"In the past decade, writers have been culling the Internet for material, making books that are more focussed on collecting than on reading. These ways of writing—word processing, databasing, recycling, appropriating, intentionally plagiarizing, identity ciphering, and intensive programming, to name just a few—have traditionally been considered outside the scope of literary practice....
"Canadian media scholar Darren Wershler.... has been making some unexpected connections between meme culture and contemporary poetry.... Wershler calls these activities “conceptualism in the wild,” referring to the aspect of nineteen-sixties conceptual art that concerned reframing, and thereby redefining, the idea of artistic genius (think of Duchamp’s urinal). Conceptual projects of the period were generated by a kind of pre-Internet O.C.D., such as Sol LeWitt’s exhaustive photographic documentation of every object, nook, and cranny in his Manhattan loft... Today’s conceptualists in the wild make those guys look tame. It’s not uncommon to see blogs that recount someone’s every sneeze since 2007, or of a man who shoots exactly one second of video every day and strings the clips together in time-lapsed mashups... a woman who documents every morsel of food that she puts into her mouth....
But it's not just poetry without the poetic.... it's writing without a reader:
"Like much conceptual poetry, the
book was designed more to ignite discussion than to actually be read.... Quality is beside the point—this
type of content is about the quantity of language that surrounds us, and about
how difficult it is to render meaning from such excesses. ...
"It’s not clear who, if anyone,
actually reads these works
"... the poet Tan Lin... has said that “the best sentences should lose information at a
relatively constant rate. There should be no ecstatic moments of recognition …
the most boring and long-winded writings encourage a kind of effortless
non-understanding, a language in which reading itself seems perfectly... redundant.”
A kind of undeath of poetry, a mestatising of text, or a meta-statising... a swarming glut of emptiness
"In an essay on the Poetry Foundation’s Web site called “Poetry is Dead, I Killed it,” Vanessa Place says that the poet today resembles a zombie more than an inspired bard, gathering and shovelling hoards of inert linguistic matter into programs, flipping switches, and letting it rip, producing poetry on the scale of WikiLeaks cables. Imagine the writer as a meme machine, writing works with the intention for them to ripple rapidly across networks only to evaporate just as quickly as they appeared. Imagine a poetry that is vast, instantaneous, horizontal, globally distributed, paper thin, and, ultimately, disposable"
Not just poetry without the poetic, but poetry without the Poet.... writing with the Writer evacuated as much as possible from the process and the product...
