Lesson 13 Conceptual Writing

Conceptual writing is to conventional poetry and other forms of "creative" writing what Gruel (we've all heard of it but hopefully never tasted it) is to a nutritionally balanced meal from Benihannas (if they exist). Meaning, both are still food, one is assumed to be bland, unimagined, uninspired, tasteless, and intolerable but as far as using language it "fills you up". To take it further, there is no REAL difference as far as mass is concerned if you eat enough gruel to fill you up or if you eat enough of an inspired delicious meal to fill you up, outside of taste, nutrition, and display. I think of Conceptual writing, and I base my definition largely from the Goldsmith reading in the harriet, as gruel because it is not trying to do anything but "fill you up" or fill pages or use language. Gruel, we can assume or we can ask Annie and some other mistreated orphans, is meant to purely fill up whoever consumes it with no regard for taste or flavoring, nutrition, or inspiration. It is largely de-motivating, hard to swallow, just like Conceptual writing.


The difference between a movement like Dada or Language poetry and Conceptual writing is pretty much answered, though oddly, in my first paragraph. There is some artistic merit to pretty much any other form of writing, especially Dada, and it is not that conceptual writing falls short in being creative, it is not trying to be creative in any means. In some of Goldsmith's work, there is no clear "point" or message to get across. Scanning a dictionary for the schwa sound, recording every bodily movement and writing it down, and reprinting a newspaper into a 900 page book are inherently uncreative conceptually. A Dada work may attempt to make some type of claim or statement and that is not the point at all of Conceptual writing.


In regards to the thinkership, obviously as Goldsmith stated he doesn't expect works like Day to be read, but rather thought about. A readership, a collection of devout followers who read your work, is definitely useless if you are creating work that doesn't necessarily ask to be read. Goldsmith's work is meant to be admired, pondered, and examined moreso on it's ambition and merit than it's "creativity" so it's not necessarily the act of reading it that should appeal to his followers, but thinking about it and examining it and placing value upon it as a whole is what is important.