What is the place of individual genius in a global world of hyper-information— a world in which, as Walter Benjamin predicted more than seventy years ago, everyone is potentially an author? For poets in such a climate, "originality" begins to take a back seat to what can be done with other people’s words—framing, citing, recycling, and otherwise mediating available words and sentences, and sometimes entire texts. Marjorie Perloff here explores this intriguing development in contemporary poetry: the embrace of "unoriginal" writing. Paradoxically, she argues, such citational and often constraint-based poetry is more accessible and, in a sense, "personal" than was the hermetic poetry of the 1980s and 90s.
Perloff traces this poetics of "unoriginal genius" from its paradigmatic work, Benjamin’s encyclopedic Arcades Project, a book largely made up of citations. She discusses the processes of choice, framing, and reconfiguration in the work of Brazilian Concretism and Oulipo, both movements now understood as precursors of such hybrid citational texts as Charles Bernstein’s opera libretto Shadowtime and Susan Howe’s documentary lyric sequence The Midnight. Perloff also finds that the new syncretism extends to language: for example, to the French-Norwegian Caroline Bergvall writing in English and the Japanese Yoko Tawada, in German. Unoriginal Genius concludes with a discussion of Kenneth Goldsmith’s conceptualist book Traffic—a seemingly "pure’" radio transcript of one holiday weekend’s worth of traffic reports. In these instances and many others, Perloff shows us "poetry by other means" of great ingenuity, wit, and complexity.
Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing 
In much the same way that photography forced painting to move in new directions, the advent of the World Wide Web, with its proliferation of easily transferable and manipulated text, forces us to think about writing, creativity, and the materiality of language in new ways. In Against Expression, editors Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith present the most innovative works responding to the challenges posed by these developments.
Charles Bernstein has described conceptual poetry as "poetry pregnant with thought." Against Expression, the premier anthology of conceptual writing, presents work that is by turns thoughtful, funny, provocative, and disturbing. Dworkin and Goldsmith, two of the leading spokespersons and practitioners of conceptual writing, chart the trajectory of the conceptual aesthetic from early precursors including Samuel Beckett and Marcel Duchamp to the most prominent of today’s writers. Nearly all of the major avant-garde groups of the past century are represented here, including Dada, OuLiPo, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, and Flarf to name just a few, but all the writers are united in their imaginative appropriation of found and generated texts and their exploration of nonexpressive language. Against Expression is a timely collection and an invaluable resource for readers and writers alike.
Uncreative Writing by Kenneth Goldsmith
Can techniques traditionally thought to be outside the scope of literature, including word processing, databasing, identity ciphering, and intensive programming, inspire the reinvention of writing? The Internet and the digital environment present writers with new challenges and opportunities to reconceive creativity, authorship, and their relationship to language. Confronted with an unprecedented amount of texts and language, writers have the opportunity to move beyond the creation of new texts and manage, parse, appropriate, and reconstruct those that already exist.
In addition to explaining his concept of uncreative writing, which is also the name of his popular course at the University of Pennsylvania, Goldsmith reads the work of writers who have taken up this challenge. Examining a wide range of texts and techniques, including the use of Google searches to create poetry, the appropriation of courtroom testimony, and the possibility of robo-poetics, Goldsmith joins this recent work to practices that date back to the early twentieth century. Writers and artists such as Walter Benjamin, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and Andy Warhol embodied an ethos in which the construction or conception of a text was just as important as the resultant text itself. By extending this tradition into the digital realm, uncreative writing offers new ways of thinking about identity and the making of meaning.
Traffic by Kenneth Goldsmith
An uneasy combination of farcical comedy and hopeless tragedy, Traffic is a drama of Aristotelian proportions. Goldsmith's book unfolds like all classic narratives, tracing the beginning, middle and end of the action on a single day. In this case, the worst driving day of the year - replete with wanderings and errors, chance encounters, subplot snarls, and very real life-and-death results. But in the end, for all the horrific implications of this cultural catastrophe, Traffic has a happy ending: the midnight dream of the open road.
Fidget by Kenneth Goldsmith
The follow-up to the critically acclaimed No. 111, Fidget ruthlessly documents every movement made by Goldsmith's body on Bloomsday (June 16) 1997 from 10 am to 11 pm. Literary critic Marjorie Perloff compares Fidget to 'a Beckett prose text,' and says many witty and intelligent things about it in her afterword.
Getting inside Jack Kerouac's head by Simon Morris
Morris’ new bookwork, Getting Inside Jack Kerouac’s Head, is a performative retyping of the recently published original scroll edition of Jack Kerouac’s beat classic, On the Road. Morris’ project first appeared as an ongoing journey through the book, read and re-typed on a WordPress blog one page per day. This newly published codex version pours the content of that performative retyping back into the format of the paperback source book. It follows the default logic of a blog archive to put the last post / page at the start and stores the rest of the entries in reverse order. In other words, whereas Kerouac traveled from the East coast to the West coast, Morris crosses America from West to East.
Getting inside Simon Morris' head by Joe Hale
Getting Inside Simon Morris’ Head is a performative retyping of Simon Morris’ conceptual bookwork Getting Inside Jack Kerouac’s Head (also published by information as material, 2010, ISBN 978-1-907468-02-5). Like Morris’ original performance of retyping the scroll edition of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Joe Hale’s project first appeared as a blog. At the rate of one page per day, like Morris retyping Kerouac before him, Hale retyped Morris’ entire book and in doing so re-retraces Kerouac’s famous adventure. Morris gave us all of Kerouac’s pages in reverse order: each blog post presented one page and the default settings of the blog platform organised his posts in reverse order, from the newest to the oldest. Now inverted again, as a double negative, Hale has restored the direction of travel to the story and produced a wholly (un)original new text. This first printed edition takes the imitative gesture to a new extreme. It features an introductory essay by poet Kenneth Goldsmith and reuses Morris’ paratext. From the cover design to the choice of paper, Hale tests the limits of conceptual extension
No Medium by Craig Dworkin
In No Medium, Craig Dworkin looks at works that are blank, erased, clear, or silent, writing critically and substantively about works for which there would seem to be not only nothing to see but nothing to say. Examined closely, these ostensibly contentless works of art, literature, and music point to a new understanding of media and the limits of the artistic object.
Dworkin considers works predicated on blank sheets of paper, from a fictional collection of poems in Jean Cocteau’s Orphée to the actual publication of a ream of typing paper as a book of poetry; he compares Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased De Kooning Drawing to the artist Nick Thurston’s erased copy of Maurice Blanchot’s The Space of Literature (in which only Thurston’s marginalia were visible); and he scrutinizes the sexual politics of photographic representation and the implications of obscured or obliterated subjects of photographs. Reexamining the famous case of John Cage’s 4’33”, Dworkin links Cage’s composition to Rauschenberg’s White Paintings, Ken Friedman’s Zen for Record (and Nam June Paik’s Zen for Film), and other works, offering also a “guide to further listening” that surveys more than 100 scores and recordings of “silent” music.
Dworkin argues that we should understand media not as blank, base things but as social events, and that there is no medium, understood in isolation, but only and always a plurality of media: interpretive activities taking place in socially inscribed space.
