Articles - February 2016

Angelo Suárez’s ‘Philippine English’ and the language of Conceptual writing

Pages from the opening chapter of 'Philippine English.' Courtesy J. Gordon Faylor.

I would like to consider Angelo V. Suárez’s Philippine English: A Novel (Gauss PDF, 2015) as a testing ground for the political work Conceptual writing can accomplish. This means historicizing before interpreting.

February 5, 2016

Stanisław Dróżdż

From Conceptual poem to concept-shape

Brian Reed

In 1977 at the Foksal Gallery in Warsaw, the artist and poet Stanisław Dróżdż (1939–2009) exhibited an installation piece titled między (“between”). It consisted of a rectangular white box, roughly eleven feet tall, seventeen feet wide, and twenty-three feet long. Inside and out, this box was covered with the letters m, i, ę, d, z, and y, carefully distributed and arranged so that at no point could a viewer spell out the word między horizontally, vertically, or diagonally.

February 5, 2016

The blackness of Holly Melgard's 'Black Friday'

Anna Vitale

One of the questions I want to ask given the failure of some recent so-called Conceptual poetry is, what are metaphors for the production and experience of black life that do not primarily reproduce the trauma of antiblack racism? What metaphors can be repurposed in the service of sustaining black life?

One of the questions I want to ask given the failure of some recent so-called Conceptual poetry is, what are metaphors for the production and experience of black life that do not primarily reproduce the trauma of antiblack racism? What metaphors, although historically part of the maintenance of white supremacy, can be repurposed in the service of sustaining black life? And how?

February 5, 2016

한 :: Concept : Spirit : Break

Sueyeun Juliette Lee

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