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Rapid Eye Movement

American poet Kenneth Goldsmith’s recent re-casting of Sol Lewitt’s 1967 article “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” as “Paragraphs on Conceptual Writing” flags an emerging tendency in contemporary poetics. For Goldsmith, as for Lewitt, “the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work.” Much like the conceptual art of the 1960s, in which all planning and decisions were made beforehand and the execution was a perfunctory affair, a number of contemporary writers have attempted to eliminate the arbitrary, the capricious and the subjective from their texts. Recent readings by conceptual poets held at the Whitney Museum of Art in New York, as well as a range of academic activity, illustrate the importance of this emerging field of poetics. My research makes use of conceptual procedures in order to investigate social relations and their articulation in language. The conceptual procedures and appropriation of language explored in Rapid Eye Movement were initially developed in The Persons. Rapid Eye Movement collects and modifies a large amount of found textual material related to dreams. It presents two bands of text which run continuously throughout the book; the top band collages together fragments from actual dreams, while the lower band juxtaposes writing on the subject of dreams. The book thus investigates the use of the sign “dream” in a number of social discourses, including advertising, contemporary literature, psychoanalysis, popular culture, song lyrics, religious literature. Although my book makes use of conceptual procedures, the specific form and contents of this project are entirely unique. In Against Expression: Contemporary Conceptual Poetics (Northwestern University Press, 2010) Craig Dworkin describes the book favourably by suggesting that it yokes form and content together, thereby “bringing the disjunctive jump cuts of the dream to the parataxis of collage.”