I actually like most of the conceptual poetry I have read, and I think that if you take its claims seriously you might believe it, especially in Goldsmith’s unoriginal moment, may have spared us from the excesses of AI poetry, made that an empty zeitgeist, however newsworthy it all is. Grateful, and still hallucinating a post AI uptake on Barthes.
it’s imitation, rather than pastiche/parody, if I say it is.
Just flicking through this excellent collection, a collage of (“domestic”) realist lyricism with avant-garde lightness and disruptiveness. I like them very much.
A book of selected poems from Shearsman. Search, the second of two English language personas, seems to just write doggerel, but his auto-epitaph is interesting (the date is missing), especially in those terms: quoting from the 4th and 49th-51st lines from that 57 line poem
He filled with madness many a song…
But let him lie at peace for ever
p100-101
Far from the eyes and mouths of men
And from what him from them did sever.
The phrasing is unusual, as in all these poems (Frazer mentions Pessoa’s Elizabethan early influences).
The later (1924-1933) poems included here seem like mature work, though it’s not immediately clear why. Perhaps he can express his curiosity more clearly.