Copy Cat
Poet Kenneth Goldsmith encourages his students to plagiarize. Maybe that’s because stealing is making him famous By Jason McBride
Image credit: David Velasco
Truman Capote famously slammed Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, claiming, “That’s not writing; that’s typing.” It’s an insult that New York–based conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith would take as a compliment. His work, which has been praised by Publishers Weekly for its “near-hypnotic pleasures,” depends almost exclusively on appropriation, plagiarism and recontextualization. For Day, he retyped every single word—including ads and stock tables—from the September 1, 2000, edition of The New York Times. His most recent book, 2007’s Traffic, is a compilation of N.Y.–area radio traffic reports. Like some impossible spawn of Andy Warhol, Gertrude Stein and William Gibson, Goldsmith abhors the very idea of traditional imaginative fiction: “Do we really need another ‘creative’ poem about the way the sunlight is hitting your writing table?” Guess not.
You teach Uncreative Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. What’s on the syllabus?
How to plagiarize, appropriate, steal, lie and cheat—things the students are already good at. They’re marked down if they show a shred of creativity or originality. They love it.
Why do you think other writers are so hung up on originality?
I don’t know. It’s something the music and art worlds dealt with long ago. Nobody wants
Britney to really sing. She lip-synchs and everyone’s happy. Marcel Duchamp put the question
of what art is to rest almost 100 years ago. But literature is always 50 years behind painting.
Your work Soliloquy is a transcription of every word you said in the span of a week.
Aren’t your books tedious to produce?
I find them very pleasurable to produce. It’s relaxing to retype and transcribe.
I absolutely adore it. It’s easy. I’ll never have writer’s block.
Do you ever miss more conventional literary pursuits, such as crafting the perfect metaphor?
No, but then I wasn’t trained as a writer. That’s like asking Matthew Barney,
“Do you ever miss drawing a beautiful face?”
What are you working on now?
Rewriting Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project. I’m transposing the whole thing
onto the New York of the 20th century.
How long do you think that will take?
About 15 years.
Kenneth Goldsmith performs as part of the Scream Literary Festival on July 10.
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I find it more than a little disillusioning that a Canadian magazine like Toronto Life would pay such attention to a New York author like Kenneth Goldsmith and his Traffic novel when we have experimental works by equally talented authors coming out on a regular basis here in Canada. I guess the major advantage that U.S. authors have over us Canadian authors is the fact that they are published by major houses whose agendas and survival are not influenced by and/or contingent on state funding. Here in Canada, the majority of publishers are dependent on federal and provincial arts council funding for their continued existence. Government funds ultimately entail safe, nationalistic agendas. As a result, Canada's ‘major’-house-published works usually look quaint, boring and culturally sentimental in comparison, with titles coming from the likes of Michael Crummey and Mary Dalton that often do not resemble poetry volumes as much as what they do tourist brochures and Newfie jokebooks. In the meantime, the truly cutting-edge works must either be self-published or churned out by American or overseas houses, thereby ensuring their ostracism by mainstream reviewers and (certainly) radio and television here at home. Take for example my forthcoming latest project, Party of Bigots, an experimental play lifted verbatim (á la Goldsmith's Traffic) from the scandalous 1991 Tom Lukiwski/Roy Romanow headquarters videotape and subsequent apologies and television interviews (check out the intended cover art at http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseac... ); Would anyone actually envision Maclean's or the CBC sending reporters out to cover its launch...?
July 26, 2008 | by R_W_Watkins