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(2016) The meaning of form in contemporary innovative poetry, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.

The trace of poetry and the non-poetic

conceptual writing and appropriation in Kenneth Goldsmith, Vanessa Place, and John Seed

Robert Sheppard

pp. 135-154

Conceptual writing is, in terms of its poetics, very clear in its intention to privilege appropriation as a mode, and it appears to downplay form. The theories (and some "uncreative" works) of Kenneth Goldsmith are expounded in support of its own practice; Vanessa Place's Statement of Facts, with its grueling accounts of rape, is read against conceptualist theory as a formal entity. The other of conceptual writing's (self-confirming) poetics is form. The work of British poet John Seed, post-Objectivist appropriations and transformations (by means of poetic artifice) of Mayhew's accounts of the nineteenth-century London poor, Pictures from Mayhew, serves to show how a successful formal and conceptual project may be achieved.

Publication details

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-34045-6_8

Full citation:

Sheppard, R. (2016). The trace of poetry and the non-poetic: conceptual writing and appropriation in Kenneth Goldsmith, Vanessa Place, and John Seed, in The meaning of form in contemporary innovative poetry, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 135-154.

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