Conceptual poetry

Conceptual writing (often used interchangeably with conceptual poetry) is a term which describes a range of experimental texts based on techniques such as appropriation (the "literary ready-made"), texts which may be reduced to a set of procedures, a generative instruction or constraint, a "concept" which precedes and is considered more important than the resulting text(s). As a category, it is closely related to conceptual art.

Although conceptual poetry may have freely circulated in relation to some text-based Conceptual art works (during the heyday of the movement), "conceptual writing" was coined as a term in 2003, while The UbuWeb Anthology of Conceptual Writing was created by Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith (the on-line anthology differs from the 2011 print anthology). Marjorie Perloff organized a conference with the title Conceptual Poetry and Its Others in the summer of 2008, at the University of Arizona Poetry Center.Derek Beaulieu, Robert Fitterman and Vanessa Place have also used the terms "conceptual poetry" or "conceptual poetics" in the following years.

First notable difference from conceptual art is that textual-orientated gestures (such as copying, erasing or replacing words) prevail in conceptual writing. The second difference is that, while conceptual strategies "are embedded in the writing process", recent conceptual writing has a relationship with the development and rise of the computers and especially of the Internet: "With the rise of the Web, writing has met its photography. [...] Faced with an unprecedented amount of available digital text, writing needs to redefine itself to adapt to the new environment of textual abundance. [...] The computer encourages us to mimic its workings."

The third difference is the concept of thinkership. Robert Fitterman writes that: "Conceptual Writing, in fact, might best be defined not by the strategies used but by the expectations of the readership or thinkership." "Pure conceptualism negates the need for reading in the traditional textual sense—one does not need to “read" the work as much as think about the idea of the work."

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