To appreciate the beleaguered position that Kenneth Goldsmith finds himself in, you have to know that in 1997 or 1998 three avant-garde poets, one of them Goldsmith, drinking in a basement bar in Buffalo during a blizzard, decided to start a revolutionary poetry movement, one that went on to endorse “uncreative writing,” a phrase and a field that Goldsmith invented. Goldsmith lives in New York. The other poets, Christian Bök and Darren Wershler, are Canadian. They had driven from Toronto to listen to Goldsmith read from “No. 111 2.7.93-10.20.96,” which is a collection of syllables, words, phrases, and sentences that Goldsmith gathered between the dates in the title. It’s a species of list poem. Chapter 1 has words of one syllable. It begins, “A, a, aar, aas, aer, agh, ah.” Chapter 2 has two-syllable phrases. It begins, “A door, à la, a pear, a peer, a rear, a ware.” Around Chapter 50 or 60, the progression grows irregular. The last chapter claims to have seven thousand two hundred and twenty-eight syllables.
According to remarks on the back cover by the poet Charles Bernstein, “No. 111” is an “alphabetic bestiary of the ribs, joints, sinews, and bones of language’s alluring lore.” This is a highbrow impression, and possibly also a singular one, since not even Goldsmith has read the book all the way through. He likes to say that he is “the most boring writer who ever lived,” and that his books are “horrible to read.” Proof of this, he said recently, is that they often have spelling mistakes: “My books are so boring that even the copy editors can’t read them.” He believes that the propositions his writing presents—uncreative writing’s permission to borrow entire texts, for example—are more interesting than the writing itself. “I don’t have a readership,” he said. “I have a thinkership.”
In Buffalo, the poets agreed that modernism was dead and that “language needed to respond,” Goldsmith said. Their movement became known as conceptual poetry, and it made Goldsmith as famous as an experimental poet usually gets—anyway, it made him the most famous uncreative writer. In 2011, along with mainstream poets, including Billy Collins and Rita Dove, and the rapper Common, Goldsmith read at the White House, and in 2013 he became the first poet laureate of the Museum of Modern Art. “He’s received more attention lately than any other living poet,” Cathy Park Hong, a poet and a professor at Sarah Lawrence, told me resentfully. “Academia has canonized him.”
Goldsmith, who is fifty-four, likes pranks and provocations and making people uncomfortable—challenging behavior, he thinks, is an artist’s prerogative. He is about five feet nine and thin, with a long face, and he usually has a beard or a mustache. He dresses flamboyantly, sometimes in suits with big paisley patterns. He has one in brown and one in blue, which he wore to the White House, with saddle shoes—Obama asked why he was wearing golf shoes—and he often pairs them with a small-brimmed hat that he wears pushed back, the way a child might. Appearing on “The Colbert Report,” he wore a salmon-colored suit, with a candy-striped shirt, a bow tie, and one green sock and one red sock, a reference to David Hockney. He also likes to wear long, flowing skirts over his pants, because they make him look as different as possible from the threadbare image he believes most people have of a poet. “I’m a dandy, and hyperconscious of image,” he said. “Every time I’m in public, I’m a persona, and people really hate that.”
He tends to speak slowly and enunciate clearly, in a stagy voice, and he models his public manner on Andy Warhol and Salvador Dali. He is an obsessive reader of difficult books and a patient and close listener. He does not try to dominate a room, but when the spotlight falls on him he is prepared. Periodically, he embodies the archetype of the trickster who sometimes pushes things too far, even against his own interests.
Before Goldsmith became a poet, he was a text artist—that is, he wrote words on surfaces. He began by making sculptures of books and carving words on them. The surfaces got bigger, until he was writing on panels that were larger than doors. For his last piece, “Soliloquy,” in 1997, he recorded every word he spoke for a week. He printed the words on pages and pasted them to the walls of a gallery. They covered the walls from floor to ceiling. “You were supposed to drown in my words, but the piece was a failure,” he said. “Nobody in the art world wanted to read, and I love language. That was the end of art for me.”
Goldsmith then published “Soliloquy” with an art-book publisher, and claimed that it was poetry. He divided the text into seven acts, one for each day. At times, you can tell where he is—in a restaurant ordering food, for example, or in bed with his wife—but you can’t always be sure whom he is speaking to, because only his side of the conversation appears. He said that he lost more than one friend when people read what he thought of them.
After “Soliloquy,” Goldsmith wrote “Fidget,” which is an account of practically every movement he made on Bloomsday—June 16th—in 1997. (Goldsmith deeply admires Joyce and has read “Ulysses” several times.) “Fidget” begins with Goldsmith waking up: “Eyelids open. Tongue runs across upper lip moving from left side of mouth to right following arc of lip. Swallow.” He described each movement into a tape recorder, which was laborious. It took him an hour to get out of bed. By the afternoon, he was exhausted, and at around five he fell asleep. He awoke after an hour, anxious at having the evening and night to describe. He bought a fifth of whiskey and drank it while sitting on a pier beside the Hudson River. He began to slur his words, then he accidentally turned the tape recorder off, so he lost the rest of the day. The last chapter is the first chapter typed backward, with each gesture except the last one reversed. If he moved his left foot forward, he wrote that his right foot moved backward. The last sentence is “.pil fo cra gniwollof tfel ot htuom fo edis thgir morf gnivom pil reppu ssorca snur eugnoT Eyelids close.”
After “Fidget,” Goldsmith decided to spend a year practicing “uncreativity,” and during that year he wrote “Day,” the book for which he is probably best known. A strict work of appropriation, “Day” is a typed copy of the edition of the Times for September 1, 2000. The date is simply the day that he happened to be free to start a new project. “Day” begins with the upper left-hand corner of the front page and ends on the lower right-hand corner of the last page. The book is eight hundred and thirty-six pages long and took a year to type. Nearly two hundred pages are financial tables. “When you take a newspaper and reframe it as a book, you get pathos and tragedy and stories of love,” he said. “It’s a great book, and I didn’t write any of it.”
Next, Goldsmith wrote “New York Trilogy.” Volume I, “The Weather,” published in 2005, is a transcription, during the course of a year, of a minute of each day’s weather report from 1010 WINS. It is “a classical narrative of the four seasons evolving,” Goldsmith said. “Traffic,” published in 2007, is a transcription of each of the station’s traffic reports over twenty-four hours on a holiday weekend. One of WINS’s slogans is “Traffic and Transit on the Ones,” so the book begins at a minute after midnight. Goldsmith read from “Traffic” at the White House. The third volume, “Sports,” published in 2009, is a transcription of the broadcast of the longest nine-inning Major League Baseball game, on August 18, 2006, in which, after nearly five hours, the Yankees beat the Red Sox, 14–11.
One day, I had lunch with Goldsmith. “When skill is out of the picture, and it is in most of my books, then you’re left with the concept,” he said. “My cutting and pasting is an acknowledgment of this. I’m dead serious that this is writing now. You may not want to hear that or think of it as writing, but I’m telling you that the moving of information is a literary act in and of itself. Even when people aren’t reading it.”
“If your work is boring and horrible to read, why are you invited to the White House?”
“Because I’m a charismatic performer,” he said. “My work is unreadable, but it’s performable.”
Goldsmith’s rhetoric—saying, for example, that he never has writer’s block, because there is always something to copy—annoys a lot of people. Conceptual art and conceptual poetry embody ideas, and both descend from Duchamp. Painting and sculpture are meant for the eye; conceptual art is meant for the intellect. Lyric poetry values identity, metaphor, and precision. Conceptual poetry “challenges subjectivity, metaphor, and precise language,” Goldsmith said. He believes that he is applying to poetry art-world practices that are nearly a century old. The art world has become so accustomed to outrage and turmoil that it is now nearly indifferent to controversy, he said. “The art world’s been through counter-movements, counter-revolutions, and then counter-counter-movements,” he said. “People’s idea of art is infinite, whereas their idea of poetry is very limited. Poetry is such an easy place to go in and break up the house. The avant-garde loves to destroy things, and I’m an old-school avant-gardist.”
According to Christian Bök, there are four ways to be a poet. A lyric poet typically intends to express a thought or a feeling. It is possible, however, “to express oneself unintentionally—surrealist writing, automatic writing, and stream of consciousness,” Bök says. “Also, Ginsberg at his most rapturous, ‘first thought, best thought’—outbursts of feeling that aren’t meditative.” A third category of poet cares primarily about intention—having a plan, that is, and seeing it through. These poets use constraints to produce poems that aren’t necessarily expressive. An example is a poem written using the avant-garde technique N+7, in which a poet takes out certain words in a piece of writing and replaces each with the seventh word following it in the dictionary. A poet named Rosmarie Waldrop did this with the Declaration of Independence and produced a satirical piece that begins, “We holler these trysts to be self-exiled.” The fourth category includes appropriation—giving an existing text a new form.
Bök is a professor at the University of Calgary. Visiting New York recently, he was sitting at the dining-room table in Goldsmith’s loft, in Chelsea. Goldsmith placed coffee in front of him. Bök said that in Buffalo they had talked about “limit cases in writing,” and that there were four: the ready-made text, the mannerist text, the illegible text, and the unauthored text. The ready-made text was a plagiarized text, like “Day.” The mannerist text was written according to a constraint that made proceeding difficult—for example, a book without the letter “e.” “The idea came from a French movement of writers and mathematicians in the nineteen-sixties, called Oulipo,” Bök said. The illegible text included concrete poetry, a hybrid of visual and literary art in which words tend to portray an image, so that a poem about an angel might be printed in the form of an angel’s wings. Unauthored books are written by computers and are “like rolling the dice for words,” Bök said. If they move a reader, it is by means of uncanny associations and the sense that they read as if written by a person.
Goldsmith poured himself a glass of water, then sat down. “So you have unreadability, unoriginal, unauthored, and mechanical,” Bök went on. “Back in Buffalo, we knew that the Internet was going to change how we would imagine being poets, and we were trying to think of what to do next. Our grandfathers who inspired us had a kind of perfect endgame—things like language poetry.”
“Language poetry was the period at the end of the modernist sentence,” Goldsmith said. Language poets believed that the meaning words held was as important as the way they were used. “It challenged the reader to take fragments of language and reassemble them, so that the reader becomes the author of the text,” he continued. “The modernist project, beginning with Mallarmé, in the eighteen-hundreds, down through Joyce and Pound and Stein and language poets, in the seventies, had always been to deconstruct language to its smallest shard. Finally, language got so atomized that there was nothing left to do. It was language as grains of sand.”
“It got pulverized to death,” Bök said. “Conceptual poetry is born out of this discussion.”
Bök became known for constraint-based writing. His collection “Eunoia,” published in 2001, has five sections. Each allows only one vowel. It took Bök seven years to write “Eunoia,” which was a best-seller in Canada and in England. It begins, “Awkward grammar appals a craftsman.”
Goldsmith was also inspired by the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler, who, in 1970, wrote, “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” He is fond of the term “unoriginal genius,” which was invented by the critic Marjorie Perloff, a professor emeritus at Stanford; “Unoriginal Genius” is also the title of her book about twenty-first-century poetry. Goldsmith believes that the Internet, with its cataract of words, made obsolete the figure of the writer as an isolated man or woman endeavoring to produce an original work. Instead of depending mainly on his or her capacity for invention, the new writer transports information. He or she retypes and recasts, archives, assembles, and cuts and pastes, passing along pieces of writing and blocks of text, the way people do on social media.
Goldsmith’s book “New York: Capital of the 20th Century,” which will be published this month, is a portrait of New York City. It is based on “The Arcades Project,” Walter Benjamin’s portrait of nineteenth-century Paris, assembled mainly during the nineteen-thirties. Benjamin relies heavily on passages taken from other writers. “New York” is half a million words long. Goldsmith spent ten years in libraries copying sentences, which he organized into two categories, concrete and abstract. Concrete subjects include Times Square and the World’s Fairs of 1939 and 1964. Abstract subjects include “grid” and “loneliness.” Baudelaire is the protagonist of Benjamin’s book, in the sense that he seemed to typify the period. Robert Mapplethorpe is the protagonist of “New York.” Whereas Benjamin wrote commentaries on the passages he copied, Goldsmith did not add a word of his own to “New York.”
Perloff’s term for Goldsmith’s type of writing is “moving information,” by which she means both taking words from one place and using them in another, and the quality produced by the result. A modern writer, operating what Goldsmith calls “a writing machine,” is more a collagist than a writer in the customary sense. “Context is the new content,” he writes in “Uncreative Writing,” his collection of essays on conceptual writing. “How I make my way through this thicket of information—how I manage it, how I parse it, how I organize and distribute it—is what distinguishes my writing from yours.”
Goldsmith developed his stagy voice while working as a disk jockey. Between 1995 and 2010, he had a radio show on WFMU, a progressive station in New Jersey, where he played avant-garde music and performed avant-garde gestures. Radio offered “the opportunity to confound people and anger them,” he said at his dining-room table. The show was broadcast once a week, for three hours. For an entire show, he played a recording of two men snoring. Another time, he had listeners call in and scream. The show was called “Unpopular Music,” so he felt that listeners were warned. After a while, the people who didn’t like it disappeared, and he was left with an audience. He believes that challenging someone not to listen (or read) makes the person pay closer attention.
Goldsmith was born in Freeport, Long Island, in 1961. His high-school enthusiasms were drugs and art. “I took my S.A.T.s on acid,” he said. “I’d already deconstructed and critiqued the culture, so I knew I wasn’t going to go down any normal path where the world of S.A.T.s meant anything to me.” He went to the Rhode Island School of Design, where he met his wife, the artist Cheryl Donegan. On their first date, he took her at four in the morning to an all-night supermarket in a small town in Rhode Island, where he interrogated people about what they had in their carts and why they were in the supermarket at that hour. In 1996, he started UbuWeb, a sprawling and eclectic archive that has become what he calls “the Internet’s largest repository of free avant-garde music, writing, art, film, and video.”
As for his heritage, he said that he comes from two distinct Jewish strains: “one very successful mercantile strain, and one highly unsuccessful intellectual strain.” Both grandfathers changed their names. One, a lawyer named Finkelstein, changed his name to Field. He “dressed like Miles Davis in the preppy British period,” and collected books. In the late fifties, he put everything into Cuban sugarcane fields, “and come 1960 he’s penniless. Turns into a wicked alcoholic, loses his job, and becomes a rent collector on the West Side, carrying a gun and picking up cash.”
The mercantile side is “Russian-immigrant grandfather comes to New York penniless and goes into women’s coats,” he said. The business was called Bromleigh Coats. His grandfather Irving Goldsmith found Bromley in the phone book, “but Anglicized it further to Bromleigh. It taught me the power of names, and I’ve played with inauthenticity for my entire career.”
A lyric poem exists in a context of ambiguity. It is not possible to know why Elizabeth Bishop wrote “One Art.” Any number of impulses or states of mind might have accounted for it. Conceptual poems are the result of their method. A lyric poem might pass through many versions before arriving at its final form; a conceptual poem has only one version. As soon as Goldsmith decided to copy an edition of the Times, or present the transcript of a broadcast, the poem existed. Since the poem was a concept, of course, it wasn’t even necessary to produce it.
People who don’t like Goldsmith’s poems tend to think that using another writer’s words, coherently or not, and arranging how they look on the page, are gestures that have no emotional power. They think that poetry involves one person addressing another person, or an object or a deity, and that cutting and pasting can’t do that persuasively, since it is essentially aloof, and the aura of the artificial adheres to it. In addition, they feel that arranging letters and words in patterns isn’t sufficient to produce poetry. A poem must also address a deep subject. Furthermore, the point of being a poet is to establish an “idiosyncratic lyric practice that can’t be assimilated into the practice of others,” a critic told me, adding that poetry derives from a writer’s consideration of his own “sensual, moral, intellectual, aesthetic” concerns.
Lyric poets tend to be allergic to conceptual poetry. The poet C. K. Williams once stood up at a talk that Goldsmith gave at Princeton and said that hearing Goldsmith’s version of poetry made his heart sink. Williams, who died last week of cancer, told me that he objected to the word “poetry” “being used to characterize such silliness.” He said, “It’s removing expression and feeling from writing, but it’s also removing beauty.” The poet Charles Simic told me that he regarded conceptual poetry as being “like a violin played by a hair dryer. It could be fun, but neither Bartók nor Ashbery has anything to worry about.” The poet and critic Dan Chiasson, who writes for the New York Review of Books as well as for this magazine, said that most of Goldsmith’s work struck him as “dreary, overliteral pranks. I associate him with a certain kind of avant-garde spectacle. He dresses like a jester, and he shows up on ‘Colbert,’ but I find him amusing more than surprising.”
Marjorie Perloff is widely considered the most influential critic of experimental poetry. She regards Goldsmith as “basically a realistic writer who gives you the feel of what it is like to be living in New York now,” she told me. “You can’t pay too much attention to what he says. ‘I’m the most boring writer who has ever lived; you don’t need to read it.’ If he really believed that, he wouldn’t bother.”
Perloff said that her friends often think that Goldsmith’s work “is ridiculous and stupid, that Kenny’s a self-promoter and anybody could do it, and I maintain that anybody couldn’t do it,” she said. “As with all conceptual art, it’s a matter of very careful selection. All his works are not equally good. I don’t care for ‘Day.’ It’s a kind of hyperreality. My students love it, though. They like that he presented, in an almost Joycean way, what it is like to experience a single day.”
As with all writing, “the aesthetic questions remain,” she continued. “You can say you’re glad that not everyone writes this way. It’s an acquired taste, and it’s comparative. I love Gertrude Stein, but most of the time I’d rather read Tolstoy.”
Goldsmith’s hegemony as a conceptual poet, achieved with Perloff’s support—his appearance at the White House and on “The Colbert Report”; the perception that he receives the best-paying offers for readings, and the best invitations, and gets the most attention; his association with the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches; the way he dresses and his studied nonchalance; his aggressive pleasure in upsetting people, his eagerness to promote himself, and his air of self-satisfaction—has led a number of other conceptual poets to feel that he monopolizes a territory that excludes them. Many of these writers identify themselves as poets of color. A poet named Tan Lin wrote me, “The conceptual program, as it has been developed and codified by critics in the past ten years or so, and I am really talking about the institutionalization of conceptual poetry in academia, has focused mainly on the work of white authors.” Dorothy Wang, a professor at Williams, said that poets of color have grown “pissed off by the stranglehold white people have on avant-garde poetry.”
Further inflaming the exchange is Goldsmith’s belief that a hallmark of uncreative writing is the irrelevance of inescapable identity, since the Internet allows a person to hide behind a multiplicity of names and profiles. Some poets of color feel that Goldsmith is subtly denying selves that they wish to assert and explore. Only a white person, these writers say, has the ability to shed his or her identity or to wear it casually. Their experience is that to be a person of color in America is to be constantly reminded of who you are. Dorothy Wang feels that identity in conceptual poetry “is a code word for racial or ethnic identity.” She says, “Often, the assumption is that good experimental avant-garde work is bereft of identity markers, and that lead-footed, autobiographical, woe-is-me, victim poetry is minority poetry.”
One day at his dining-room table, Goldsmith said that after “Sports” he “got bored with being boring.” His work had traced “a trajectory that starts with the driest copying, where I trumpet being the most uncreative writer on the planet, and the most boring writer that ever lived,” he said. Flogging this conceit, however, had led to conceptual poetry’s being regarded as unfeeling and as interested only in formal problems. The perception that the field had discovered its boundary had led to its being less well attended. “We held the stage for fifteen years as the most challenging movement in poetics, with a form of expression that many people hated,” he said. He wanted to hold the stage a bit longer.
What would help, he thought, was to find “a hot text.” His next book, “Seven American Deaths and Disasters,” which was published in 2013, is an homage to Warhol’s “Death and Disaster” series. It includes eyewitness and reporters’ accounts, taken from radio and television broadcasts, of the deaths of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, John Lennon, and Michael Jackson, and from accounts of the Challenger explosion, the Columbine school shooting, and 9/11. The reviewer for the Times wrote, “It knocks the air from your lungs,” and it “will have you dilating on race in America.”
Last March, Goldsmith gave a reading at a conference at Brown University. He read a poem that he called “The Body of Michael Brown,” an appropriation of Brown’s autopsy report, which he thought could have been included in his book as “the eighth American disaster.” About a hundred people were in the audience. Goldsmith wore a long black skirt over dark leggings and a black suit jacket. He looked like a Coptic priest. He stood beneath a projection of a photograph of Brown in his high-school graduation robe. He announced that he would read a poem about the quantified self, meaning one that catalogued the evidence obtained from the close examination of a body, similar to the way he had examined his own body in “Fidget.”
He read for thirty minutes, pacing forward and back. For dramatic effect, he ended with the doctor’s observation that Brown’s genitals were “unremarkable,” which is not the way the autopsy report ends, and when he finished he sat down in the front row. He thought that the reading had been powerful—“How could it not have been, given the material?” he said. He believed he had demonstrated that conceptual poetry could handle inflammatory material and provoke outrage in the service of a social cause. Mairéad Byrne, a poet who heard him, told me that she thought the audience was stunned. A young man in the audience told her that for thirty minutes he had thought about nothing but Michael Brown.
Rin Johnson, a young artist, wrote me that the reading had upset her. She wanted to interrupt but didn’t want to be rude. “I also didn’t want to have to fight against a room full of white people who might be interested in hearing more,” she wrote. At the end of the performance, Johnson, who is black, addressed a few remarks to Goldsmith, “something not very articulate, as soon as I could, scolding Goldsmith like a shocked grandparent, something to the effect of That was lazy. I can’t even believe you did that.”
I asked Goldsmith what he had hoped to provoke. “Well, I don’t know if I went into it with the intention to provoke, but I understood that it would be a provocative gesture,” he said. “It had a lot of power, the kind of thing that happens all the time in the art world. People behave very badly in the art world, but it’s what pushes boundaries and makes discussion.”
The morning after the reading, Goldsmith was on the train to New York, looking at his phone, when he began to see objections to his reading, mostly from people who had only heard about it. During the next few days, the objections grew vehement. One came from a group called the Mongrel Coalition Against Gringpo—“gringpo” being gringo poetry. The Mongrel Coalition is anonymous, and didn’t respond to questions I sent. Its Web site announces, “Our targets are: Homonationalists, Whitmanian twink poets, white LGBT poets who use the trophy of queerness as negator of racial privilege . . . bitches who write in English but refuse to see it (if you write in English, you are already in translation . . . Marjorie Perloff & Kenneth Goldsmith the overseers of poetry . . . poets who write ‘Identity politics are bullshit.’ ” Of Goldsmith the coalition wrote, “On Friday night—in what was clearly an attempt to salvage the corpse of ‘conceptualism’—Goldsmith made explicit a slippage that we (and others) have been bemoaning for years: The Murdered Body of Mike Brown’s Medical Report is not our poetry, it’s the building blocks of white supremacy, a miscreant DNA infecting everyone in the world. We refuse to let it be made ‘literary.’ ”
Goldsmith wrote a response in which he placed the piece in the context of his methods, but it appeared only to make people angrier, perhaps because he didn’t apologize. He was paid five hundred dollars for his reading, and he gave the money to Hands Up United, an organization that called, among other things, for an investigation of Michael Brown’s death. He also asked the university not to make available the video of his performance.
Throughout the spring and early summer, a number of online literary journals published withering pieces about Goldsmith. Several blogs on sites such as the Poetry Foundation also rebuked him. Goldsmith spent most of May and June giving readings and workshops in Europe, where, as far as he could tell, people either hadn’t heard of the controversy or were more interested in conceptual poetry; only one person asked him about it. An art school in Switzerland had him fill out a questionnaire, which it published online. “Outlaw,” his answer to the question “My background—in one sentence,” so inflamed an experimental poet named CAConrad that Conrad sternly lectured him on what the word meant, then solicited responses to the Brown reading from twenty-nine poets. None were supportive. Conrad, who is white, published the reactions, along with his essay, on the Poetry Foundation’s Web site, in what he called “a document against White Supremacy Poetics.” Among the responses was one by a poet named Collestipher Chatto, who wrote that Goldsmith’s reading had “made Brown’s death a sort of scapegoat for the Euramerican nation to purge itself of its transgressions.”
In another long piece, a poet named Ken Chen, the executive director of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, wrote that the reading showed that “Conceptual Poetry literally sees itself as white power dissecting the colored body.” What seemed to offend people most about Goldsmith’s reading was that he appeared to have used Michael Brown’s death for his own purposes.
Some people wondered whether the reading might have been received differently if Goldsmith had explained his intentions. If he had “prefaced the work calling it a piece of protest poetry (or something) I am pretty certain the work would have been considered a triumph,” Rin Johnson wrote to me. Goldsmith said that he had not made any prefatory remarks because he believed that his sympathies were plain, and because he felt that art should not depend for its effect on explanations.
Al Filreis, the head of the contemporary-writing center at the University of Pennsylvania, thought that the reaction had something to do with the ambiguity of Goldsmith’s method. “Kenny’s version of N+7 is retyping,” Filreis said. “It’s N+0. No one reading Rosmarie Waldrop would think that she had no problem with the declaration ‘All men are created equal.’ But, with N+0, you don’t always know what he’s doing. The question for an artist becomes: How certain do I have to be to make it clear that I intend to make this text work a certain way? How much complicity is there in reading a horrifying text?”
Other academics were pleased that Goldsmith had been set upon. “I am hoping that there has been enough anger that he won’t survive,” Cathy Park Hong, at Sarah Lawrence, told me. “Maybe he really did mean to be sympathetic, who knows. Two, three years ago, it would have been ‘That’s Kenny being Kenny,’ but in this racial climate you don’t get away with it.”
Marjorie Perloff said that when she heard about the reading she thought “it was a terrible mistake and certainly in bad taste.” The larger fault, however, lay with the obsession in the poetry community with political correctness. “It began with, You’re not allowed to criticize a poem by a woman,” she said. “Then it was poets of color. Now a poet is an activist who writes in lines. That has nothing to do with poetry. It’s just provocation and proclamation.”
About the only poet to defend Goldsmith publicly was an African-American named Tracie Morris, whom he knows. In an Internet exchange with a black man who identified himself as an artist and a curator, Morris said that Goldsmith was right to read the report, because there was no correct way to approach such material. For white people to ignore Brown’s death would be just as damaging, she wrote. What made the piece difficult for her was that she regarded it as “the truth of what happened,” she wrote. “It’s not poetic ‘interpretation’—it’s not a speech. It’s what we are ‘left with,’ the dispassionate, painful truth of this child’s lifeless body.”
Goldsmith makes a substantial part of his living from readings, and over the summer he was concerned that fewer places would hire him. A group calling itself the New Order of St. Agatha posted a document that it called “Kenneth Goldsmith Is Reading at My _______. Now What?” The text says, in part, “It’s hard to resist the impulse to kill Kenneth Goldsmith, but many different and more effective strategies are available.” And, “Try things like: Sitting in the audience and reminding people Kenny is a racist by periodically yelling, ‘Racist!’ ”
Who is allowed to speak for people who have been harmed or who have suffered is an open argument. In the twentieth century, the discourse involved survivors of the Holocaust. “Can one speak about suffering if one hasn’t experienced it?” Rubén Gallo, a professor at Princeton who has written about Goldsmith’s work, asked me. “The debate gets very complicated, because you have different types of suffering. W. G. Sebald launched a huge debate in Germany when he wrote about the hardship people suffered in Dresden from the bombing.”
For Mónica de la Torre, a poet and a senior editor at the magazine BOMB, “the problem is that both positions are equally flawed. My main beef is with this idea that if I am Mexican-American I can express only that particular community. The idea that there’s this one-to-one correspondence is very dangerous.”
Goldsmith withdrew for the summer from talking in public, except in Europe. He has shaved his beard, so that he won’t be recognized. He said, “If all I can do is speak about what I know and what I am, all I can do is white and Jewish. I’m not willing to go down that road to restrict what I write about to what I am. That’s the end of fiction. That means a black person can’t have a white character.”
“Will this change your work?”
“I’m still interested in strong material that may provoke. I don’t want to shy away from it. I tried. I’m an experimental artist, and I failed, on a very big stage. I wanted to work with hotter material, and this was so hot it blew up in my face.” He sighed. “I’m an avant-gardist. I want to cause trouble, but I don’t want to cause too much trouble. I want it to be playful. When this happened, I realized I had hurt people. But an artist’s right to make a mistake is much more sacred than anyone’s feelings.”
His phone rang, and it was Marjorie Perloff, telling him to ignore a spiteful post that had appeared that morning. He paced as he talked to her. When he sat down again, his face looked drawn. “Sometimes I think I might be headed back to the art world,” he said ruefully. “I don’t deny that possibility. They still seem to like me there.” ♦
