A Poetics Defined in the Paratext

This study uses data visualisation tools in an examination of Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (2011) to consider the ways in which the category of poetry is demarcated in this contemporary movement, defined primarily by its US practitioners, but with an international corpus of associated praxes. Conceptual Writing, in claiming the status of 21st century avant-garde, designates its works as poetry in terms of qualities other than their poeticity. To be counted as avant-garde poetry, Conceptual Writing has to claim a position rather than a set of linguistic properties. In the Anthology, this position is asserted through the delineation of a genealogy originating in the early twentieth century. In order to be defensibly avant-garde, however, it must resist the institutionalising processes of tradition and canonisation such a genealogy potentiates. To this end, the Anthology problematizes its own authority, insisting on a ‘curatorial’ stance ‘beyond received histories’, and proposing a loose and temporary assemblage as opposed to a tradition or a canon.
Using data gathered from the introductory essays and the preambles to each writer’s work, my analysis looks beyond these claims to capture the ways in which the Anthology legitimises Conceptual Writing through the deployment of particular paratextual devices. My aim is to understand how the compositional forms available to the anthologist are used to shape the reception of these practices. I use data visualisation tools drawn from the field of statistical analysis to make manifest those significant underlying patterns in the paratext which are obscured by other, more overt, devices. In using these forms of analysis, I show how the patterns which emerge reveal a covert enactment of the very institutionalisation the Anthology of Conceptual Writing claims to avoid.