It must be national poetry month. In addition to Nick Montfort’s foray into deforestation this morning my email included note of two other strange poeti [...]

Consequently, when Nick ambled up to the stage and whipped out his 500 pager, I imagine there were some concerned palpitations from the audience. Not to mention the visceral pleasure of flipping through 500 pages of poems in lightning speed.

The trick, I think, with these heavily structured poems is to incorporate a real narrative, as Nick has done, and then to bring the narrative forward enough so that it really becomes pleasurable to see the narrative functioning alongside the structural conceit.

Personally, I enjoy it when the concept and the content function mimetically – so I suppose Nick’s selection of the Raven is good because it evokes a certain madness on the writer’s part. (Or is the Raven really about a guy who had a Raven flutter into his room, Nick?)

(Also, great idea, ArC – although maybe an idea for another project!)

I agree with this, and I guess it underlies a lot of my skepticism towards the entire “conceptual art” movement. I come at it mainly from an interest in avant-garde music, where oddly the topic rarely comes up (a few PhDs in musicology notwithstanding). It’s sort of expected that an interesting concept for a piece is a starting point, not a finishing point—it’s possible to come up with an interesting concept and still produce a remarkably uninteresting piece of music. I think this is where, to pick one group often considered “conceptual”, Nurse With Wound have succeeded where a lot of other avant-garde musicians have failed. Almost all their albums are based on a concept of one sort or another, but they manage to make something interesting out of them. For example, their most recent project, “Shipwreck Radio”, consisted of living on a remote Scandinavian islands for a few months, recording ambient sounds and broadcasting cut-ups of them over a pirate radio station, recording that radio station, and trying to talk to the local weather-station personnel (recording that as well). An interesting concept, but you can imagine that of the infinite number of albums that one could produce as a result of such a project, some are much more interesting than others. The fact that they produced a very good one (in my opinion) is what makes them interesting musicians rather than merely musicians who had interesting ideas.

I could imagine you’d say the conceptual part of the piece, which you’ve published above, is all that you wish to publish online, and the literary part must be experienced with the 500 page stack itself, since the act of reading those 500 pages is critical to the enjoyment of it as literature.

To explain a bit more about the context of the project: I consider the writing of Ream to be conceptual writing. This is not as “pure” a conceptual writing project as are Kenneth Goldsmith’s recent projects, certainly. Ream incorporates authorial decisionmaking and allusion, among other things. But I think these flavor rather than override the nature of the project as conceptual.

An idea not articulated in Kenny’s paragraphs on conceptual writing, but one which I don’t think he is hostile to, is that it is possible to read conceptual writing without having access to the text. I had a two-and-a-half hour conversation with several people online after I described Ream. I think the people who were part of this discussion, who never saw the text, read Ream more closely than they’ve read any other poem I’ve ever written.

So my notes above are also an invitation to read the poem, whether or not you borrow the manuscript from me at some point.

It must be national poetry month. In addition to Nick Montfort’s foray into deforestation this morning my email included note of two other strange poeti [...]

The sexy part starts shortly after page 230

Ah, that’d be approximately when you’re into the k’s — oh, yeah. Yeah.