Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age
Kenneth GoldsmithIn addition to explaining his concept of uncreative writing, Goldsmith reads the work of writers who have engaged in "uncreative writing." Examining a wide range of texts and techniques, including the use of Internet searches to create poetry, the appropriation of courtroom testimony, and the possibility of robo-poetics, Goldsmith joins this recent work to practices adopted by writers and artists such as Walter Benjamin, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and Andy Warhol. Yet, more than just a reconfiguration of texts, uncreative writing can also be suffused with emotion and offer new ways of thinking about identity, the making of meaning, and the ethos of our time.
Kenneth Goldsmith is the author of ten books of poetry and founding editor of the online archive UbuWeb (ubu.com). He is the coeditor of Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing and the editor of I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews. An hour-long documentary of his work, Sucking on Words, premiered at the British Library. He teaches uncreative writing at the University of Pennsylvania and is a senior editor of PennSound, an online poetry archive.