Title: “The Not Tale (Funeral)“
Author: Caroline Bergvall
Words: 162
Lines: 43
Stanzas: N/A
Experience: I read the first five lines, scan the rest, scroll to the bottom of the page. In gray, small sans-serif, as if embarrassed, the note explains Bergvall’s composition method—surely this is in some sense the heart of the piece. I scroll back up. The first five lines take up new meaning. I switch to my other document, “Eleven Assertions about…”, and write a few sentences about the poem before finishing reading it. In the other window I can see just its last two lines: “But shortly to the point I turn/ And make of my tale an ende.” I guess I’ll finish reading it now.
What it would be if you took out all the words except ‘nor’ but left the punctuation and broke the linebreaks:
. Nor. Nor Nor Nor Nor. Nor Nor Nor Nor Nor Nor. Nor. Nor Nor Nor Nor Nor.
Title: “I Google Myself“
Author: Mel Nichols
Words: 195
Lines: 37
Stanzas: 4
Justification: Center
Is it as good left-justified?: No.
Number of Appearances of the Word “Google”: 17
Fun Fact: In a video on the Huffpost blog Nichols sings “I Google Myself” while playing a ukulele. On the camera lens she’s rubbed Vaseline. I have no justification for saying she rubbed Vaseline on the camera lens — but the focus is soft.
Experience: At the bottom of the Poetry Foundation page there’s no note explaining the compositional method, so I Google “‘I Google Myself’ Mel Nichols” and find Mel Nichols on the Huffpost blog singing “I Google Myself” while playing a ukulele. Because she sings it to the tune of “I Touch Myself,” I realize I was being thick: it’s a word substitution.
Hot Take: “Google” is a goofy word, but also a sexy one, maybe?
Title: “Fact“
Author: Craig Dworkin
Words: 324
Characters: 2,236
Lines: 1
Stanzas: 1
Hot Take: Look at me, Craig Dworkin, extending a long literary-historical trend of contemplating the artist contemplating the blank canvas/page!
Alternate Hot Take: No matter what you think, art, even the semic, is material.
Alternate Fact: Despite the note saying “Each time Dworkin displays the poem, he researches the medium on which it’s being viewed, changing the list of ingredients,” I’m reading this on a 15 inch MacBook Pro retina display from Early 2013 powered by a NIVIDIA GeForce GT 650M 1024 MB graphics card, but the list of ingredients I just read is about paper.
Interpretation of Alternate Fact: The artist was not involved in the transition from the Poetry Foundation’s print edition to their web edition.
Title: “Directory”
Author: Robert Fitterman
Lines: 34
Words: 89
Words in the Notes: 69
Appearances of “H&M”: 4
Appearances of “GNC”: 6
Appearances of “Crabtree & Evelyn”: 3
Stanzas: I don’t know, it depends how you count them.
Form: You know, there is some, I guess
Meter: Pretty free form. Neither regular lines in terms of metrical feet nor Hopkins’ sprung rhythm or whatever appear to appear. Still, the note at the bottom of the page has assured me that the poet looped the mall directory “with poetic concerns for form, meter, and sound,” so…
Sound: As a poet at a lectern slips into an arch and affected manner, the sound self-consciously marks itself poetic.
Title: “Art, Work, Endlessness: Flarf and Conceptual Poetry among the Trolls”
Author: Jasper Bernes.
Notes: Here! (CLICK IT!!! Maybe there are pictures of baby ducks on the other end of the link!)
Words: 10,785
Patron Saint: Bifo Berardi (depicted on a medallion holding up a medallion on one side of which the words “THE SOUL” and on the other side “AT WORK”)
Blind Spot: Nostalgia. (“Gee, art in the ‘60s and ‘70s was so revolutionary!” Art now is “domesticated by the commodity form and the world of labor it once opposed” (766).)
Takeaway Message: Just like Kathi Weeks says, we should not demand better work, but less.
How Long It Takes to Get To the Takeaway: 2.5 pages
How Many Pages He Goes Through After The Getting to the Takeaway Only to Return to It: 19
Title: “Why Conceptual Writing? Why Now?”
Author: Kenneth Goldsmith
Words: I don’t know, my PDF wasn’t OCRed
Paragraphs: Do I really have to count?
Pages: That’s easy, six.
Procedure, Abstracted: Think of a technology’s affordances, assume artists will do weird things with them.
Title: “The Fate of Echo”
Author: Craig Dworkin
Notes: HERE!
Metrics: Elided — the joke has gone stale.
Amount of Art History: Some.
Author: Jessica Covil
Words: 696
Paragraphs: 6
Characters: 4,281
Number of Hyperlinks to Bootleg The Office Compilations: One
Final Point: Just like Berne says, détournements of labor from within labor fail to escape labor.
Author: Jordan Sjol
Words: 833
Hot Take: Sometimes a different form of criticism is required; sometimes it’s just a lark.
Alternate Hot Take: It’s not always easy to take something seriously.
HONORABLE MENTION: Statement of Facts – Vanessa Place; “Chicks Dig War” – Drew Gardner; “Their Guys, Their Asian Glittering Guys, Are Gay” – Michael Magee
