Property, Priority, Place: Rethinking the Poetics of Appropriation

Appropriation has attained the status of a signature technique in contemporary poetry. This compositional method consists of the self-conscious and overt use of preexisting textual materials, encompassing every thing from local uses of quotation and collage to the more or less framed re-presentation of entire texts. Taken in its most general sense, appropriation can be observed in a broad range of poems: most closely associated with conceptual writing, it is just as common in documentary poetry, essay poems, and pastiches. Nor is it unusual to find instances of appropriation within lyric and new formalist poems. The technique thus crosses with seeming ease between apparently opposed styles and schools. Despite its ubiquity, however, there is to date surprisingly little scholarship describing appropriation.

The few extant theorizations of appropriation largely circumscribe it within the self-polemicizing of conceptual poetry, which does not “simply appropriate but appropriate[s] appropriation,” to borrow a phrase from the poet-critic Judith Goldman (Goldman). Put differently, conceptual poetry is now so closely identified with appropriation that uses of the technique by other poets are imagined to be subsidiary to or derivative of conceptual writers’ work. Accounts of conceptualist appropriation, whether produced by the poets themselves or by their critics, tend to describe the recent prevalence of appropriation in relation to the rise of the Internet. Appropriation, these accounts contend, responds to “an utterly transformed media landscape”: the Internet has made an unprecedented, seemingly infinite amount of text available to readers (Stephens 158). Perhaps more importantly, current computing technologies make all of this text easily transferable from one location to another (Perloff 17). The most extreme accounts of appropriation therefore suggest that “one does not need to generate new material to be a poet” (Dworkin, “Fate” xliv); instead, one becomes a poet in working on the glut of text that defines our current media landscape. Kenneth Goldsmith has argued—in a frequently recycled remark—that the characteristic activity of a contemporary poet consists of performing workaday tasks such as “replicating, organizing, mirroring, archiving, and reprinting” texts that already exist (“Provisional Language”). The most interesting poets, he suggests, combine the chores “of a secretary” with the “more clandestine” proclivities of a “pirate.” Poetry today, he argues, also consists of “bootlegging, plundering, hoarding, and file-sharing.”

Goldsmith’s framing of the process of poetic composition as clandestine begins to suggest the liberationist idiom in which appropriation is often discussed. Drawing on the rhetorics and insights of movements for open access and free culture that achieved prominence in the first decade of the current century, appropriation-based poetry is credited with heroically freeing linguistic content unjustly captured by the draconian rules governing intellectual property. Such accounts of appropriation suggest that found language is, or at least ought to be, available for the taking, whether it is encountered on the Internet or in an orphan work of some kind. In doing so, they imagine language, or at least the history of print publication, as a type of land—a commons wrongly enclosed. While other critics have described this approach as a “cyberlibertarian rhetoric of free exchange” (Edmond 158), I focus on something that has not been discussed: its inherent traditionalism. The implication is that poets’ writerly labor improves this neglected territory and allows them to claim it justly: poetic labor opens these texts or this language to new use. This new use is generally imagined as redistributive: textual materials that have been wrongly enclosed are made newly available to readers in the form of the poem. (That these poems are highly authored works themselves, and thus arguably constitute renewed instances of privatization, tends not to be noted.) What strikes me about these articulations of the poetics of appropriation is that while they cast appropriation as an important, interventionist critique of intellectual property law as it exists in the age of the Internet, they rely upon the most conventional, pedestrian ideas about real property—that is, about the possession of land and its attached objects.

What I will argue in this essay is that in order to understand the poetics of appropriation, it is...