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Archameau would be also. I think his point is not so much in disagreement with you as with those claims he sees as
advocating Cambridge Poetry as a political force other than in the more refined sense you describe political poetry as
ideally being.
[The discussion ended at this point]
Jeffrey Side
A Facebook discussion about conceptual poetry
August 2013
This is a very important quote from Robert Archambeau’s article ‘Charmless and Interesting: What Conceptual
Poetry Lacks and What It’s Got’:
In what sense is pure conceptualism poetry, beyond the institutional sense of being distributed and
considered through the channels by which poetry is distributed and considered?
It hits the nail on the head. No one from the conceptual poetry camp has been able to answer it, as far as I know.
Michael Robbins
I don’t think that’s a problem. “Poetry” is an honorific-nothing more-that’s granted to different productions at
different times. The “institutional sense” is sufficient. (I am, obviously, anti-conceptualism, but “it’s not poetry”
seems to me an especially weak position.)
Jeffrey Side
Thanks, Michael. I’ll take it from now on that every comment you make in a lexical form is a poem!
Michael Robbins
That doesn’t follow, of course. You can call anything a poem if you want to & no one will pay you the slightest bit of
attention. Many thousands of people calling something a poem, including the arbiters of poetic distribution, might
just make a difference, tho.
Robert Archambeau
Well, I was talking about institutions of distribution and reception, specifically. The Schoedinger’s cat scenario-a
sestina written but left in a drawer-would lead a lot of people to want to expand “institution” to include things like
“the tradition referenced” or something. And a bunch of linguists and formalists don’t even care about institutions,
but look at things like the kind of language function that’s stressed or whatever (Shklovsky, Jacobson, etc.). I’m not
prepared to talk about all, or even some, of conceptualism in terms of those things, but I wish someone would.
Jeffrey Side
I agree, Bob, that’s how I took your quote. In an institutional sense, conceptualism is regarded as poetry, and this
complicates any objections to it as such, for once we accept unquestionably the institutional status of it as such, we
have lost an effective means to criticise it.
Michael Robbins
Well, again, this is a non sequitur. It just makes no sense to say that because conceptualism is poetry, we have no
means to criticize it. Bob is not making such a point. And although it seems to me quite misleading to say that
Shklovsky & Jakobson have no interest in institutions, neither provides grounds for denying the honorific to
conceptualism-on the contrary, in fact. This line of questioning is a red herring.
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