Kenneth Goldsmith with Christian Bök
Tue Jun 25 2013
3:30 PM – 5:00 PM
FREE Members
$15 Non-Members
Click the button below or call the Harbourfront Centre Box Office at 416.973.4000 to purchase tickets. Members can reserve their free tickets by contacting Marnie Mandel, Events & Fundraising Assistant, at 416.954.0013 or mmandel@thepowerplant.org. Please note that if the event is sold out, reserved Members’ tickets that are not picked up by 7:20 PM will be released.
Brigantine Room, Harbourfront Centre
In conjunction with Postscript, artists included in the exhibition will participate in a conversation about aspects of their respective practices.
Experimental poets Kenneth Goldsmith and Christian Bök are two of the earliest founders of the conceptual writing movement. They will discuss an unofficial history and overview of conceptual literature, concluding with a reading and presentation of a range of conceptual texts.
Kenneth Goldsmith is the author of eleven books of poetry, notably Fidget (2000), Soliloquy (2001), Day (2003) and his American trilogy The Weather (2005), Traffic (2007), and Sports (2008). He is founding editor of the online archive UbuWeb and the editor of I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, which was the basis for the opera Trans-Warhol, which premiered in Geneva in 2007. He teaches writing at The University of Pennsylvania, where he is a senior editor of PennSound, an online poetry archive. He held The Anschutz Distinguished Fellow Professorship in American Studies at Princeton University for 2009–10 and received the Qwartz Electronic Music Award in Paris in 2009. In May 2011, he was invited to read at President Obama's A Celebration of American Poetry at The White House, where he also held a poetry workshop with First Lady Michelle Obama. In 2011, he co-edited Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing, and published a book of essays entitled Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age. Goldsmith participated in dOCUMENTA(13) in Kassel, Germany, 2012. He was appointed the Museum of Modern Art’s first Poet Laureate in 2013.
Christian Bök is the author of Eunoia—a bestselling work of experimental literature, which won the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2002. He has created artificial languages for two television shows: Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley’s Amazon. Bök has earned many accolades for his virtuoso recitals of “sound-poems” (particularly Die Ursonate by Kurt Schwitters) and he has performed lectures and readings at more then 200 venues around the world in the last four years. Bök is on the verge of finishing his current project entitled The Xenotext—a work that requires him to engineer the genome of an unkillable bacterium so that the DNA of such an organism might become not only a durable archive that stores a poem for eternity, but also an operant machine that writes a poem in response. Bök teaches in the Department of English at the University of Calgary.