Conceptualism and Craft _ with K. Silem Mohammad

Workshop by Small Press Traffic

July 6-9, 2009
6:00pm - 9:00pm

California College of the Arts
1111 8th Street
San Francisco, CA

email: smallpresstraffic [at] gmail [dot] com

This four-day workshop will begin by examining and rehearsing various techniques central to Conceptualist poetics, broadly considered so as to encompass appropriation, transcription, and other versions of what Kenneth Goldsmith has called “uncreative writing,” as well as the deliberately awkward and expressively debased gestures associated with Flarf. We will then look at these techniques in relation to older and more traditional notions of craft: can there be coherent criteria for craft-based evaluation of texts written using blankly conceptual or intentionally “bad” methods? Do any of the familiar aesthetic categories still apply, and if so, how?

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$125 fee ($100 for students and SPT members)

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K. Silem Mohammad is the author of three books of poetry: Breathalyzer (Edge Books, 2008), A Thousand Devils (Combo Books, 2004), and Deer Head Nation (Tougher Disguises, 2003). His work has been featured in numerous journals and anthologies, including The Best American Poetry 2004, Bay Poetics, and A Best of Fence, as well as the forthcoming Flarf: An Anthology of Flarf, which he is co-editing with Sharon Mesmer, Nada Gordon, and Gary Sullivan. With Anne Boyer, he edits the poetry magazine "Abraham Lincoln". He is Associate Professor of English and Writing at Southern Oregon University in Ashland.