Is Conceptual Poetry Dead?

That's the question recently posed by the Poetry Foundation.

From the piece...

Vanessa Place has suggested that, if Conceptual Literature is dead, it is so, only because poetry itself is dead—persisting, like a spectre, which does not yet know that it must keep its rendezvous with the afterworld, preferring instead to malinger in the a shadow of its own demise. “If poetry is dead, act like a zombie,” she advises. I really admire the wit of her salvo in this conversation—(and I wish that I might have said half of her epigrams myself…). I think that, in contrast to Drucker, who feels the regret of a coroner, declaring the time of death at a crime scene, Place gleefully confesses to the murder, holding out her wrists to be handcuffed. I admire the willingness on her part to take the rap for the rest of us—(and besides, nobody typically remembers who gets to perform the medical autopsy in the story of the crime anyway…).

Conceptual Literature argues that whatever passes for creativity in workshops on poetry has now become entirely moribund—and thus all our acts of both wearisome discipline and shameless plagiarism set out to perform a kind of spectacle of “uncreativity,” meant to highlight not only the deadness of the lyric voice, but also the boredom of a modern milieu, whose word processing and data management have forever altered the concept of writing itself. I often joke with my students that, given their experiences, the word “microwaveable” needs to appear more frequently in their lyric poems (since I cannot easily tell, through diction alone, whether or not such poems have, in fact, been written before or after the invention of television—let alone YouTube…)—so I suggest that this fact may be potentially problematic….