What is conceptual writing, and how does it differ from conceptual art? This petite, wallet-sized prime offers up a collection of notes, quotes and inquiries on conceptual writing – and its emerging place in the coalescing worlds of poetry, creativity and critical theory.
“Conceptual writing teaches us to write about the wrench, not the monkey. Take Notes and get the idea...”
– Christian Bök, winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize
Robert Fitterman is the author of 12 books of poetry, including his long poem Metropolis, Holocaust Museum, now we are friends, and Rob the Plagiarist. He teaches writing and poetry at New York University and at the Milton Avery School of Graduate Studies at Bard College.
Vanessa Place is CEO of VanessaPlace Inc., a trans-national corporation whose sole mission is to design and manufacture objects to meet the poetic needs of the human heart, face, and form. She is the author of Dies: A Sentence (Les Figues Press), a 50,000-word, one-sentence prose poem, and the post-conceptual epic La Medusa (Fiction Collective 2). Place is co-founder of Les Figues Press, described by critic Terry Castle as “an elegant vessel for experimental American writing of an extraordinarily assured and ingenious sort.”