Uncreative Writing!

 Read this brief interview with Kenneth Goldsmith about his practice of Uncreative Writing and how he uses it in the teaching of his classes at UPenn. Goldsmith is perhaps most famous for his work as founder of ubu.com, a repository of all manner of avant-garde art and literature. 

Your (ungraded but required) assignment for Thursday is to type an exact transcription of Jasmine L. Combs' spoken-word poem "Object." The link is below in the post about our future collaboration with the Delaware Contemporary.

This exercise should probably take about 20-30 minutes. The best way to do this is to open up a word document side by side with the spoken-word video. Listen carefully, then press pause, and transcribe the poem word-by-word. Continue until the end of the poem. Once you have all the words precisely transcribed, start to think about how they appear on your page. Does it look like a poem? A list? Something else? You can make the text bigger or smaller, you can change the font, or use italics, bold, etc. You can also keep it fairly straight without using expressive typography. The choice is yours. Upload this to Populi no later than 9:00 am, Thursday, February 4. Questions: csmith@dcad.edu.