Against Conceptual Poetry

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. If you search on references to Ron Silliman in Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing, edited by Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith (Northwestern University Press, 2011), you find the following: table of contents, pg. xv, Ron Silliman, 531, from Sunset Debris, 28; in the opening to Great Expectations: A Novel (New York: Grove, 1983), Kathy Acker appropriates, deforms, summarizes, and rewrites passages from Charles Dickens's Great Expectations and Pierre Guyotat's Eden, Eden, Eden to solve the equation plagiarism + pornography = autobiography. For the formulation of this equivalence, see Ron Silliman's "E- Mail Interview" (Quarry West 34 [1998]: 13). 53; as is the entirety of Ron Silliman's "Sunset Debris." In an interview with Tom Beckett, Silliman explains that "every sentence is supposed to remind the reader of his or her inability to respond" (The Difficulties 2, no. 2 [1985], 45). But the work...