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Conceptualisms
Conceptualisms: The Anthology of Prose, Poetry, Visual,
Found, E- & Hybrid Writing as Contemporary Art

Edited by Steve Tomasula

The University of Alabama Press Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press
Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380
uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2022 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed

to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Whitney

Cover art: John Robert Marasigan/Unsplash

Cover design: Daniel Warren

Conceptualisms is made possible in part by support from the Institute for

Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, College of Arts and Letters, University of
Notre Dame.

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-0-8173-6041-2
E-ISBN: 978-0-8173-9405-9
contents

i introduction

016 1 | writing language writing: a preface (of sorts)

019 r. henry nigl | The Shout Artist (online)
020 kass fleisher | The Speed of Zoom
024 scott helmes | Non-Additive Postulations; The Division of the Soul
026 ben marcus | from Notable American Women
031 bob perelman | China; Confession
035 cole swensen | Thought Experiment; Should Something Happen to the Heart;
How Photography Has Changed the Human Face; Chaïm Soutine: Reeling Trees
049 harry mathews | Translation and the OuLiPo: The Case of the Persevering Maltese
060 bhanu kapil | from The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers
068 lyn hejinian | from My Life
077 leslie scalapino | Delay Series
082 john ashbery | Business Personals
084 noah eli gordon | from Novel Pictorial Noise
088 blake butler | from Scorch Atlas
103 carla harryman | from Adorno’s Noise

112 2 | the double helix of contemporary writing & contemporary thought

115 charles bernstein | The Lie of Art; Thank You for Saying You’re Welcome
131 michael martone | Jaques Derrida Writes Postcards to Himself from a Diner in Winesburg, Indiana
133 lydia davis | Story
136 joe amato | from Under Virga
141 william h. gass | A Little Song of Suffering on Behalf of Prose
151 claudia rankine | from Citizen
156 jonathan safran foer | Finitude: From the Permanent Collection
165 caroline bergvall | Say: "Parsley" (online)
166 david foster wallace | Reduced
168 brian evenson | Altmann’s Tongue (online); House Rules
177 deb olin unferth | Brevity
182 lucy corin | Some Machines
188 jenny boully | from The Book of Beginnings and Endings
193 lidia yuknavitch | The Chronology of Water
201 rachel blau duplessis | Draft 95: Erg
207 percival everett | Confluence
216 george saunders | The Wavemaker Falters
224 robert coover | The Return of the Dark Children
234 joshua marie wilkinson | from Meadow Slasher
240 steven ross smith | The Reader

243 3 | writing technologies/digital wor(l)ds

247 jason huff | from AutoSummarize
251 young-hae chang heavy industries | Dakota (online); Nippon (online)
vi contents

251 nam le with matt huynh, kylie boltin, and matt smith | The Boat (online)
john cayley with douglas cape and giles perring | What We Will (online)
the high muck a muck collective including fred wah, jin zhang, nicola harwood,
thomas loh, and bessie wapp | High Muck a Muck (online)
charles bernstein | The Yellow Pages (online)
stephanie strickland and ian hatcher | Liberty Ring! (online)
252 lance olsen with tim gutherie | The Nature of the Creative Process (online); 10:01 (online)
illya szilak and cyril tsiboulski | Queerskins (online)
j.r. carpenter | The Gathering Cloud (online)
david jhave johnston | Henry (online); Ouadane (online)
alan bigelow | Silence; Last Words; My Life in Three Parts (online)
mez breeze | V[R]erses: An XR Story Series (online)
scott rettberg and roderick coover | Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project (online)
253 nick thurston | from Of the Subcontract, Or Principles of Poetic Right

258 4 | architecture of the page/writing as visual form/visual form as writing

263 lesley dill | Blue Poem Girl
264 lee siegel | from Love in a Dead Language, “The Kama Sutra Classic Comic”
266 johanna drucker | from Narratology
273 lily hoang | from Changing
284 tom phillips | from A Humument
291 graham rawle | from Woman’s World
312 susan howe and susan bee | from Bed Hangings
324 rimma gerlovina and valeriy gerlovin | Be-lie-ve & Absolute-Relative
326 douglas kearney | Runaway Tongue

327 5 | clouds, collage & the aesthetics of ripping & mixing

329 niels plenge with charles bernstein | The Answer (online)
davis schneiderman | Drone-Space Modulator (online)
330 mark z. danielewski | from House of Leaves
347 frank rogaczewski | So What Else Is New?; The Fate of Humanity in Verse
352 craig dworkin | from Parse
356 amaranth borsuk and brad bouse | from Between Page and Screen
360 david clark | 88 Constellations for Wittgenstein (to be played with the left hand) (online)

361 6 | reworking the past & the future & the present
363 charles bernstein | Before Time; Amberianum
370 richard mcguire | Here
373 fred wah | Akokli (Goat) Creek; Havoc Nation; Hamill’s Last Stand; Chain;
The Poem Called Syntax; (sentenced)
381 harryette mullen | Bilingual Instructions; Black Nikes; Coals to Newcastle, Panama Hats
from Ecuador; Denigration; Sleeping with the Dictionary
 contents vii

384 anna joy springer with rachel carns and jane o'neil | The Forest of Mandatory
Innocence; The Forest of Peril That’s Real; The Forest of Good Bad Intentions; The Not Fake
Parallel Forest; No Escape Hatch in the Forest (online)
385 michael mejia | Coyote Takes Us Home
398 carole maso | Deer
402 patrik ourednik | from Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century
410 stacey levine | And You Are?
425 salvador plascencia | from The People of Paper
429 kate bernheimer | A Star Wars Tale
431 rikki ducornet | The Wild Child
435 hank lazer | Dream; Torah; INTER(IR)RUPTIONS 5
438 debra di blasi | “Winter” from Selling the Farm: Descants from a Recollected Past
444 lynne tillman | Future Prosthetic@?

449 7 | sound writing

451 steve mccaffery | The White Pages
453 nathaniel mackey | Song of the Andoumboulou: 18, 19 & 20 (online)
david antin | stepping into the river (online)
ian hatcher | All Hands Meeting (online)
454 r.m. berry | from FRANK
468 david melnick | from Men in Aida

476 8 | dna, found scores, machine writing & other post-literature literature
480 david buuck | Black Box Theater: United 93
494 vanessa place | from Tragodía
505 nick montfort | from ppg256
507 shelley jackson | from SKIN
511 jhave | Spreeder: For EPC20 4am-5am Sept 11th 2014 (Part 1) (online)
512 eduardo kac | Biopoetry
519 christian bök | The Xenotext Experiment

9 | contributor statements and biographies (online at: www.conceptualisms.info)

528 credits
 introduction 1

Introduction

“What was great about the fifties is that for one brief moment — maybe, say, six
weeks — nobody understood art. That’s why it all happened.”
— Morton Feldman

contemporary vis-art

Composer Morton Feldman’s description of the mid-century art scene refers to

the explosion of forms, means, and materials that emerged from studios in the
wake of Duchamp’s "Fountain": a urinal placed in a gallery, whose symmetry,
craftsmanship, and beauty asked, ‘Why am I not also art?’ The answer we’ve
embraced since then is that Duchamp’s Fountain is art, of course, but for
reasons that have far less to do with its craftsmanship or beauty than the
questions it raised or the concept upon which Duchamp based his work. Enter
most art galleries today, and the view of contemporary society you’ll find is
less likely to be expressed by a realistic painting of a Parisian cafe than a work
like “Alba,” the rabbit that artist Eduardo Kac genetically engineered to glow
green. Instead of casting history as a bronze general on a horse, it’s more likely
to take the form of Tom Friedman’s “1,000 Hours of Staring,” a blank piece of
paper that the artist stared at for a thousand hours to imbue it with a history,
the way a cheap, ordinary pen becomes museum worthy because of the history
attached to it, say, by having been carried by an astronaut to the moon. That
is, today, mainstream visual art is conceptual art: art where the concepts or
ideas informing it are at least as important as the art object itself, and whose
form calls attention to these ideas. Yet even the brief list of the two examples
above illustrates how the term “conceptual art” is a misnomer when used in
the singular, for it masks how varied, how multiple these concepts, and so
these art works, can be: each a proposition for how to make and think about
art, each an articulation of its own particular concepts, or engagement with the
world outside of art—that is, its own particular time, its own particular place.
This anthology, then, is an argument to think through contemporary writing
that engages its issues by foregrounding its forms, materials, and ideas. It is
an anthology of works more motivated by concepts than conventions; works
that are aware of themselves as art made of words and engage with language
2 conceptualisms

as a medium as well as a means to an end. Given that literature itself has never
had an easy or stable definition, conceptual writing, like conceptual visual art,
cannot be one thing but an irreducible multiplicity. Having no clear boundaries,
conceptual writing is less able to answer questions that beg binary answers,
such as ‘Is this art?’ than it is to ask, ‘Why not?’ ‘Why does the novel have to be
one thing?’ ‘How many ways can a poem be?’

conceptual writing / writing as

contemporary art

Anyone who steps away from the bestseller lists can see that the literary
landscape beyond its commercial walls is just as wild as that of visual art,
just as varied, just as conceptual: novels in the form of a diorama; narratives
told as a series of FaceBook pages, tweets, or crowdsourced across multiple
social-media platforms; stories told as recipes, poems in skywriting or genetic
code, pixels, skin — as well as print and sound — carriers of language with the
strangeness authors have always given ordinary speech in order to transform it
into art. In fact, this strangeness, or unfamiliarity, may be the very core of what
makes writing literature; and pushed to its boundaries, what makes literature
conceptual. As Gerald Bruns puts it, conceptual writing is “made of language
but not of what we use language to produce: meanings, concepts, propositions,
descriptions, narratives, expressions of feeling, and so on. It’s not that
conceptual writing excludes these things; it’s that the writings we call conceptual
are no longer in their service.” In this way, authors can be like painters once
photography freed them from their service to document, to depict historical
events, to create lifelike portraits. The clowns of both Shakespeare and Beckett
understand this, undermining the pragmatic literalness of utilitarian speech, as
do authors of fictional guidebooks such as Michael Martone’s The Blue Guide
to Indiana with its description of the trans-Indiana mayonnaise pipeline; as
Steve McCaffery’s exhaustive, performative reading of headings in the Toronto
phone book suggests, it’s hard for a functional street map, directory, or urinal
to be read as art. It is only by disconnecting the pipes of these “texts” that
they can become symbolic. It is only by making them useless that they can,
paradoxically, become useful — useful in a different sense — not as urinal, map,
or phone directory, but as rhetoric. As art.

Novels and poems are, of course, put to many uses (as therapy, commercial
product, greeting cards, entertainment, docu-drama … ). And conceptual
literature can also have utility, especially that which blurs the line between
art and life. “If someone walks up to you and starts talking,” David Antin
says at the start of one of his talk poems, “how do you know if it’s a poem?”
 introduction 3

Even Antin’s talk poems — long impromptu monologues — even the most
conceptual of writing — the sound poem of non-rhymes for no reason — has to
be entertaining, that is, has to serve. Conversely, even the most non-conceptual
work, the work deep in the service of some pragmatic function, is written
according to some theory, even if it’s only a concept as to how many syllables
are in a sonnet, or whether the protagonist can see through walls or must
obey the laws of Newtonian physics. As far back as the Greeks, readers have
noted the multivalenced nature of writing, or as Aristotle put it, every work has
a philosophical component (content), a form (aesthetics), and a rhetorical
function (political).

It is impossible to speak, write, or make any art without a conceptual basis, for
theories of how the world is arranged and can be represented are embedded
in our very grammar (even our very cognitive makeup). All writing is already
conceptual. In this sense, even the most traditional novel can be conceptual:
a story for Henry James is never just what happened. It is also what someone
thought happened. And this is a theory of composition, a conception. So what
do we mean when we talk about “conceptual writing”? Partly, we mean writing
that calls attention to this fact: writing in which form both conveys meaning and
is the object of meaning. It could be said, for example, that the most traditional,
formal aspect of a portrait bust is marble. But it’s easy to see the relation of form
to meaning in art when Marc Quinn creates a classical bust of his own head, but
instead of using a traditional material like marble, uses his own blood, drained
out of his body and frozen to form a block of ice that could be shaped, thereby
suggesting that the identity of a person lies less in the appearance of their
surface features than their inner (and ephemeral) biology. Alain Robbe-Grillet
makes the same point thus: if the style of Camus’ The Stranger was changed,
its flattened effect would be lost and the philosophy of this existential novel
diluted. Here, form, rhetoric, is conceived as worldview, not simply technique,
or style. Similar analogies between form, concept, and meaning could be made
in any medium: architecture, music …

Thus it is no accident that the epic poem arises in one era and the poem written
by a computer in another; or the poem written in genetic code. It’s no accident
that a conception of literature as a product of unique, individual genius arises
in one century, while in another it takes the form of a database film, that is,
a narrative film such as Toxi•City by Roderick Coover, Scott Rettberg, and
numerous others who contributed to the software and imagery of a film that is
different every time it is viewed. Or writing conceived as architecture, or that
foregrounds the body of the text, its materials and visual nature; or a rip-paste-
burn aesthetic — call it collage — and its democracy of sampled quotation,
recycling, appropriation, recirculation — so much so, in fact, that collage of
4 conceptualisms

reworked materials has been the

dominant organizing principle of the
(post)modernist period. This includes
the plethora of authors reworking
history or appropriating pop or
earlier forms, as Patrik Ourednik
does in Europeana, casting this novel
in the form of a history textbook; or
repurposing materials as Vanessa
Place does, creating narratives by
Caption
repurposing court documents as
poetry, making them speak a different truth in the manner of visual works like
“Gloria” by Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, which repurposes a 52-ton
army tank as art.

Indeed, recasting language (its materials, its history) in ways that require readers
to reassess their own assumptions can be seen as a marker of contemporary,
conceptual writing. But why? What is it about our moment that makes us feel,
again (like Gertrude Stein?), the need to reclaim a language? “Faced with an
unprecedented amount of available text, the problem is not needing to write
more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists,”
the “uncreative” poet Kenneth Goldsmith has written (uncreatively rewriting
filmmaker Harun Farocki’s words: “Because so many images already exist, I
am discouraged to make new ones”). Conversely, Johanna Drucker writes that
the only way we can reclaim our language, make it our own, is to keep writing.
Reclaim from what? Author Raymond Federman once answered with another
question: “Is it possible for literature to survive the kind of reduction, the kind
of banalization that mass media imposes on contemporary culture?” he asked,
referring to the overwhelming power of entertainment corporations, Hollywood
and television producers, and political machinery to define literature, and indeed
all writing, in terms that serve their interests. Federman’s list seems equally
valid today, if augmented by a variety of software developers, social media
conglomerates, and other entities jockeying to monopolize “the way we speak.”
“Indeed, if there is a future in fiction,” Brian Evenson has written, “I think it lies
in the active dialogue that can occur between fiction and philosophy/theory, a
dialogue in which each prods the other toward new possibilities, where each
proposes questions that the other is compelled to answer.” In sum, those who
value purity of genre will not find it in conceptual writing: the questions that
motivate conceptual writing are as varied as the answers given by the work,
but much of what goes by conceptual writing today seems to be writing with or
against the machine: our bureaucracies, the habits of mind, and other systems
that colonize the ways we speak, and so the ways we think. A number of authors
 introduction 5

write to foreground the arbitrariness of convention: to draw attention to what

an accident of history usage can be, as well as the power relations that flow
from it (think here of the “Whites Only” restroom signs, and how they were
once considered “normal,” the “way we write,” in apartheid South Africa or
the Southern United States). Rather than mirroring the land — as in Stendhal’s
conception of the novel as a “mirror traveling down the road of life” — conceptual
writing often strives to reveal strata that give the surface its shape; it exposes
linguistic fossils — the commonsense or mythical view — such as our persistence
in saying “the sun rises” though we know full well that it is the earth that moves.
When Ron Silliman creates a language of non sequiturs, invented vocabulary,
fractures, and enjambments — when he and other poets frustrate expectations
or pull a linguistic rabbit out of a grammatical hat — they foreground how easily
we sleepwalk the ruts of everyday speech, and so thought. Or the joy there is
in appreciating language as language. It’s not that contemporary, conceptual
authors have a unified agenda or aesthetic: uncreative writing, the reworking
of fairy tales, texts of erasure, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing, and code poetry,
to use some of the labels given to the kinds of writing that are on display in
the following pages. Rather, these are but a few of the many approaches
taken by authors whose work can be seen as conceptual. Nor do they make
language new in order to make it new, per se. The works gathered here do not
mine those tired and false dichotomies often associated with new writing, the
difference between High and low, for example (or other mis-characterizations
of last century’s avant-garde agenda), or thought and emotion, or even the
conventional-conceptual divide. Instead, much conceptual writing reveals
anew how habits of speech mirror habits of thought embedded in official or
dominant culture: they rework states of common sense, myth, commerce, or
nature and reconfigure it as historical, unmask it as a point of view, a system of
power relationships. They rework language for many of the reasons that writers
have always had.

Or not.

a long, parallel history …

“I have nothing to say and I am
In this sense, conceptual writing has
saying it, and that is poetry.”
a tradition that extends back through
— John Cage
the postage-stamp parodies, fake
newspapers, and other publishing
experiments of FLUXUS; back through
Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein’s repetitions; back through
the visuals of Tristram Shandy at the inception of the novel, or even the layout
Renaissance poets gave verses so that they could be read in multiple directions;
6 conceptualisms

back through the icons embedded in medieval illuminated manuscripts to

visually link one passage to another; up from the muse of the first poet who
made ordinary speech strange; and out from the invention of writing itself.

Yet even if we were to tweet Don Quixote word for word, Borges might have
written, it would be different in time, and therefore different in meaning. Thus,
web authors using hyperlinks that echo the medieval scribe’s use of visual icons,
the metafiction novel that incorporates the same frame-within-frame structure
that Scheherazade employed to save her life, the authors in this anthology who,
like Renaissance troubadours, juggle verses, or incorporate the white space of
their page as Stéphane Mallarmé did in “A Throw of the Dice,” or otherwise
draw on the early avant-garde, are different: a contemporary extension of one
of two literary traditions that are easier to discern when placed side by side.
Even the briefest of sketches illustrates how literature has always consisted of
two parallel practices: writing as a transparent window on the world and writing
that calls attention to the window itself, including the grid of its panes. In one,
writes poet Charles Bernstein, “reality / fantasy / experience is presented to us
through writing. // In the other, the writing itself is seen as an instance of reality
/ fantasy / experience / event.”

In prose, for example, there is the realist mainstream, often exemplified by the
novel as a daydream that readers can get lost in; in this virtual reality, page layout,
fonts, language — anything that would
shake a reader from this dream — are
left invisible by an adherence to
normalcy, familiarity, convention. Just
as a traditional landscape painting can
be a window on the world, these texts
serve as the windows Henry James
imagined in the house of fiction, or
Stendhal’s mirror with its emphasis
on authenticity, craft, transparency of
language, sentiment, and the text as
trompe l’oeil. On the other hand there
is a kind of literature that is equally
interested in exploring the possibilities
of form, the limits of language; a type
of literature suggested by Sterne’s
Caption
Tristram Shandy that emphasizes text
as a medium, the material nature of language; a literature that articulates an
assumption that literary form, like form in music or visual art, emerges from
and so reflects its historical moment, and implies that the conventional forms of
 introduction 7

the past are no more appropriate as contemporary expression than the minuet.
Compare, for example, Shakespeare’s break with the conventions of his day
known as the unities (a play should have one main action, which happens in
one place, during the space of a day or less), or his invention of the soliloquy:
a moment in the play where the action stops so that the actor can deliver a
personal essay, another literary invention that emerges along with the humanist
individual whose personal thoughts were not only worthy of writing but worthy
of reading (in contrast to, for example, the eternal truths of stylized, and
anonymously authored mystery plays). It was the literary equivalent of the shift
from the stylized depictions of men and women in medieval art to the individual
features that Renaissance painters gave to their characters, à la Michelangelo.
It was, in short, an experiment by an author in search of a form that would speak
to his contemporaries.

Three thousand years ago, in the Temple Experimental, conceptual, avant-

of Esna, an Egyptian scribe composed a garde, hybrid, surfiction, fusion, radical,
hymn to the omnipresence of Khnum slipstream, avant-pop, postmodern,
the Ram God by making it entirely out of self-conscious, innovative, alternative,
transformations to a single hieroglyphic anti- or new literature … A variety
sign: the symbol for the ram. of names have been proposed to
Caption
describe the conceptual writing
that has emerged across the years
ever since Shakespeare broke with the unities, and previous anthologies have
gathered works under these names (indeed readers will recognize some of the
authors included here from these earlier formulations). As in Shakespeare’s
case, experiments by authors often became conventions themselves or were
subsumed by the culture at large. Avant-pop (see After Yesterday’s Crash: The
Avant-Pop Anthology), that impetus to channel the Andy Warholesque focus
on celebrity, advertising, and pop culture into forms and agendas more closely
identified with the avant-garde, loses its power to be noticed, let alone shock,
in a world that includes the globalization of McDonald's, an elevation of
celebrities to the status once held by public intellectuals, pop touchstones as
cultural lingua franca, and literary study itself skewers toward cultural studies.
Similarly, we might ask, what happens to Electronic Literature (See Electronic
Literature: New Horizons for the Literary) once all writing is “electronic”? No term
for this variety of writing can be all encompassing; most will be associated with
the period in which they emerged (Postmodern American Fiction) though there is
a family resemblance in that conceptual writing can be thought of as a literature
whose aesthetic often shares an ethos with contemporary thought; a literature
that takes its own medium as part of its subject matter, or works against the
assumptions of the (current) status quo, especially literature that conceives of
its audience in mass demographic or commercial terms. In this regard, it has
8 conceptualisms

affinities with visual, conceptual art such as Francis Alÿs’s “Sometimes Making
Something Leads to Nothing,” a performance in which the artist pushes a
melting block of ice around Mexico City until there is nothing left. The concept
motivates the work, rather than the work illustrating a concept, or resulting in
a product that can be sold. And in so doing, it opens up a variety of slippages,
chance encounters, disjunctions, and surprises. The concept generates the
work in the way that the constraints of an OuLiPo author generates the game,
e.g., the decision by Georges Perec to write a novel without ever using the
letter ‘e’ is the action that generates the novel itself (translated as A Void)
just as the rules of a sport make possible the game, or the decisions by other
authors generate one kind of literary work and not another: works that employ
talking animals, linguistic games, puzzles, parodies, historical or ontological
disjunctions, discursive juxtapositions, appropriations, collage techniques, and
other rhetorical and stylistic strategies and constraints, even those of realism.

That is, inherent in this type of literature is a belief that aesthetic choices
are conscious and political, not natural. That conventional form, as well
as unconventional form, carries a viewpoint, an attitude through language
and to language and to the world. It believes that literary form embodies
epistemological, or ontological positions, or otherwise articulates convictions
about how the world works, including the literary world. By its very nature, then,
though the “normal” use of language is calcified by everyday usage; though the
cultural formations that “the way we speak” bring into existence (best-seller
lists, mainstream publishers, course syllabi, Hollywoodization) tend to limit the
definition of what counts as a novel or poem, this is a type of literature that
tends to keep these definitions unresolved. Or at least fun and unexpected. In
contrast to the easy consumability of genre fiction, or the familiar sentiment
of greeting-card verse, this is a kind of literature that asks us to look again, to
consider what else the text might be doing if our first reaction, our reaction
premised on past ways of reading, doesn’t seem to fit the conventions we’ve
been taught (indoctrinated) to read by, and we find ourselves in the position
of the first viewers of Henry VI who thought the play absurd because they
were asked to believe the single space before them was by turns a street, a
bedchamber, and the coast of Kent. Or viewers who still come upon a cubist
painting for the first time and exclaim — “People don’t look like that!”

As Joe Amato writes, “Because it’s aesthetic, it’s momentary./ Because it’s
momentary, we’re confused.”
 introduction 9

… up to today

It’s not hard to imagine our gentle reader coming upon Scott Helmes's "Non-
Additive Postulations," with its fusion of natural and mathematical languages,
and exclaiming, “That isn’t a poem!” It’s not difficult to imagine a similar reaction
to Lucy Corin’s plotless “Some Machines” or Alan Bigelow’s “Silence,” a story
inspired by John Cage’s 4’33”, and which appears on screen as mostly black
space. Original readers often had a visceral reaction to what came to be called
Language Writing, or writing that is about, whatever else it may also be about,
writing: fictions like Brian Evenson’s “House Rules” or prose poems like Lyn
Hejinian’s My Life. Indeed these aren’t stories if a story must have conventional
story tropes, psychologically rounded characters, cinematic description. Ditto
for Shelley Jackson’s “Skin,” a story that is being published, one word at a time,
as tattoos on the 2,000 volunteers who serve as Jackson’s pages. But it’s also
easy to imagine our gentle reader leaving these works with the reaction many
of Picasso’s first viewers must have had, willing to have a second and third look,
remaining open to the possibilities of another way of seeing, and willing to
consider the individual work on its own terms: a reaction art critic Dave Hickey
summarizes as “Huh? Wow!”

The art that most interests Hickey, and many readers of conceptual literature,
is art that doesn’t just go about business as usual; art that, like Helmes's poem,
might be confusing when first encountered, but once the reader sees how
the equations direct reading, how the square root of love and its other math-
English fusions fail, for all their mathematical precision (let alone the slackness
of English), to get at the cause of a failed relationship, or has to abandon linear
cause and effect for clouds of association, and how these nebulous associations
may come as close to saying something about the human condition as we can
hope for — “Wow!” Nor is it hard to imagine this reaction to “House Rules” once
the reader sees it as a dialog between fiction and philosophy. The same is true
for Jackson’s “Skin,” once we consider this story, a story we will never actually
get to read, is a contemporary articulation of the wall-less labyrinths Borges
imagined to such effect and what its existence has to say about our bodies, our
narratives, the conception of the author, and what it means to publish …. Publish
means, after all, to ‘make public.’

That is, if the 19th-century novel is the literary equivalent of a painting of a clipper
ship on the high seas, works like Eduardo Kac’s “Biopoetry” or George Quasha’s
“Poetry Is” or Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper can be thought of as
the literary equivalent of contemporary conceptual art. A different emphasis. A
different orientation: one that privileges the conceptual in literature instead of
the mimetic.
10 conceptualisms

Thus, while one author might write a mainstream, traditional novel with
characters saying feminist things (“I am woman, hear me roar”) and doing
feminist things (running for president), another might explore the way language
and the pressures of plot itself may help bring into existence a gender-based
hierarchy. Or explore through language an ontological shift embedded in our
communication, as Kass Fleisher does in “The Speed of Zoom” whose txt-spk
form asks what it means for women and men to have an online relationship
when body text stands as a surrogate for human bodies, and all speech is
mediated by the medium, and edited for effect. And by so doing, perhaps creates
a penetrating representation of unspoken laws, social formations, relationships
between men and women. As well as the Eternal Human Heart. For the Human
Heart, like the perpetual calendar, is eternal. As such, the conceptual works in
this anthology do not imply a break with the aesthetics and humanist concerns
of traditional literature. Rather, they are extensions of them.

As John Barth famously wrote, ours is a period where postmodern, modern,

and premodern literary works are being written simultaneously. As time passes,
this observation increasingly seems to be an understatement: on my bookshelf,
there are texts that are thousands of years old, as well as those written during the
French Revolution, and in the year I was born. And this year. They are all part of
the always-ever-present that is today, and all of them contain examples of what
would have been “experimental” in their day (e.g., Dante's neologistic phrasing,
the hybrid writing of Zora Neal Hurston or Kathy Acker's appropriations); all
of them continue to influence whatever is written today, and will live on in
whatever literature will become, be it the writing by bots descended from Nick
Montfort’s code poetry, or the DNA replication imagined by Christian Bök.
If conceptual writing from the last century was driven by experimentation in
form, and postmodern writing was a dialogue between authors like Barth and
theorists and philosophers of language, the generation writing today seems to
have absorbed this history: authors like Deb Olin Unferth or Salvador Plascencia
do not so much engage the theoretical debates of the past but have absorbed
their fallout over story form, originality, authorship, and the other hot buttons
of an earlier generation the way an earlier generation of writers might have
absorbed assumptions about the unconscious without ever having read Freud,
or the way female pilots flying combat missions for the military today embody
assumptions about the role of women without having read Hélène Cixous.

conceptualism(s)+1

Just as visual artists have brought into being a plethora of models for art-
making, so some writers continue to find their materials — language as well as
 introduction 11

its embodiment in fonts, layout, or sound — endlessly surprising. Raised to an

exponent by the variety of objects readers have discovered that can be read
as text, and the ever-changing historic and cultural contexts in which we read
and write, the tradition of conceptual writing seems less like a movement (the
avant-garde), or period (postmodernism), than an open-ended activity.

How could it be otherwise? Unlike those unknown Egyptians, chiseling their

poems to the Ram God in stone, unlike members of Fluxus, creating text collages
with scissors and paste, readers and writers today swim in a much more fluid
stream of reading and writing technologies. As N. Katherine Hayles notes,
every work of literature published today is digital, if its writing, layout, printing,
and distribution is taken into account. Just as earlier technologies such as the
telephone and the telegraph disembodied voice and thereby made speech
different for James Joyce than what it had been for Homer, so reading and
writing cannot help but become something different to us as our lang absorbs
a vocab of emoticons, txt-spk, on cl phones, and old words (photography, gay,
cloning) accrue new associations, while others go as extinct as ‘thou’.

Consider the 1.3 million poems Philip M. Parker has written, using software
that employs an algorithm based on graph theory and a metric for linguistic
differences across word strings in other poems. Consider the poetry of Nick
Thurston, which he composes by hiring crowdsourced, subminimum wage
employees to do the actual writing. Consider “Monument to Indian Native First
Nations American Tenacity in the Stacked Face of Continual Misrepresentation,”
by Davis Schneiderman and Tom Denlinger, with its appropriation and remix
of competing viewpoints, styles, and representations — from congressional
reports on Indian affairs to whooping Native Americans in pre-PC beer
commercials — its juxtapositions of voices, bending of genres, erasures, and
boundary transgressions. If the aesthetics of these three works speak to
contemporary readers it’s because they echo contemporary culture in general:
a culture and an aesthetic made possible by putting into the hands of readers
and writers communication technologies and attitudes of a sophistication
we’ve never seen before: tools that allow anyone to monitor the behavior of
others, mix tracks, incorporate old TV commercials, VR objects and blogs — the
whole theater of cultural memory — data mine each other’s living for patterns;
work, or play with people all over the globe, just to mention a few examples. But
more importantly, these works speak relevance, i.e., are born of a contemporary
mindset that thinks it’s natural to draw on a global history of words, sounds,
and images at our fingertips today; to make visible the previously invisible or
marginalized; to restate that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, even if the
beholder is an algorithm; to regard all culture as contingent and rearrange-able;
to tell its story, in other words, in a way that is as natural for us as Medievals
12 conceptualisms

thought it natural to seek out a Christian explanation for the order of the
planets, or as Modernists would have thought it natural to articulate a Freudian
unconscious. And in so doing, say something we can relate to today.

Contemporary, conceptual writing, then, arises from more than the timeliness
of its themes, is about more than the proliferation of authoring tools, writing
surfaces, and the evolution of language. Rather, conceptual writing is as often
as not an exploration of how these elements come together to help make the
present “present,” and in so doing, are themselves born: a cultural node in
which lots of authors, working for lots of independent reasons, and with lots
of different tools and goals, together constitute the emergence of a body of
writing with family resemblances. That continues to morph. Often faster than
the culture at large, and so continually requires of the reader a willingness to
relearn things they thought they already knew, especially how to read. It puts
high demands on the reader as co-author, even if the fourth wall can be the
most opaque of all.

As is true for any new art, as was true of earlier literary experiments such as
Virginia Woolf’s fragmented narratives or Walt Whitman’s free verse, only time
will teach us how to read many of the works in this anthology. As well as how
they will always stay beyond reading. The failure of language to express the
inexpressible is one of the enduring themes of literature, and this is especially
true of conceptual literature. What can be said is that any definition will be out
of date as soon as it is written. Any attempt to narrow conceptual writing to
a particular form or idea is doomed by the very limits required by definition.
For even as you read this introduction, someone somewhere is inventing a new
form in the hopes of cracking open something meaningful about life as it is lived
at the moment of its writing. Imagination Dead Imagine +1.

on the selection and organization

of this anthology

All framing requires cropping, and the snapshot of conceptual writing that
is this anthology is no exception. First affected by framing are the individual
selections themselves, an endeavor that proves equally frustrating as gratifying
for the number of works that could have been included. While a number of
realist literary works could be thought of as philosophical or otherwise engaged
with contemporary thought (the novels of J.M. Coetzee or W.G. Sebald come
to mind), what has guided the selection of works gathered here is a tendency
to keep what counts as literature fluid. That is, the intention was to favor works
 introduction 13

that open up the definition of literature rather than works that could more easily
fall back into more familiar genres.

If anthology-like groupings under terms like “story” and “poem” are avoided,
then, it’s only because they don’t seem to fit a work like Mez Breeze's virtual-
reality "V[R]erses." If terms like “author” don’t fit it’s because the authorship
of work like Implementation is as dispersed as its many online contributors. If
“American” or “English” literature is avoided it’s because terms about national
origin don’t seem relevant to a literature that’s more global, as suggested by the
stories by the collective Heavy Industries, written in Korea and New York and
published worldwide in multiple languages. If terms like “literature” are avoided
it is because they seem to imply institutions and canons and genre divisions
and values that have more to do with the values of the publishing marketplace
than those of artists. It is because thinking of writing as a medium as well as
a material, in the way that all sound can be creative material to a soundscape
composer, opens up possibilities for writing not normally considered literary:
wire bent so its shadows cast words on the wall as they do in Alexandra Grant
and Michael Joyce’s collaborations.

An attempt was made to balance other contradictory impulses, as well: while

“craft” is often of little importance in much visual, conceptual art, an emphasis
was given to well-written work here out of the belief that the difference between
literature and other kinds of writing is how it is written, even if “writing” in this
book could mean an elegant computer code as well as an elegant sentence (as
useful as the analogy between written and visual conceptual art is, it is not
airtight, especially when the divide between conceptual visual art and other
kinds of art is drawn along the lines of visual mimesis or visual pleasure). Thus,
the anthology by its nature excludes much writing in which aesthetics are an
after(non)thought: most genre fiction, plot-driven video games, pornography,
celebrity writing, or textual objects not presented as art (the dissolution of high
and low, it seems, is perpetually announced prematurely). Further, an attempt
was made to not confuse new material (or hardware) for new ideas, even if
writing is held to be a form of thinking, a way of working through a concept
rather than illustrating one that is already known: sometimes exploring new
materials leads to discovering a concept an author didn’t know existed, or how
to articulate.

Though the anthology excludes much that is considered literary in other spheres,
the inclusion (or exclusion) of writing is not meant to imply any sort of “best
of” sorting or hierarchy. Indeed, one could ask, why, in the age of the Internet,
create an anthology at all given that works by all of the authors included here
14 conceptualisms

can be found online? It is hoped that the hybrid nature of this print-online book
points to an answer in that the works gathered here are meant as approaches
toward a variety of ways of reading, as provocations toward seeing writing as
a medium for art as practiced at our moment. (In fact, many of the authors
would resist being categorized in the way that any heading seems to imply.)
It is hoped that this anthology will not lapse into all-too-common fallacy of
anthologies in general, of giving an illusion of completion. The hope then is that
readers will use the anthology as more of a portal than cell; the beginning of the
conversation, not the conversation itself.

For this reason, readers will note that many of the works gathered under one of
the chapter headings — e.g., Architecture of the Page — could have just as easily
been placed under another, e.g., Language Writing Language. Similarly, many
of the digital works have been grouped together for their electronic nature, but
they could just as easily be considered “literature” without any prefix. Likewise,
some of the approaches to reading presented here could have been combined,
or substituted for still others. The groupings are provisional, and meant to serve
as possible entries into the work and not as a taxonomy. That is, though the
anthology is organized as an art gallery, its walls are permeable and only meant
to suggest traffic patterns. Readers are invited to compose other configurations,
or skip them altogether. After all, this anthology is as much an invitation to ways
to read as it is ways to write.

Perhaps most conspicuous, compiling a snapshot of contemporary conceptual

writing required that the rich body of writing that is its history had to be
left outside the bounds of this book. And yet, though no attempt was made
to historicize the field, it can be noted that within this collection there are
some three generations of conceptual authors at work, from canonical
masters to authors the reader may be encountering for the first time. In
this sense, the anthology is a snapshot of conceptual writing as practiced
from the end of the last century into the first decades of this century; it is
a history in the making, albeit a brief one, of the explosion of aesthetics set
off by the cultural and technological changes that impacted reading and
writing as experienced by authors writing during the time of the anthology’s
making. Some aesthetics that seemed strange at their inception will by now
be familiar; others will be confusing to a jury that is still out. It is hoped that
this book is very much in conversation with like-minded anthologies, born of
their own cultural moment: After Yesterday’s Crash: The Avant-Pop Anthology;
Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology; Postmodern American Poetry:
A Norton Anthology; Electronic Literature Collection; Forms at War: FC2 1999-
2009; Wreckage of Reason: An Anthology of Xxperimental Prose by Contemporary
Women Writers; and Best American Experimental Writing, to name just a few….
Finally, this anthology contains a recognition that like the all-white painting
 introduction 15

hanging on the white wall of a gallery, the works included here, like much
conceptual art or music, often depend on their “supporting texts.” That is, like
a urinal displayed as an art work in a gallery, they are not necessarily evident as
art. Indeed, they often exhibit an overt rejection of the criteria by which literature
is commonly evaluated, or even recognized. In an effort to make this work more
user friendly to those readers who may be encountering it for the first time,
authors were invited to submit a paragraph expanding upon the thinking behind
the pieces they authored for this anthology. Their thoughts can be found, along
with a brief biographical note, in the online companion to this book. See it at:
www.conceptualisms.info

Last, but not finally, words are inadequate to express my gratitude to the many
people who made this anthology possible: first of all the authors who contributed
work, in every single case, freely and with enthusiasm — thank you; to the
many people who contributed advice and suggestions early on, and ever after,
especially Joe Amato and Kass Fleisher — thank you; to those who contributed
labor and editing help, especially Kim Koga, Tasha Matsumoto, Lindsay Starck,
Anne Berry, Jac Smith, Joseph Thomas, Abigail Burns, Greg Havrilak, Phillip
Spinella, and Naïma Msechu. Thanks go to Mervi Pakaste for saving the design,
Peter Beatty who rode in at the last minute to cut through thickets, and most
importantly Dan Waterman at the press for his early enthusiasm, advice, and
perseverance over what proved to be an undertaking of years — thank you.
16 conceptualisms

1 | Writing Language Writing: A Preface (Of Sorts)

Problems begin when people speak, Beckett wrote, referring to what a flawed
instrument the “mirror” of language is for reflecting the human condition. And
the animal condition. And the condition of vegetables and minerals as well as
God, or the unconscious, or other entities, ideas, and abstractions with far less
body, including language itself. Yet it is the means by which we know. And how
we order our world. It determines who serves and who is served, and even who
lives or dies. To varying degrees, nearly all the authors in this anthology have, by
a variety of means, subverted the passage of language from use, to repetition,
to convention. But the works in this cluster do so at the order of the word, or the
syllable, in order to focus attention on the workings of language itself.

“Why don’t you

write like I talk?”
a reporter once
asked Gertrude
Stein. Stein re-
plied with an
answer that much
conceptual writ-
ing asks (no
matter what else
it also asks):
“Why don’t you
talk like I write?”
Caption
Embedded in this
question is an even more problematic one: How have our social practices
allowed some language practices to emerge (e.g., political, religious, or
epistemological), and be valorized, or demonized and / or normalized? Why
do we think the way the reporter talks is normal? How, for example, are we
able to take for granted, as Paul Ricoeur asks, the existence of a sentence like
“Tomorrow was Christmas”? That is, how are we even able to make sense of
a sentence that describes an event to take place in the future but uses the
past tense? Or what about the opening line of Gabriel García Márquez's One
 1 | writing language writing: a preface (of sorts) 17

Hundred Years of Solitude: “Years later, when he was to face the firing squad,
General Buendía thought back and remembered the time his father took him to
discover ice.” If one thinks about it, the temporal backflips this sentence does
are breathtaking, leaping ahead as it does, to recall a future memory of a time
that takes place before the present of the sentence. Ricoeur’s answer is that
systems of grammar are like grids that we use to map unmediated experience.
That is, these grids are like the one that Alberti would look at subjects through
in order to determine spatial relations between their body parts in order to paint
them using linear perspective. In the case of grammar, it is the form of tenses,
for example, that conveys relationships between the author and the text, the
reader and the text, and between characters within a text. That is, much of the
meaning of a text is inherent in its form, the manifestation of the underlying
concept. And then, repetition hardens these concepts into “the way we talk.”

This is not only a formal or aesthetic choice(s) — you say toeMAEto, I say
toMAtoe — for they carry an underlying assumption that to use a grid to
organize a view will result in a particular kind of art (an emphasis on mimesis,
rendered in three-point perspective) as surely as representing the world via the
conventions of the world is to reinforce the status quo (Why is God referred to
as 'He'?).

Conversely, to recast language in ways that require readers to relearn their own
language foregrounds the accidents of history, or convention, or imposition of
will: it draws attention to what an accident of history usage can be, as well as the
power relations that flow from the requirements of language as an organizing
system: William Gass’s Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife stages the hermeneutic
circle as a typographical and linguistic spiral where repetition turns specific
ideas into general ideas that mutate back into specific ideas far from their
origins. Consider the names for plumbing parts, Gass writes, derived from
names for body parts — elbow, nipple — while his narrator wonders, just before
Jews go up chimneys as smoke, why it is so easy to equate people with objects?
When Ben Marcus creates an invented language by swapping words and usage
(e.g., ‘my error’ for ‘penis’) or by writing as if a metaphor were literal (our all-
too human “suits of meat”), he doesn’t do so to make speech strange so much
as to expose power relationships naturalized in language, and so overlooked by
its users. He exposes hierarchies that have become embedded in language, or
“natural” through familiarity. When Claudia Rankine makes microaggressions
rhyme, it isn’t to make language new so much as to make visible what is
already present: the toxic atmosphere unwittingly (or intentionally) created
by words and deeds. When Lynne Tillman or Ron Silliman creates a language
of non sequiturs, invented vocabulary, fractures, and enjambments — when
they frustrate expectations— they foreground how easily we sleepwalk down
18 conceptualisms

the ruts of everyday speech. That is, the writers in this section do not have a
unified agenda or aesthetic; they do not make language strange for the sake of
strangeness even if there is often delight in this strangeness. And yet the works
on the following pages often do demonstrate how the grid, like the rules of any
game, make possible some outcomes while ruling out others. They demonstrate
how language can generate ideas of what is or isn't "realistic" or normal. Or
even possible. They show us the grid, as well as the view through it.

Note: Statements by the authors about their work can be found at:
www.conceptualisms.info
 1 | writing language writing: a preface (of sorts) 19

r. henry nigl
The Shout Artist

Shout Art, as a structurally distinct art form, was created by the artist Henry
Nigl during the early 1980s. As far as is known, there is no other poetic or
performance form like this. The format / structure of a ‘Shout’ is specific. A
‘Shout’ is typically non-rhyming (but can be rhythmical), double entendre with
a conflicted, unexpected, and abrupt ending phrase or word. Performance is a
significant component of the form and often included props — both stationary
and animated — and electronica (audio/video/projection). Music, as such, was
provided by various automatic contrivances including oscillating fans tied to
chimes and breeze-driven curtains. The artist is still actively involved in this
limited genre and has recently produced new performances.

online at: www.conceptualisms.info

20 conceptualisms

kass fleisher
The Speed of Zoom

[A]ny writing is a process of inscription. By inscription I mean a process in which

through putting two things together, the nature of these two things is in some
way modified.
— Ernesto Laclau

1. Nosegay is a word that has nothing to do with me.

The light shimmied through the wires and skimmed the curves of the
screens. Although it was about L_________, it could not be hugged, kissed,
snuggled in any fashion. First there was he and she, him and her, slogging
away at keys. Dialing upward by way of digging down. Only to connect. And
then, response makes a pair. A them of sorts. To be sorted. Meanwhile we,
under the eaves.

dear joe, she wrote. please forgive this imposition from a stranger. dear
kass, he wrote. a stranger imposes pleasing forgiveness.
(It is the misfortune (but also perhaps the voluptuous pleasure) of
language not to be able to authenticate itself.)

2. The words are flying away.

what strikes me, she wrote, is the way your alphabet forms in frankness.
i wonder whether your skin is as supple as your being. being, he wrote, is
the suppleness of striking, your beta waves in alphafrank wonderment,
the skin on your chinny-chin-chin a suitcase away. being is in L_________.

(We invite our advertisers to submit articles for consideration. Articles

must meet our editorial policy, requiring a minimum amount of editing.)
 1 | writing language writing: a preface (of sorts) 21

3. Your word is too white.

dear reader, she wrote, i feel i know you, but what is there to know?
there is nothing, there is the hail mary pass, there is the wide receiver,
there is static in the medium, there is question, there is answer, there
is openness, there is closure, there is no being. but what, he wrote, is
there? a static medium, a questioned answer, a reception in honor of
knowing. to know. nothing. to be. nothing. to feel the closure of being
transmitter. to feel transmitter. to receive that feeling of transmitting. to
know no closure. that is L______.

(After graduating from UCSC with a focus on Cuban Feminist politics

and joining the struggle to end violence against women of color, she and a
friend rode their bicycles cross-country.)

4. People won’t be able to see your word.

i stroke, she wrote, keys. keys that gather order present align pronounce
enjoin decree instruct trim fit shape set sort piece group palm this thing,
this one, this be, this face, this fuss, this will, this won’t, this life. i know,
he wrote, the keys, how striking. the debauch of tapping, the revelry of
pounding, the orgy of beating, the bacchus of fingering. a L_____-in of
fiddling. how it puts us straight, how it codifies, tabulates, administrates,
some thing we name we — a tone, a pitch, a timbre. all from tips, touching,
keying, breaching.

(Is there a way to end the monotony of black-and-white documents by

printing a few pages in color? Yes. The imageRUNNER family is color-
enabled. For when you need color.)

5. Our words are out of order.

we, she wrote, being the best and worst of terms, making of us a we but
necessarily a them. them being necessary to know the we. our separate
speaking, our cant. but for there to be we there must be i and you and for
there to be i there must be you. my separate tongue, my utter. for there to
be we we must be different from and they must be different from. to go to
L______ there must be different from. we, he wrote, being not us, being only
pidgin, being only phraseology, being only. in the separation, evaporation.
surrender of i. if no i, no you. if no we, no them. only reading, the instability
of reading. do not make me use the term interpret. do you. read me.
between the lines, divination. more today than yesterday.
22 conceptualisms

(I have a hearing deficiency, she said, so if you ask me a question and I
answer some other question, don’t get me wrong.)

6. Even human poetry words have to scan for chrissake.

pixels collect dust, she wrote, space dust, cyber trash, hacker tripe. i don’t
know how they get from there to here. how you get from you to me. you
come through a wire — or something. there must be time involved.

L_______ is really time in a bottle. messaged. the time it takes you to write
me. the time it takes you to get here. the time it takes me to read you, wrong
you, rip you, right you. there is no you after that time passes. passaged.
packaged in pixie dust. you are the time involved. there is you, then the
formation of you. massaged by a constant speed of light. resorted. mass-
less. the most i may make of you, is to print you on paper. twenty-four
pound please, he wrote, and ninety brightness at least. to see the light. i
want to be something to you, something you can tear into, something
apprehendable. you arrest me. time after time i am here and there. there is
no simultaneity, spontaneity. no for that matter me, without time bending
me around to you, bound in time yourself, you not me and not now. we will
get there with energy. fossil fuels in fact. carbon burning beings in order to
be more than babble to one another. one a nother. a whole nother. a howl
nother. a howling nothing. a mooning howl. time is not. change is. this letter
different from that, thus change, thus time, thus sun. passage. in a moment
you will not be you. one brief dying moment. i not you, you not you.

(The way physicists use equations: why is a=b not quite enough for them?
(We invite you to consider becoming a member!))

7. Shout out the word on your back.

but should we, she wrote, see. each other. now. it is, he wrote, necessary.
now. but won’t that, she wrote, you know. ruin. we must, he wrote, not
become. stuck. but is it, she wrote, you know. time. it may, he wrote, already
be too. late. but how do, she wrote, we know it won’t. hurt. we must, he
wrote, actualize. a. heart. but won’t it, she wrote, sting. the loss of light. we
are, he wrote, nothing. a stream of digits. but our fingers, she wrote, make
us who we are. should we. touch. we could, he wrote, quit. end the down
and qwerty. but in L______, she wrote, is there not peril. of pulp. we need, he
wrote, a pulse. to plug the space. of. but your purported, she wrote, pulse, is
a palpitation, a vibration. little more than. this. we will, he wrote, throb. but
might we, she wrote, not. thud. we either, he wrote, take a thwack at this,
or. eighty-six it. we are not, he wrote, playing around here. we are, he wrote,
 1 | writing language writing: a preface (of sorts) 23

serious. we are not, he wrote, dreaming of you not me. we are, he wrote,
weighty. far-reaching. vital. we are not, he wrote, fucking around.

ok but, she wrote, i have to buy new underwear first.

(Mr. Smith does not like verbs. Whenever he finds one, he crinkles his brow
in disgust like a man who has discovered a dribble of food on his tie. He
taps furiously at his keyboard, moves the cursor to the offending word and
deletes it, or else adds “ing,” turning the verb into a participle and his script
into the strange shorthand that passes these days for news. “Outrage in
the Middle East threatening the United States! A school bus and two other
vehicles colliding in Dallas! Amazon.com celebrating a birthday!”)

8. My word is black, and yours is blue.

Flight. Flutter. Winging. Soaring. Shoot through the air at the speed of
zoom. Air the only struggle. Well. Friction. Telephones. Cells zinging.
Connection. A voice. Talk. Connection. Well. Speech flounder muddle
bungle. Shoot through the air at the speed of whoosh. The not-there-
ness of resistance. In the face of propulsion. Well. The who-you-ness
of making an i. Shoot through the air at the speed of zip. They shared
dispatch. In an attempt to parole. Form. Utter that which shifts. Pledge
assurance. Give their. In a nutshell, they are literature. Well. If you put it
that way. Shoot through the air at the speed of whiz. We may explicate
them only through intimation. Survey their bulletins. Toms peeping.
Flight. Neither here nor there. Not yet the you she will be when she.
Her purposely dressed down so he won’t think she. Him leaning against
a pillar, one foot crossed over the. Winging. Casual on the concourse.
Shoot through the air at the speed of zow. And to put it briefly, boxers.
Well. Flight. In the midst of but not medium. She has neither memory nor
vocabulary. He will talk all night about the notness of we. Well. Except
for ten minutes when they — Shoot through the air at the speed of wow.
Flight. Zero hour. Almost there now. Are we here yet? Do not make me
use the term interpret. They will be neither together nor not. They will
find no separate tongue. They will be youitheywe. L_____. Shoot through
the air at the speed of zoom. They will be we. With the greatest of ease.

(“We don’t communicate in full sentences anyway,” says Mr. Smith. “We
don’t need all those words. It allows us to go faster.”)
24 conceptualisms

scott helmes
Non-Additive Postulations

random order + preposterous outcry = negative time

negative time2 = relationships + 3

rudders alphawakes
relationships =
udders
+
√ oscillations

ϕ + � = blueberryohio to the tenth power

͚ antioch
Ohio = Ʃ̥ + trying √ power + ϕ

equality = three equality + 5 = race2

without (recognition) + negative sex = tomorrow

airplane pee + ͚
Jefferson + 6 + 3pee = green ddt

negative time
sex
+ i.u.d. = √ communicate + 1 + c 2

time noosphere
= 2’ + c = =
telepathy RBF

terminate
 1 | writing language writing: a preface (of sorts) 25

scott helmes
The Division of the Soul

world √ intragalactic =

civilization : playback ͚
formal vote

-1

∫ into
wash
× terms
eraser
avant
= heritage
0

diction grapes vapor postcard +

× fool5 = × swift = ×3×
lesson triangle tumult alarm

invoices earth photograph Des Moines

-
recent × 2 sock Cronkite = alarm

analogous
√ lead + ( rubber
tickle )
= rock -
false
icebox
+ stencil -

sky glue perfume eggplant

÷ descending3 = - + =
hidden 3 turds letter fingerprint

book motel
golden - + = lust
spite √3 bank
26 conceptualisms

ben marcus
from Notable American Women
The Name Machine

I’ll not be able to list each name we called my sister. The process would be
exhausting, requiring me to relive my sister’s pitiful life. There are additionally
copyright issues connected with persons that are officially the holdings of
the government, which is still the case with my sister, despite her demise. To
reproduce the precise arc of names that she traversed during her life in our
house would be to infringe on a life narrative owned by the American Naming
Authority. It will suffice to select those names sufficiently resonant of her, ones
that will seem to speak of the girl she was rather than of some general American
female figure, although it could be argued that we can no longer speak with any
accuracy of a specific person, that the specific person has evolved and given
way to the general woman, distinguished primarily by her name.

The names defined here derive from a bank of easily pronounceable and typical
slogans used to single out various female persons of America and beyond.
A natural bias will be evident toward names that can be sounded with the
mouth. The snap, clap, and wave, while useful and namelike in their effect (the
woman or girl is alerted, warned, reminded, soothed), are generally of equal
use against men, and therefore of little use here. Gestures of language that
require no accompanying vocal pitch, such as gendered semaphore, used in
the Salt Flats during the advent of women’s silent television, or Women’s Sign
Language (WSL), developed in the ’70s as a highly stylized but difficult offshoot
of American Sign Language, now nearly obsolete because of the strenuous
demands it placed upon the hips and hands, were never successful enough with
my sister to warrant inclusion in the study. She plainly didn’t respond to the
various postures and physical attitudes we presented to her—our contortions
and pantomime proved not theatrical enough to distract her into action. No
shapes we made with our hands could convince her that there was important
language to be had in our activity, and she often sat at the window, waiting for a
spoken name, without which she could not begin the task of becoming herself.

This is certainly not to imply that communication between persons and living
things requires tone or sound, or that deaf figures of the female communities can
 1 | writing language writing: a preface (of sorts) 27

have no names. There is always written text, to be apprehended through visual

or tactile means, as well as the German-American technique of “handling” the
name of a woman onto her thigh. My sister, as it happens, did not respond in
any useful way to our repeated and varied handling of her body. As rough as we
were, it made no apparent impression on her.

Here the American female name is regarded as a short, often brilliant word.
Rarely should it inaccurately capture the person it targets, and its resistance
to alternate uses, modifications, translations, and disruptions is an affirmation
that individuals can and should be entirely defined by a sharp sound out of the
mouth — these definitions have simply yet to be developed and written. Once
they are, we will know what there is to know about all future persons who take
on one of the appellations listed in the American Bank of Names, striving in
their own particular way to become women of distinction.

Nicknames, admittedly, allow for a broader range of fetching, commanding,

and calling, but the nickname only indicates an attribute or device of a person,
such as the length of her legs, the way she sleeps, how she bounces a ball (in
this case: “Sticks,” “Taffy,” “Horse”). A name, as the government instructs,
can no longer be an accessory of a person, but must be her key component,
without which the person would fold, crumble. She would cease, in fact, to
be a person. The nickname, and more particularly the endearment (“Honey,”
“Doddy,” “Love,” “Lady”), speaks to a deeper mistrust of the original name, a
fear of acknowledging the person at hand. If it is possible to change a person
by changing her name, why not employ a name of diminished potential and
thus diminish or destroy the person? It’s a valid concern. When a man modifies
or adorns a woman’s name, or dispatches an endearment into her vicinity,
he is attempting at once to alter and deny her, to dilute the privacy of the
category she has inherited and to require that she respond as someone quite
less than herself. (Conversely, women who are scared of their own names are
also typically afraid of mirrors.) The movement toward a single name for the
entire female community (“Jill,” “James,” “Jackie”) — as aggressively espoused
by Sernier and practiced by his younger employees — would disastrously limit
the emotional possibilities for women and, rather than unify them as the Bible
claims, probably force a so-called girls’ war in their ranks.

The task of my family in this regard was to process and unravel the names
that arrived in the mail, then dispatch them onto my sister, generally with
the naming bullhorn, a small seashell my mother carved for the purpose.
We were enlisted by the government to participate in what was being called
the most comprehensive book ever attempted, a study meant to catalog the
names of American women. In the book, each name is followed by a set of
28 conceptualisms

tendencies that are certain to arise if the user employs the name as the full-
time slogan for herself. The book is meant to serve as a catalog of likely actions,
not only to predict various future American behaviors but to control them.
If the government regulates the demographics of name distributions, using
a careful system of quotas, it can generate desired behaviors in a territory,
as well as prevent behavior that does not seem promising. It’s not exactly a
style of warfare as much as it is deep dramatic control over the country. The
book remains unpublished, but its authors are reported to be numerous,
somewhere in the thousands, each working blind to the efforts of the others.
In my possession are only the notes taken during the naming experiments on
my sister — an intuitive set of definitions of the names she inhabited. We were
not instructed how to define the names we were given, only to use them, study
them, employ whatever research we could devise. I therefore have no notion if
our material was ever incorporated into the text. We submitted it promptly but
never received word on the matter.

We served up the names to my sister one by one and watched her change
beneath them. Researchers here might say that she became “herself" or that
it was her body expressing its name, as if something does not know what it is
until the proper sound is launched at it. Each new morning that she appeared
before us and we announced the name for the day through the bullhorn, we saw
her become the new girl and release the old one, drop the gestures and habits
and faces that the last name had demanded of her and start to search for the
necessities of the new name.

I presume that other men launch their childhoods with sticks and mitts and
balls, skinned knees, a sackful of crickets, and other accessories. They are
shoved onto a lawn, where they know the routine, can find the snake or book of
matches, sniff out water, or sit in a children’s ditch and watch the sky with their
light and delicate heads. But I was the designated writer among us, unable to
walk across grass or throw or catch or hide, equipped only with the stylus and
pad, made to create our life in the form of notes on a page. This was unfortunate,
because I don’t like to write, I don’t like to read, and I like language itself even
less. My father read to me as a boy and I was mannered enough not to stop
him. It was unbearable — book after book that failed to make or change me, my
father’s lips twisting and stretching during a supposed story hour, massaging
a stream of nonsense inside his mouth. I have always tried to be polite about
words—good manners are imperative in the face of a father wrestling with a
system that has so clearly failed — yet I find language plainly embarrassing. It is
poor form, bad manners, that so much hope is pinned to such wrong sounds out
of the mouth, to what is really only a sophisticated form of shouting and pain.
It is not pleasant for me to hear “foreign” languages, either. All languages are
 1 | writing language writing: a preface (of sorts) 29

clearly alien and untrue, and, absent of so-called meaning, it is repeatedly clear
that language is a social form of barely controlled weeping, a more sophisticated
way to cry. To speak is to grieve, and I would prefer not to listen to a weeping
animal all day and every day, sobbing and desperate and lost. Particularly when
that animal calls itself my father.

Each time we changed my sister’s name, she shed a brittle layer of skin. The
skins accrued at first in the firewood bin and were meant to indicate something
final of the name that had been shed — a print, an echo, a husk, although we
knew not what. They were soft in my hands, devoid of information, and quite like
what I always thought was meant by a “blanket,” a boy’s little towel, something
to shield me from the daily wind that got into my room. It is not that the skins
resembled a person anymore, or stood for one, or acted as a map of the past.
They were, rather, a part of my sister I could have to myself — soft, foldable,
smelling of bitter soap, perhaps like a toy she might have used. I kept them for
hand warmers, penciled my pictures into their flaky surfaces, draped them over
my bedroom lamp for spidery lighting effects and the whiff of a slightly burnt
wind. Maybe I smelled something deeper as the skins burned away on the bulb,
floating in and out of the cone of light that enabled my infrequent passage from
bed to door, at such times when my bed pan was full. There was nothing of food
to the smell, only houses, hands, glass, and hair. And her. They smelled of her.

Oddly, these skins my sister shed seemed to serve as a repellent to my sister

herself, as if smelling her own body were uncomfortable for her. She would
not come near my room when I was using them. Nor would she approach me,
particularly if I wrapped myself in parts of her old body and walked through the
halls, or bathed in a caul of her husks, which would cling to my skin in a gluey
callus when they were wet. No one, I would venture, likes to be understood as
deeply as I was understanding my sister at that time, shrouding myself in the
flakes of her body that she had lost, wearing her. She preferred, I assume, not
to know me.

When the names ran dry, my sister pulled up short somewhere in the heart of
the Learning Room. The mail had ceased, and no one was sure what to call her.
She slept on the rug and scratched at herself, looking desperately to all of us for
some sign of a new name, of which we had none. No one, as I mentioned, was
sure what to call her, a problem that proved to be the chief void in her identity,
which slowly eroded. There were no more skins, and one morning my sister lost
her motion and folded into a quiet pose. Out of sympathy, we reverted back to
her original name, or one of the early ones. I have to admit that I’m not sure
what name she began with. Nor were any of us too sure, to be frank, whom,
exactly, she had become.
30 conceptualisms

lisa

Because the word “Lisa” most closely resembles the cry heard within the
recorded storms at the American Weather Museum, a crisply distorted
utterance claimed to be at the core of this country’s primary air storms, the girl
or woman to carry the burden of the Lisa name carries also perhaps the most
common sound the world can make, a sound that is literally in the air, everywhere
and all the time. (Most wind, when slowed down, produces the sound “Lisa”
with various intonations.) The danger is one of redundancy, and furthermore
that a woman or girl cruelly named Lisa will hear her name so often that she will
go mad or no longer come when called. Children learn that repeating a word
wakes it meaningless, but they don’t know why. Briefly: Weather in America
occurs through an accumulation and disturbance of language, the mildest form
of wind. To speak is to create a weather, to supply wind from a human source,
and therefore to become the enemy. The female Silentists are silent primarily
to heal the weather, or to prevent weather, since they believe that speech is
the direct cause of storms and should forever be stifled. A Silentist regards the
name Lisa as the purest threat, given that, when heard, it commonly indicates
an excess of wind, an approaching storm, possibly the world storm. The name
Lisa, to some Americans, is more dangerous than the words “fuck” or “fag” or
“dilch.” It should probably be discontinued. It can crush someone.

Statistics for Lisa: An early name of my sister. She rarely acknowledged it. It
caused her anger. We could pin her to the floor with it. She drank girls’ water
and would peaceably wear a Brown Hat. Her Jesus Wind resistance was nearly
zero. Rashes and facial weakness were frequent. A distressed tone to her skin.
Her language comprehension was low, or else she showed selective deafness.
A growling sound was heard when she wrote. She seemed blind to my father.
 1 | writing language writing: a preface (of sorts) 31

bob perelman

china

We live on the third world from the sun. Number three.

Nobody tells us what to do.
The people who taught us to count were being very kind.
It’s always time to leave.
If it rains, you either have your umbrella or you don’t.
The wind blows your hat off.
The sun rises also. I’d rather the stars didn’t describe us to
each other; I’d rather we do it for ourselves.
Run in front of your shadow.
A sister who points to the sky at least once a decade is a
good sister.
The landscape is motorized.
The train takes you where it goes.
Bridges among water.
Folks straggling along vast stretches of concrete, heading
into the plane.
Don’t forget what your hat and shoes will look like when
you are nowhere to be found.
Even the words floating in air make blue shadows.
If it tastes good we eat it.
The leaves are falling. Point things out.
Pick up the right things.
Hey guess what? What? I’ve learned how to talk. Great.
The person whose head was incomplete burst into tears.
As it fell, what could the doll do? Nothing.
Go to sleep.
You look great in shorts. And the flag looks great too.
Everyone enjoyed the explosions.
Time to wake up.
But better get used to dreams too.
32 conceptualisms

confession

Aliens have inhabited my aesthetics for

decades. Really since the early 70s.

Before that I pretty much wrote

as myself, though young. But something

has happened to my memory, my

judgment: apparently, my will has been

affected. That old stuff, the fork

in my head, first home run,

Dad falling out of the car —

I remember the words, but I

can’t get back there anymore. I

think they must be screening my

sensations. I’m sure my categories have

been messed with. I look at

the anthologies in the big chains

and campus bookstores, even the small

press opium dens, all those stanzas

against that white space — they just

look like the models in the

catalogs. The models have arms and

legs and a head, the poems

mostly don’t, but other than that

it’s hard — for me anyway — to

tell them apart. There’s the sexy

underwear poem, the sturdy workboot poem

you could wear to a party
 1 | writing language writing: a preface (of sorts) 33

in a pinch, the little blaspheming

dress poem. There’s variety, you say:

the button-down oxford with offrhymed cuffs;

the epic toga, showing some ancient

ankle; the behold! the world is

changed and finally I’m normal flowing

robe and shorts; the full nude;

the scatter — Yes, I suppose there’s

variety, but the looks, those come

on and read me for the

inner you I’ve locked onto with

my cultural capital sensing device looks!

No thanks, Jay Peterman! No thanks,

“Ordinary Evening in New Haven”! I’m

just waiting for my return ticket

to have any meaning, for those

saucer-shaped clouds to lower! The authorities

deny any visitations — hardly a surprise.

And I myself deny them — think

about it. What could motivate a

group of eggheaded, tentacled, slimier-than-thou aestheticians

with techniques far beyond ours to

visit earth, abduct naive poets, and

inculcate them with otherworldly forms that

are also, if you believe the

tabloids, salacious? And these abductions always

seem to take place in some

provincial setting: isn’t that more than
34 conceptualisms

slightly suspicious? Why don’t they ever

reveal themselves hovering over some New

York publishing venue? It would be

nice to get some answers here —

we might learn something, about poetry

if nothing else, but I’m not

much help, since I’m an abductee,

at least in theory, though, like

I say, I don’t remember much.

But this writing seems pretty normal:

complete sentences; semicolons; yada yada. I

seem to have lost my avant-garde

card in the laundry. They say

that’s typical. Well, you’ll just have

to use your judgment, earthlings! Judgment,

that’s your job! Back to work!

As if you could leave! And

you thought gravity was a problem!
 1 | writing language writing: a preface (of sorts) 35

cole swensen

thought experiment
for D.P.

1
The train sliding smoothly, how smoothly it surrounds
and becomes all in its own world. It’s too simple and
too much is simple, so we’ll live here and let cell by cell
dissolve in else. There is a next. There is a man sitting
next to you. He looks like Einstein, with the underwater
hairdo and those very particular eyes. So Einstein lives on
in the train, a small man with a flashlight and a brother
with another flashlight and a twin who never returned to
earth. Such odd wealth — the one growing older and the
other lost like glass in water: this was once a face. And
this is a person who can’t turn around. If the past is the
past, why have you lost your voice.

2
We begin with the proposition that the world is beautiful,
and that from a train it’s a beautiful thing. Einstein loved
trains like the rest of us love the world. Speed that
infinitely approaches white and lodged in the breath. How
the twin gasped, flung from view. What do you see? A
light bounces off the ceiling of the train. A light that lands
beside itself like its own twin but that neither recognizes
nor resembles, among all the different identical, you were
the one I loved, the one I was and where. Now it appears
that the destination can be chosen afterward and the
landscape collapses like a lung — you were the one on
the train traveling to the sea who said, look — a fire in the
field where we are on fire in peace.
36 conceptualisms

3
When one train passes another in the opposing direction,
the air between must split, each of its particles twinned
and racing for the same location before the decision can be
prearranged. We went this way. A long slow curve across
the beauty of the world which at this speed is finally and
clearly perceptible as a suspension of flight; some flying
thing with a permanently held breath. Some understanding
of green and blue and red that sees the spectrum split and
sees the fan of slivered light sink in. “This window between
us” you’ll say as you have said but it is so among us that we
have seen the world. It is arriving, and though it has not yet
arrived, we are sure of its tender, transparent body, of its
tendency to gasp for air until it splits into all its possibilities
and of its desire to be with us as breath is, indivisible and
interior and always falling in a curve like that of a hand, held
palm up or that of a face where it curves at the edge and
can therefore end.

4
But the face that underlies a landscape is only perceptible
from a train. Einstein knew this and “the world has a face
that looks back at you, and it is your own.” Wittgenstein
said it and Einstein couldn’t deny it and so they shook
hands, one turning one way and the other, the other in a
clean bisection of available space and if you ever see your
brother again (the one who’s gone) the features rapidly
approaching white. He was your own. Repeat the word
now. Now. Now the world is beautiful and now it is a single
thing and this renders it silent so that the light can pass
through in any direction, altering the nature of motion, and
everything that moves is newly legible though unsayable;
one said it wouldn’t be possible but another turned around
quickly and is still turning.

5
We pull into a town with 17 steeples. Cows falling down
green hills almost to the center. Once the train begins to
move again it all makes sense. Like the hands lying folded
in a lap where it’s woven: one life into another and under
and beauty being the only thing holding them together.
“All we ever see is light” in its lively fracture and saturated
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