Words and Sentences and What We Make of Them: Poet and Artist Kenneth Goldsmith to Read at TU

On this installment of ST, we speak with the poet and performance/conceptual artist, Kenneth Goldsmith, who has appeared on The Colbert Report, held a poetry reading in the White House, and published more than ten books. He's also the first-ever poet laureate to be selected by The Museum of Modern Art -- and he'll offer a free-to-the-public poetry reading tonight, Tuesday the 22nd, at 9pm in Tyrell Hall on the TU campus. (More info on that event, which is presented by the TU Department of English, can be found here.) Goldsmith -- the founding editor of the online avant-garde archive UbuWeb, who also teaches poetics and poetic practice at the University of Pennsylvania -- began his career in art as a sculptor, having studied at the Rhode Island School of Design. But as he began to create more and more art that used "found text" purely as a kind of eye-grabbing visual media -- like paint or ink or charcoal -- he became more and more interested in using written words in his art works. This led, eventually, to creating word collages, reworked textual cut-ups, and so forth -- a manner of writing that's more akin to rearranging or re-contextualizing than to composing. As Goldsmith once put it: "Pointing at the best information trumps creating the best information." He's also the author of a book of essays, "Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age," and he edited the book, "I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews."