Articles

한 :: Concept : Spirit : Break

I am a Conceptual writer. I’m also “just” a “writer.” I’m a body and a mind and a woman and the child of immigrants, and I am sexual and sometimes contradictory and on the move. And I write.

The ways I hear “Conceptual writing” discussed often feel limited to me, given the capaciousness of the term “concept.” I hear it so often discussed under terms that seek to erase authorship through mechanistically procedural habits or found/repurposed language. There’s additionally a sad whiteness factor to who gets considered under such a banner. It’s an old problem. It persists, along with the way western values privilege abstraction as intelligence or “real” knowledge, demarking what is of noteworthy contribution.

February 5, 2016

On 'Area Sneaks'

Rita Gonzalez

Joseph Mosconi

The original call for work for our journal Area Sneaks sought “to touch the live wire where language and visual art meet.” The very real divide between poetry and visual art, as we saw it in 2007, is where we discovered this metaphorical live wire. The figure of the area-sneak, a term borrowed from Charles Dickens, proved to be our principle guide.

February 5, 2016

A pale Usher

Nicolas Mugavero

Lexicon-Cetus is a dictionary that compiles and defines every single unique word from Melville’s Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. There are approximately 16,000 “unique” words in Moby-Dick; about 5,000 of them are a mixture of common given names, plurals, infinitives, gerunds, and/or adjectival/adverbial forms of root words. If the root word is already defined in the lexicon, then any derivations thereof are for the most part excluded.

February 5, 2016

'Corpaphysics, Conceptualism, and dualism

Matthew Landis

Larry Eigner, left, in 1984, photo by Alistair Johnston; Bernadette Mayer and CAConrad, right, photo © Lawrence Schwartzwald.

Is this mental/intellectual/psychological focus within Conceptualism ableist? At the very least it seems to be one-dimensional: the body marks a caesura, and it is a product of Conceptualism’s relationship with the body and its positioning of itself in relation to it. There’s so much of a focus on the idea, on how the work strikes the mind — it’s rife with duality. Indeed, Conceptualist scion Sol LeWitt’s “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” can be surprisingly Cartesian at times.

February 5, 2016

Concept

Constraint and construction, body as page

Laura Goldstein

Poet and reader inside poem in procession.

I talk about meaning all day long. I don’t feel that language comes out of my body, but rather that I observe and recycle it. Maybe my voice originates in my body, but language is a visitor that changes form all the time. I use my body all day long. I don’t feel that I am my body, but that embodiment is an idea that I observe and recycle. Maybe I originate in my body, but I am a visitor that changes form all the time. Is the idea that emerges from this line of thinking a concept? I think about what I want to do with poetry all day long.

February 5, 2016