"Conceptual Poetry". Sounds, on the face of it, like the same kind of catachresis you get with "Language Poetry". Abuse of terminology. "Language Poetry" can be forgiven, as it's kind of a cute way of expressing that project's self-consciousness about the verbal "material". But "Conceptual Poetry"... - all poetry is conceptual. How about just calling it "Ersatz Poetry"?

I can understand, I think, one motivation for work like this : it's a reaction against the over-seriousness & professionalization in poetry. Not that poetry isn't sometimes a VERY serious activity; but I've been doing quite a bit of looking into & reading about Jasper Johns (a very serious artist) lately, & that's having an influence on my current view... the idea of "transitional objects", things upon which we project or re-project our original psychic bond with a parent... - toys, play objects... & how important this is, in art- & symbol-making...

I guess what I'm trying to get at is that poetry-making is similar to painting & art-making - it is the cherishing of play- or fetish-objects... the poem is fundamentally a toy or play-object : we love it for this fascination-aspect in itself, not simply for it's serious import or thematic messages about life-at-large...

- but how can we play with our toys if the whole milieu is so seriously vocational? A market, a school, a competition... (not that I'm against competition, really...)

Poems are toys, gizmos. Intellectual frisbees. Free-floating, free-standing. Paradoxically, they have to be real good toys before that can be taken seriously as "statements". I think the activity of visual artists (like Johns) provides examples of this. You have to be ravished by the thing itself, before you will expend time & energy to examine, reflect, extrapolate meanings from it...

Of course, poetry encompasses both, being made of words & ideas... & what I see in these catachrestic appropriations ("language", "conceptual") is a kind of grabbing-of-the-toys... (maybe this is another term for "branding")...

But to me, this branding activity is too much appropriation & not enough attention to the thing itself, the actual "fetish"... look at Jasper Johns & you see a master of the "thing"... (& the deep story of that thing)... branding is almost a way of short-cutting the process : it's fetishizing through branding, rather than making...

Maybe poets are continually trying to free themselves from ersatz or inauthentic appropriations... when the world is an inscrutable mix of play and work, pleasure and suffering, good & evil, just how the artist "plays" only grows more telling... & we can feel, in the art-expression, how play sometimes turns into heartless superficiality, & how seriousness turns into ponderous, life-killing hypocrisy... a human joy can grow cold & dehumanized in either of these directions... from illusion to delusion... a fine tightrope walk it is...

[We recognize the powerful magnetism of the fetish-object... I remember the sharp, voracious pleasure I felt, as a boy, just looking at a line of toy soldiers set up in the grass... this was the basis of a novella I wrote about growing up during the Vietnam War (Chapel Hill)...]