De La Salle University Publishing House (DLSUPH)
Kenneth Goldsmith In Conversation
Authors: Kenneth Goldsmith
and Francisco Roman Guevara
Published and distributed by
De La Salle University (DLSU) Publishing House, 2014
ISBN ISBN: 978-971-555-596-8
50 pages
LITERARY / CULTURAL STUDIES
What is uncreative writing? What can writing learn from visual art? How does one write through art and culture? What is language and how should one speak (of) it in this digital age? How have the current technological developments shaped the contemporary scene and sense of poetics, aesthetics, and poetry pedagogy? What is conceptual writing and its relation to the international avant-garde movement? And after all, what is poetry? These are some of the questions addressed by Kenneth Goldsmith in the interview with Francisco Roman Guevara. This discussion – candid and provocative – is a helpful introduction to the ideas of a most significant “writerly” voice in the contemporary space of literary and cultural studies.
Kenneth Goldsmith‘s writing has been called “some of the most exhaustive and beautiful collage work yet produced in poetry” by Publishers Weekly. Goldsmith is the author of eleven books of poetry, the founding editor of the online archive UbuWeb (ubu.com), and the editor of I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, which was the basis for an opera, Trans-Warhol, that premiered in Geneva in March of 2007. An hour-long documentary on his work, Sucking on Words, was first shown at the British Library in 2007. He teaches writing at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is a senior editor of PennSound, an online poetry archive. He held the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow Professorship in American Studies at Princeton University for 2009-10 and received the Qwartz Electronic Music Award in Paris in 2009. In May 2011, he was invited to read at President Obama’s “A Celebration of American Poetry” at the White House, where he also held a poetry workshop with First Lady Michelle Obama. In 2011, he coedited Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing and published a book of essays, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age, which won the 2011 Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Award. Goldsmith participated in dOCUMENTA(13) in Kassel, Germany (2012). dOCUMENTA(13) published his Letter To Bettina Funcke as part of their 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts book series. In 2013, he was named as the inaugural Poet Laureate of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Francisco Roman Guevara, a poet, teaches literature and creative writing at De La Salle University. His poems and prose have appeared in Cordite Poetry Review, Jacket, Bookwatch, and The Offending Adam.