elides not a single word in his reproduction, and chooses, instead of the “high” texts of canonical literature, the detritus of mass culture.⁴ Like Warhol’s visual recyclings of Photoplay and newspaper photographs, Goldsmith’s transposition into poetry of what is often disparaged as “fish-wrapping” or “bird-cage liner” stanches the news’ bleed into ephemerality, literalizing Ezra Pound’s dictum that “Poetry is news that stays news.” But in a defining difference, Goldsmith reproduces The Times’ text from left to right, top to bottom, front to back, irrespective of story jump or column boundary. This defamiliarizing of the text—what Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky calls ostranenie, or poetic strange-making—ensures that only those accustomed to “difficult” literature will approach, much less read, Day. A representative passage:

Elsewhere today, a bomb exploded near a public market, wounding at least 13 people, officials said. The police said they suspected that another Muslim rebel group, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, was responsible.

the original razor scooter

hot@bloomingdale’s

adjustable.

collapsible. six pounds.

(40)

Here sober disaster journalism falls into the vapid sensationalism of advertising copy. In supplementing, in the Derridean sense, The New York Times with an almost unreadable version of itself, Goldsmith reminds us that few consumers read every word of the newspaper, even in its original format. (The Times still printed stock quotes in the paper in 2000, when Goldsmith undertook his writing.) Instead we skim and read only the bits of interest, ignoring vast amounts of primary and secondary information (page numbers, story jumps, bylines) to avoid wasting time. As if addressing this issue of waste, Goldsmith chose to reproduce a volume of the Times on September 1—not September 11, a frequent misreading—the sleepy Friday before the American holiday Labor Day. Goldsmith’s expense of unremunerated labor on Labor Day weekend, when he began the project, reminds us of the vast work expended in the newspaper’s production, and how comparatively little we expend in our consumption of it. To produce Day, Goldsmith read the newspaper like a book (doggedly left-to-right, rather than scattershot, as one might read a newspaper), and in the process, produced a book.

Such aesthetic efficiency—consumption as production—is the prototypical gesture of our current cultural moment, argues art historian Nicolas Bourriaud, in his thin tome Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World. Bourriaud argues that much contemporary art practice is founded on the by now self-consciously “postmodern” notion of reappropriation:

It is no longer a matter of elaborating a form on the basis of a raw material but working with objects that are already in circulation on the cultural market, which is to say, objects already informed by other objects. Notions of originality (being at the origin of) and even of creation (making something from nothing) are slowly...