Uncreative Writing
by Kenneth Goldsmith
Columbia University Press, 2011
272 pages / $23.95 buy from Columbia UP

1. Uncreative writing is situating. A détournement. A patchwriting. Goldsmith: “context is the new content.”

2. A portrait of Stéphane Mallarmé with “A Throw of the Dice” inserted three times:

3. Uncreative writing is language as pure material. Quantity over quality. The digital-age inheritor of Stein, Concrete Poetry, Mallarmé, Herbert, Apollinaire, and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. It sees the internet as language abundant, language swim, all text thrum. Goldsmith: “What we take to be graphics, sounds, and motion in our screen world is merely a thin skin under which resides miles and miles of language.”

4. Much of what Goldsmith says uncreative writing is is stuff I already know. Through Flarf, through FC2 and Les Figues Press, through Goldsmith’s own work like Day or Traffic or Sports, through Walter Benjamin and Gertrude Stein and Vanessa Place, through this blog, through Ron Silliman’s blog, through David Markson, through any number of conceptual writers working today.

If you’re familiar with these things too, you’ll nod your head and move along through a number of the early essays here. If you’re not familiar with these things, this book’s a solid place to begin.

5. But I’m not sure Goldsmith thinks he’s saying anything radically new with these essays as much as he’s articulating (again) a stance toward language that should be obvious to anyone writing, but still, for some reason, isn’t.

A sense of perplexity—maybe even frustration—about a large segment of contemporary writing runs through the early essays here.

Goldsmith wonders: What happened that made most 20^th and 21^st-century writers miss the work of Duchamp, LeWitt, and Warhol? Why did conceptualism take off so readily in the visual arts and not in the literary? What is taking writing so long to mine the possibilities of the conceptual text? What’s with all the holdover from literary Romanticism? The stuff about genius? The stuff about ego and originality? All that stuff about having a voice?

Still worthwhile questions.

6. Here’s Goldsmith’s annotated copy of Charles Bernstein’s “Lift Off,” a piece of uncreative writing Bernstein built by transcribing the characters from the correction tape of his manual typewriter.

Here’s a recording of Goldsmith performing it.

I like this poem because it’s hard to see it being made today. I like this poem because of its impossibility.

And I like Goldsmith’s performance of it because, even with all that, he shows how the thing’s still legible.

7. When’s the last time you typed another writer’s story word for word?

8. Picasso’s Portrait of Gertrude Stein with excerpts from The Making of Americans inserted: READ MORE >

Gravel and Hawk
by Nick Norwood
Ohio University Press, 2012
72 pages / $16.95  Buy from Ohio University Press or Amazon

The traditional story of the south: barns, fields, dilapidated gas stations, grandparents, a keen sense of rhythm, and a pronounced attention to the detail of these things. Family stories filled with fairly controlled amounts of emotion and longing and romanticism. Qualities like these flare in Nick Norwood’s latest collection, Gravel and Hawk, out from Ohio University Press. It’s a book of family and most certainly of place. The moving lens of the speaker hovers over these components for various amounts of time and in various patterns, chopping up the focus so that the southern tale might not get too long-winded.

Norwood uses his focus on the South to expose the relationship between people and place throughout the collection. At least, the opportunities are there and some exposure is developed. He constructs a short sequence near the middle of the book simply called “Buildings,” in which various buildings around this hometown are examined in various lights. Some focus on the items lying around the place while others describe past events on the property, memories and injuries. I’m reminded right away during the first of these poems, called “Filling Station,” of — obviously — the Elizabeth Bishop poem of the same name. While Norwood’s gas station has some beautiful imagery, such as the opening line “The dirt driveway is potbelly black, / jeweled with bottle caps and broken glass,” the poem doesn’t do what Bishop’s does so well: connect the place with its people. And in a collection so focused on the people and family of the South, it seems to me more importance should be applied to this connection.

Later in the same sequence, a poem titled “Field Shed” does accomplish this connection, and it does it well. Here the farmer walks among the many still and silent dangers sitting in the shed. “He walks in a vapor, drags it like a mean spirit / a half step behind. Where he stops it hovers. / His father’s harness hangs on the wall.” The man now has a past, a father, has concerns and threats, “mean spirits,” and all these things that a place can and should bring to its residents. Finally we have connections. Finally we have the South.

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