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Kenneth Goldsmith Biography

Kenneth Goldsmith

Kenneth Goldsmith (born 1961) is an American poet and critic. He is the founding editor of UbuWeb and is a senior editor of PennSound at the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches. He hosted a weekly radio show at WFMU from 1995 until June 2010. He has published ten books of poetry, notably Fidget (2000), Soliloquy (2001), Day (2003) and his American trilogy, The Weather (2005), Traffic (2007), and Sports (2008). He is the author of a book of essays, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age (2011). In 2013, he was appointed the Museum of Modern Art's first poet laureate.

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Kenneth Goldsmith Quotes

For me, Twitter is a public persona. It's UbuWeb or Kenneth Goldsmith (as opposed to Kenny Goldsmith). I don't interact. It's a lousy form for conversation and opinion (what can you really say in 140 characters?), but a wonderful propaganda and sloganeering tool. I use it as a one-way street.

Character, Characters, Kenny, Say, Tools, Use

Conceptual writing is looking for that "Aha!" moment, when something so simple, right under our noses, is revealed as being awe- inspiring, profound, and transcendent.

Writing, Simple, Profound, Revealed, Aha

New York City is just one node on the global cultural scene now. Social media reflects the state of the world, so I've become more devoted to that. To be a NYC artist today feels local and small. Social media feels now.

Artist, Cultural, Feels, Scene, Today, World

The moment we shake our addiction to narrative and give up our strong-headed intent that language must say something "meaningful," we open ourselves up to different types of linguistic experience, which could include sorting and structuring words in unconventional ways: by constraint, by sound, by the way words look, and so forth, rather than always feeling the need to coerce them toward meaning.

Coerce, Giving Up, Intent, Look, Meaningful, Strong

I've been trolled lots on Twitter. But I understand trolls for what they are and I don't let them get to me. They take my bait, so I'm in charge of the discourse.

Bait, Discourse, Take, Troll, Trolled, Trolls

Twitter is not art. But it inspires me in the way that art used to inspire me.

Art, Inspire, Inspires, Way

Poets think in short lines. Unless you're Samuel Beckett, Twitter might be more difficult for novelists.

Difficult, Lines, Novelists, Poets, Thinking

Short attention span is the new avant-garde. Everyone complains that we can no longer intake huge chunks of text. I find that a reason to celebrate. It's something that has deep roots in modernism, stretching from the Futurists' use of typography to Pound's use of ideograms to concrete poetry. David Markson feels particularly relevant now. Twitter is the revenge of modernism.

Attention, Celebrate, Complaining, Revenge, Typography

It's hard to be understood when addressing many people at once. How can you ever know if you're being understood? So, I've just started being intelligently provocative. And people take the bait.

Bait, Hard, People, Provocative

My books are better thought about than read. They're insanely dull and unreadable. But they're wonderful to talk about and think about, to dip in and out of, to hold, to have on your shelf.

Book, Books, Dull, Shelf, Thinking, Unreadable

Language is material to shape and mold, not only a transparent or invisible medium for communication, business contracts, or telling stories.

Communication, Mold, Shape, Stories

What I'm doing in writing has been thoroughly and exhaustively explored in other fields like visual art, music, and cinema, yet somehow it's never really been tested on the page.

Art, Cinema, Fields, Visual, Writing

All of our media is made of language: our films, our music, our images, and of course our words. How different this is from analog production, where, if you were somehow able to peel back the emulsion from, say, a photograph, you wouldn't find a speck of language lurking below the surface.

Different, Media, Our Words, Speck, Surface

It's not plagiarism in the digital age -- it's repurposing.

Age, Digital, Digital Age, Plagiarism, Repurposing

If you work on something a little bit every day, you end up with something that is massive.

Day, Ends, Littles, Massive, Work

I think that the special thing about radio is the off switch. If something's not pleasing you, turn it off.

Radio, Special, Switch, Think, Thinking

My favorite method of encryption is chunking revolutionary documents inside a mess of JPEG or MP3 code and emailing it off as an "image" or a "song. " But besides functionality, code also possesses literary value. If we frame that code and read it through the lens of literary criticism, we will find that the past hundred years of modernist and postmodernist writing have demonstrated the artistic value of similar seemingly arbitrary arrangements of letters.

Demonstrated, Past, Song, Writing, Years

I don’t trust painting. At least not in New York. Most painting here relies on formula and repetition, whoring itself to the market. There seems to be no risk and once a painter gets a strategy, very little exploration. As a result, I stopped thinking about painting a long time ago. I prefer forms of art that are more market-resistant, more idea-based, more - for lack of a better word - risky.

Art, Gets, New York, Risk, Stopped, Thinking

I never wanted my books to be mistaken for poetry or fiction books; I wanted to write reference books. But instead of referring to something, they refer to nothing.

Book, Books, Fiction, Refer, Reference, Writing

And I think this is the real epiphany: the ways in which culture is distributed become profoundly more intriguing as a cultural artifact itself. What we've experienced is an inversion of consumption, one in which we've come to prefer the acts of acquisition over that which we are acquiring, the bottles over the wine.

Come, Real, Thinking, Wine

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