ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

 

Several of the essays in this book were inspired by pieces initially commissioned by the Poetry Foundation, where they appeared as a weeklong journal on their site in January 2007; other ideas were developed on their blog, Harriet. I’d like to thank Emily Warn, who after hearing my talk at Marjorie Perloff’s MLA Presidential Panel in 2006, offered to publish it on the foundation’s site, which has resulted in a long and happy collaboration. My thanks also to Don Share, Christian Wiman, Cathy Halley, and Travis Nichols for their open-mindedness and continuing support.

Portions of “Language as Material” appeared in New Media Poetics (Cambridge: MIT, 2006) and was first written for the New Media Poetry Conference in October 2002 at the University of Iowa. Other parts of the chapter were given at Digital Poetics at SUNY Buffalo in 2000. “Infallible Processes: What Writing Can Learn from Visual Art” evolved from two gallery talks commissioned by Dia:Beacon in 2008 and 2009. An early version of “Why Appropriation?” was given for the “untitled:speculations,” a CalArts conference held in 2008 at the Disney REDcat Theatre and again at Cabinet Space in 2009 in Brooklyn.

Originally this book began as a project on sampling with Marcus Boon, but ended up splitting into two separate boks, Uncreative Writing and Boon’s great In Praise of Copying. Although the two books map different territories, they both stem from the same ten days between Christmas and New Years almost a decade ago.

This book developed over years of conversation with my peers, many of whom I write about here. Without this decade-and-a-half-long ongoing discourse, this book in its present form would not exist.

Thanks the University of Pennsylvania for allowing these words to be put into practice. In particular, I’m grateful for the support of Al Filreis and Charles Bernstein at the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing and to Claudia Gould and Ingrid Schaffner at the Institute of Contemporary Art.

I’d like to acknowledge Princeton University’s Department of American Studies for granting me their Anschutz Distinguished Professorship in the winter of 2009, which provided the support and environment where these ideas could take root. Thanks to Princeton’s Hendrik Hartog and Susan Braun.

At Columbia University Press, the careful efforts of Susan Pensak made this a stronger book. And I can’t thank my editor, Philip Leven-thal, enough for reading this book closer than it deserved to be read, for shaping it, saving it, and for giving me the opportunity to see it into print. His challenges and provocations pushed this book to places I’d never imagined.

The patience and devotion of my wife Cheryl Donegan, along with the feisty playfulness of my sons Finnegan and Cassius, made for a rock-solid writing environment over the years it took to pen this.

Special thanks to Marjorie Perloff for her continuing support to the most extraordinary degree. My admiration and gratitude for her work never ceases.

And finally, this book is dedicated to the “six guys, all in a line, all basically the same age, same stocky build, same bad haicuts [sic], and black T-shits [sic]”. You know who you are.