How to WRITE?

Paragraphs on Conceptual Writing - Kenneth Goldsmith

"The idea becomes a machine that makes the text."

Goldsmith’s work forces a drastic rethinking of what a book or text can be. Incorporating elements of surrealism, concretism, and sound poetry, his writing takes pleasure in words as things of beauty (or manipulable items of data) in and of themselves. His texts—filtered and itemized—go well beyond traditional “list poems,” betraying an almost Asperger’s-like attraction to organization and categorization on a grand scale. His enthusiastic use of the advanced copy-and-paste techniques of the internet age pushes the limits of the postmodern remix or Situationist-style détournement. At the same time, his work is a comment on (and an undisguised cheering-on of) the obsolescence of authorship and originality.