Två dikter och en subjektiv kommentar om konceptuell poesi

Abstract

Two Poems and a Subjective Comment on Conceptual Poetry

Since the editorial staff at Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap got the task of completing the material I sent them, this summary will be highly preliminary. As a writer, I only have some control over the final outcome.

However, the contribution originally consisted of two poems that apply a conceptual practice, and by a comment that discusses the phenomenon of ”conceptual poetry”. The statement that ”all poems are conceptual” is repeated and tested. Ernst Jandl, who wrote the text that the two poems use as a model, becomes, together with the American writer Kenneth Goldsmith, important voices in the commentary. The comment evolves into a criticism of Goldsmith’s definition of conceptual writing that the author of the article finds too strict. The comment does not join Goldsmith’s from Sol Lewitt’s appropiated definition of conceptual writing, which reads: ”When a writer uses a conceptual form of writing, it means that all of planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that creates the text.” The article ”Two Poems and a Subjective Comment on Conceptual Poetry” claims that there is nothing in ”beforehand” and thus the conceptual machinery can only occur and begin to act as a part of an ongoing process.

The two poems in the material make use of Ernst Jandl’s poem ”1944 45” from 1968 and expose it to different spatial and temporal movements. Through these  transpositions, other and today possibly more relevant conflictzones that the poems have created and still create, may come into  focus.