Kenneth Goldsmith
| Kenneth Goldsmith | |
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Kenneth Goldsmith reading at President Obama's A Celebration of American Poetry at the White House on May 11, 2011
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| Born | 1961 Freeport, New York |
| Occupation | poet, critic |
| Nationality | American |
| Period | 1993 - present |
| Notable works | Day |
| Website | |
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Kenneth Goldsmith (born 1961) is an American poet. He is the founding editor of UbuWeb and is a senior editor of PennSound at the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches. He hosted a weekly radio show at WFMU from 1995 until June 2010. He has published ten books of poetry, notably Fidget (2000), Soliloquy (2001), Day (2003) and his American trilogy, The Weather (2005), Traffic (2007), and Sports (2008). He is the author of a book of essays, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age (2011). In 2013, he was appointed the Museum of Modern Art's first poet laureate.
Born in Freeport, New York, he was trained as a sculptor at the Rhode Island School of Design and graduated with a BFA in 1984. Goldsmith worked for many years within the art world as a text-based artist and sculptor before becoming a writer.
Motivated by his own 2007 manifesto "Uncreative Writing" and notion that "any language can be poetry", Goldsmith has been the editor of one continuous project of innovative poetics, comprising both the study and practice of conceptual poetry as a writer, academic, and the curator of the archives at UbuWeb. In his own words, "I guess what I write is poetry. But I clearly don’t write traditional poems. I’ve never written a sonnet. Poetry is so generous that it can take a hybrid practice like mine and claim it as its own and support it in a way fiction isn’t able to." He places conceptual poetic practice within the realm of activist poetry. His process, which involves self-induced constraints, has produced 600 pages of rhyming phrases ending with the sound r, sorted by syllables and alphabetized (No. 111 2.7.93-10.20.96, 1997), everything he said for a week (Soliloquy, 2001), every move his body made during a thirteen-hour period (Fidget, 2000), a year of transcribed weather reports (The Weather, 2005) and one edition of The New York Times, September 1, 2000, transcribed as Day (2003). Goldsmith's practice embraces the performance of the writer as process and plagiarism — as content.
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