Friday, May 30, 2008

language, period style of the 80s

Lots of people I know are currently in Tucson at the Conceptual Poetry Conference. Kenneth Goldsmith is blogging for Harriet (at the Poetry Foundation) and gives us fresh accounts of papers and other doings in Tucson. Today he writes about Marjorie Perloff's keynote speech in which 21st-century century avant-garde poetics is shaped by and of course itself evinces the new transnational and global culture of the internet. Along the way she describes Language Poetry as the "period style of the 1980s" - not meaning anything particularly negative about the phrase, I assume from what Goldsmith writes.