Conceptual Poetry and Proprietary Authorship

Experimental Poetry and the Avantgarde

• Innovative
• Breaks conventions
• Introduces new technique
• Incorporates Sound and Image in new ways
• Incorporates shock value
• "Poetic meaning" is changed or subverted

Conceptual Poetry and Material Poetry:
Poetry is created through a process of deletion and appropriation of other materials. Poetry is seen as a process of "choice" and "framing"and is a collaborative process between the reader, the author and sometimes the internet

Discussion Questions

• How does the use of another author's language complicate ideas of the authorial voice? Does it?
• Who do these texts belong to? Are they "new"?
• Can these really be qualified as poems? Are they authored by poets? Is this just adapation?
• Can language be owned?

Jen Bervin

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Tom Phillips

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Ronald Johnson

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Poetic Influence:
The Anxiety of Influence - Harold Bloom

"But poetic influence need not make poets less original; as often it makes them more original, though not necessarily better" (7).
"But the poem is now held open to the precursor, where once it was closed, and the uncanny effect is that the new poem's achievement makes it seem to us, not as though the precursor were writing it, but as though the later poet himself had written the precursor's characteristic work" (16).

Discussion Questions

• How does the use of another author's language complicate ideas of the authorial voice? Does it?
• Who do these texts belong to? Are they "new"?
• Can these really be qualified as poems? Are they authored by poets? Is this just adapation?
• Can language be owned?