March 21st, 2013 / 10:10 am
 Snippets
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In case you’ve missed it, Kent Johnson’s gone after Marjorie Perloff (PDF) for her entry on “Avant-Garde Poetics” in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4th ed. Writes Johnson:

[With] exception of a passing reference to the Brazilian brothers Augusto and Haroldo de Campos and their Concretista moment, not a single poet or group outside the Anglo-American/European experience is acknowledged. The entire Iberian Peninsula, even, goes missing!

Among those missing, he argues, are Vicente Huidobro, César Vallejo, Aimé Césaire, Kitasono Katue, Alejandra Pizarnik, and Raúl Zurita—plus he takes a few swipes at Conceptual Poetry and Flarf. Well worth reading.

2 Comments

  1. March 23rd, 2013 / 3:20 pm Kent Johnson—

      Thanks, AD, for posting the link.

      In some relation there’s this, just posted today, I believe: Kenneth Goldsmith’s “inaugural address” as First Poet Laureate of the MoMA (presented on 3/20/13). The talk is titled “”My Career in Poetry, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Institution”

      http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/events/17385

      Fascinating to me, in particular, is during the Q&A (you have to get
      through a long slide-show about his White House visit), where Goldsmith is
      prodded into talking glowingly about his wealthy friend and ally, the artist
      Richard Prince– in particular the latter’s facsimile reproduction and authorial
      appropriation of J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (signed copies of
      which Prince sells for $75,000), a move made about a year after I’d carried
      out the same exact fabrication with Goldsmith’s own DAY, pushing Goldsmith’s
      rather banal “original” gesture into paratextual areas that
      his hyper-Self-framing aesthetic really can’t countenance (i.e. KG appropriated
      an issue of the NYT, plastering his name all over it; I did that, too,
      and simultaneously appropriated KG’s Author Function). In the video, Goldsmith
      doesn’t mention my bracketing and repurposing of his book. But it’s hardly
      surprising that he can’t (he never has been able to) bring himself to engage it.
      And his studied silence, I must say, especially when it’s so obviously there as
      sub-text, makes the matter all the more fun.

  2. March 24th, 2013 / 5:22 pm A D Jameson—

      Thanks, Kent!