Lots of conceptual writing links and clips.

I posted this for my experimental essay and memoir students, but I figured I’d double-up here. You will see me narrating this post all teacher-like, but you get the idea.

Most of these links come from Sina Queyras’s Conceptual Writing website.

constraint isn’t enough, not by a long shot. Aren’t we talking about disruption as a way of ordering disruption? Procedure as a mock-up of process? I guess I’m interested in what happens when avant garde practices are applied to more conventional strands of storytelling…Unreadablity as a feature of reading in extremis? I’m not sure what I’m looking for exists quite yet but I am sensing a kind of formally innovative, intelligent and emotive kind of fiction that is under some pressures, that uses found and sculpted language, that transforms in some new way, how we might look at our (excess) world…that helps us in fact, imagine it. — From the Introduction to Conceptual Fiction folio on Drunken Boat curated by Sina Queyras & Vanessa Place.

Right now, from that Drunken Boat issue, I really like Simon Wake’s “Pronominalization” (see if you can identify the source text) and Lizzy Edwards’ “28 Stolen beginnings, never endings,from the 2nd shelf from the floor.”

Check out this Collection of Oulipo Exercises from this site. Just one example of an Oulipoean writing exercise in action is Maureen Seaton and Denise Duhamel’s collaboraive poem “Hillbilling and Cooing.”

Conceptual Writing is automatic. It operates most efficiently when machines perpetuate it subconsciously. Conceptual Writing is infinitely flexible. It is obvious yet discreet, insidious yet desirable, powerful yet pathetic. It is despised, yet sought after. It is ubiquitous yet specific. It is both centralized and dispersed. The medium for Conceptual Writing is information, which is a mere receptacle for quantification — a domain within which information is both extracted and deployed. It is the grid again — the return of the Cartesian, but with a vengeance. This time, roving crosshairs — not unlike those of missile guidance systems — have been included. Conceptual Writing doesn’t have the pretense to find poetry all that important; in subsuming literature to the statistical, it announces the obsolescence of expression. — Kenneth Goldsmith

From Jen Bervin’s Nets, an erasure project of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

Kenneth Goldsmith’s Gallery of Conceptual Writing

Ubuweb‘s Anthology of Conceptual Writing

Christian Bok‘s Eunoia; reading from Chapter I. Another Christian Bok reading.

More sound poetry readings here on this blog.

Flarf Readings: Nada Gordon, Mitch Highfill

Stairway to Gilligan’s Island.

Drunk History, Volume 5.

Other things by Cory Arcangel: Things I Made.

A cento is a poetic form that combined lines from other works.

Found poetry is a whole other wing of appropriative writing. There are plenty of examples out there. One my own personal favorites is the collection of Phil Rizzuto’s found poems made from his often digressive commentary during Yankee games. Here’s one called “Prayer for the Captain”; it was set to music by composer Daniel Sonenberg.

http://soundcloud.com/shamantis/j-biebz-u-smile-800-slower

Above: Justin Bieber’s “U Smile” played 800 percent slower, first done by Nick Pittsinger.

Girl Talk’s collage-samples are the latest in the line of appropriative sound art. Here’s one clip.

Let’s not forget Bed Intruder and its many covers/appropriations. Covers here, here, here.