Kenneth Goldsmith

Kenneth Goldsmith (born 1961) was an American poet and critic, active between the years of 1993 and 2023.

He was the founding editor of UbuWeb and an artist-in-residence at the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing (CPCW) at the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught.

He was also a senior editor of PennSound at the University of Pennsylvania.

Born in Freeport, New York, he was trained as a sculptor at the Rhode Island School of Design and graduated with a BFA in 1984.

Goldsmith worked for many years within the art world as a text-based artist and sculptor before becoming a writer.

In 1993, Goldsmith embarked on a collaboration with avant-garde vocalist Joan La Barbara, resulting in a CD and book 73 Poems published by Brooklyn's Permanent Press.

He hosted a weekly radio show at WFMU from 1995 until June 2010.

Goldsmith hosted a weekly show on WFMU, the New Jersey-based freeform radio station, from 1995 until June 2010, using the broadcast name of "Kenny G".

The show was an extension of Goldsmith's writing experiments, his pedagogy and UbuWeb.

His programs were titled (for various extended periods) "Kenny G's Hour of Pain," "Anal Magic" and "Intelligent Design."

He has also had numerous collaborations with musicians and composers.

In 1998, the Whitney Museum of American Art commissioned vocalist Theo Bleckmann to stage an interpretation of Fidget.

He published 32 books including ten books of poetry, notably Fidget (2000), Soliloquy (2001), Day (2003) and his American trilogy, The Weather (2005), Traffic (2007), and Sports (2008), 'Seven American Deaths and Disasters (2011), and 'Capital: New York Capital of the Twentieth Century (2015).

In 2004, Goldsmith released a CD with People Like Us called Nothing Special and has done many radio performances with Vicki Bennett.

The next year he collaborated with guitarist Alan Licht to stage an evening length performance of The Weather, as well as excerpts from Fidget.

He has also collaborated with musician David Grubbs with texts from Fidget.

In 2004, he curated a CD for the Sonic Arts Network in London called The Agents of Impurity.

Creative and critical responses to his work are archived at the Electronic Poetry Center with several being consolidated in Open Letter: Kenneth Goldsmith and Conceptual Poetics (2005).

Notable addressees of Goldsmith's work include those of the literary critics Marjorie Perloff, Craig Dworkin, Sianne Ngai, Robert Archambeau, and Johanna Drucker, as well as poets Bruce Andrews, Christian Bök, Darren Wershler-Henry, Christine Wertheim and Caroline Bergvall.

In 2006, he performed in the TRANS-WARHOL, Chamber Opera, a libretto based on his book I'll Be Your Mirror; The Andy Warhol Interviews.

The project was a collaboration with choreographer Nicolas Musin, composer Philippe Schoeller and Ensemble Alternance.

In 2006 he organized a CD for the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston called The Body is a Sound Factory.

Also in 2006, he organized an 8-hour-long performance at the Sculpture Center (New York City) of Erik Satie's Vexations "Pianoless Vexations" (UbuWeb) for any instrument other than piano.

Motivated by his own 2007 manifesto "Uncreative Writing" and notion that "any language can be poetry", Goldsmith has been the editor of one continuous project of innovative poetics, comprising both the study and practice of conceptual poetry as a writer, academic, and the curator of the archives at UbuWeb.

In his own words, "I guess what I write is poetry. But I clearly don’t write traditional poems. I’ve never written a sonnet. Poetry is so generous that it can take a hybrid practice like mine and claim it as its own and support it in a way fiction isn’t able to."

He places conceptual poetic practice within the realm of activist poetry.

His process, which involves self-induced constraints, has produced 600 pages of rhyming phrases ending with the sound r, sorted by syllables and alphabetized (No. 111 2.7.93-10.20.96, 1997), everything he said for a week (Soliloquy, 2001), every move his body made during a thirteen-hour period (Fidget, 2000), a year of transcribed weather reports (The Weather, 2005) and one edition of The New York Times, September 1, 2000, transcribed as Day (2003).

Goldsmith's practice embraces the performance of the writer as process and plagiarism — as content.

The opera premiered at the Bâtiment des forces motrices in Geneva, in March 2007.

Goldsmith has written about experimental music on the article A Popular Guide to Unpopular Music and has curated many musical events and compact discs.

He was a musical curator for the Whitney Museum of American Art's The American Century, Part 2, which included 73 Poems.

In 2009, Goldsmith co-curated the exhibition Intermission: Films From a Heroic Future at the Canadian Centre for Architecture.

The exhibition surveyed the evolving relationship between speed and space and the accelerating pace of life through different artistic films from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

He also was the author of three books of essays, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age (2011), Wasting Time on The Internet (2016), and Duchamp Is My Lawyer: The Polemics, Pragmatics, and Poetics of UbuWeb (2020).

In 2013, he was appointed the Museum of Modern Art's first poet laureate.

From 26 July to 31 August 2013, Goldsmith curated a conceptual art project called Printing out the Internet in collaboration with LABOR and UbuWeb, that invited the public to print and send pages from the Internet to an art gallery in Mexico City, with the intention to literally print out the entire Internet.

Goldsmith dedicated the exhibition to Aaron Swartz, an Internet activist who committed suicide while facing federal charges of illegally downloading and disseminating millions of files from the digital library JSTOR.

As Goldsmith said in an interview, "The amount of what he liberated was enormous — we can’t begin to understand the magnitude of his action until we begin to materialize and actualize it. This project tries to bring that point home."

By the end of the project, Goldsmith had accumulated over 10 tonnes of paper from more than 20,000 contributors.

In Venice at the “Hillary: The Hillary Clinton Emails,” a work on display in a balcony jutting out over a supermarket at the Despar Teatro Italia during the 58th Biennale of Visual Arts, Clinton made a surprise visit on Tuesday September 10, 2019, to this work of political theater and performance art, where she spent an hour reading her emails.