Craig Dworkin

Even I must say this: "Against Expression" is not "the" perfect anthology.

First things first: it is obviously rather partisan, in a trojan horse kind of way. It is not just of, but (especially) "for" conceptual writing (and in quite a polemic way, as if expression is necessarily excluded by the use of conceptual techniques). There are quite a few "avant la lettre" examples of what they consider conceptual writing (Diderot, Mallarmé, Tzara, Duchamp, Warhol are all here, but concrete poetry, for instance, just gets a mention), but the focus is on the recent or very recent people, some of them, of course, directly connected to the two editors, who also mean to promote in this way their cause...

The analogies used to explain why conceptual writing is bound to become a major thing of the present/future, in fact, are rather flawed: it doesn't look that certain that literature will change itself under the pressure of the Internet as much as painting was reinvented with the coming of photography. Then "literature" is not really that many decades behind visual arts. Besides Kosuth and Warhol, there are quite a few other contemporary artists who delved into writing, at least within the medium of the artist book. In fact, Kenneth Goldsmith himself actually comes from the same art world-slanted air. French artist Bernar Venet did in the '60s-'70s some of the same things as Goldsmith (http://hyperallergic.com/228238/the-languages-of-bernar-venets-conceptual-poetry/). Otherwise, there is some truth: it is much easier to practice conceptual writing now and make a reasonable aesthetic out of it - indeed, it shouldn't even be seen as so groundbreaking, but I don't see it as a rehash of Duchamp or Art & Language either.

Then there are so many authors, especially not English-speaking authors, that were left out (most of those in the book are from Canada, the USA and the UK - much less France and the surprisingly prolific Scandinavian countries. (For authors from some more parts of the world, please consult my "Bibliography of Conceptual Writing". And now sorry for the shameless plug!)

Of course, the female-to-male ratio also makes this index questionable, but now we also have the anthology "I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing By Women", which improves things quite a bit and comes with arguments that ought to be taken now in consideration.

All of these being said, "Against Expression" is, alongside "I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing By Women", "Notes on Conceptualisms" by Fitterman and Place, Perloff's "Unoriginal Genius" and a few other books, a still great resource for the time being. For me, at least, it was a re-introduction to experimental writing that met my writerly needs in a time when I was looking for something like this. It really made me re-evaluate my commitment to literature, my priorities... No, I didn't give up entirely on "lyrical poetry", but conceptual means give me now the access to do approaches I wanted to do ever since I started writing, but was not bold enough to go this far.… (meer)