At the Zinc bar launch for All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems, Kenneth Goldsmith read "Lift Off" – a poem he also write about in Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age. The poem, which was originally published in Poetic Justice (Baltimore: Pod Books, 1979), is a transcription from the correction tape of an IBM Selectric typewriter.
Here is Kenny's script –– pdf & here is Kenny's reading: (7:20): MP3
Erica Hunt, Bruce Boone, Peter Inman, Jackson Mac Low, David Antin, Barbara Guest, Lorenzo Thomas, Steve McCaffery, Kathleen Fraser, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Nathaniel Mackey, Ron Silliman, Bob Perelman, Anne Waldman, Nick Piombino
In 1985, Eileen Myles was the new director of the St. Mark's Poetry Project in New York. She asked me to curate a lecture series, the first such program at the church. I modelled the series at the Poetry Project on my earlier series New York Talk, giving it the amusing title, given the sometimes seeming resistance to poetics at the St. Marks at the time, St. Marks Talks. And talk it did.
The poet, associated with the Brazillian concrete poetry movement, died today. He was 85 and lived in Sao Paulo. With Augusto and Haroldo de Campos he edited the magazne Noigandres e Invenção and they together wrote Teoria da Poesia Concreta (1965).
Perhaps his most famcous concrete poem is this one, from 1957:
