"...as ambitious an intellectual project with contemporary poetics as I’ve seen in some time. As such, it’s impact will be both profound & lasting."

—Ron Silliman

"Objectivity is old-fashioned, subjectivity idem.
The Sobject is the properly melancholic contemporary entity."

Click the picture to purchase a limited-edition SOBJECT t-shirt. You'll feel better.
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By smartly straddling the creative and the critical, this book does twice the work toward our understanding of what it means to be contemporary. (Kenneth Goldsmith)

What is conceptual writing, how does it differ from Conceptual Art, what are some of the dominant forms of conceptualism,where does an impure or hybrid conceptualism fit in, what about the baroque, what about the prosody of procedure, what are the links between appropriation and conceptual writing, how does conceptual writing rely on a new way of reading, a “thinkership” that can shift the focus away from the text and onto the concept, what is the relationship between conceptual writing and technology or information culture, and why has this tendency taken hold in the poetry community now?

What follows, then, is a collection of notes, aphorisms, quotes and inquiries on conceptual writing. We have co-authored this text through correspondence, shared reading interests, and similar explorations. Notes on Conceptualisms is far from a definitive text, and much closer to a primer, a purposefully incomplete starting place, where readers, hopefully, can enter so as to participate in the shaping of these ideas.

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“The problem facing contemporary innovative writing is that having gotten out of the cult of the author, we’re left with either the cult of the performer or the cult of the object, and the object, in order not to be secretly authorial, must be mass-made . . . and the cult of the author is finally and fully replaced by the cult of the authority.” What to do? In their delightful and wise Notes on Conceptualisms, Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman sketch out some exciting “conceptualist” alternatives, all of them having to do with creation—which is what art is all about. You won’t agree with all the aphorisms and formulations in this book, but it is guaranteed to keep you in your seat, turning its pages with real pleasure.

—MARJORIE PERLOFF

In Notes on Conceptualisms, Place and Fitterman erect the first critical framework toward the understanding of conceptual writing, an emergent early twenty-first century literary movement. Elegantly parsed and carefully dissected, this work fleshes out many of the missing details proposed thus far regarding the methodologies and strategies of how to proceed with innovative writing. Both direct and oblique, Notes is itself a self-reflexive work of conceptual writing in the guise of theory; or is it a work of theory in the guise of conceptual writing? By smartly straddling the creative and the critical, this book does twice the work toward our understanding of what it means to be contemporary.

—KENNETH GOLDSMITH

I n the process of deciphering Place and Flitterman's hieroglyphic Notes, I learned more about the impact of conceptualism on artists and writers than I had from reading so-called canonical works on the subject. Buried in their vertiginous word-play, there is an analytical nugget worth excavating: how redefining allegory furthers the cause of unencumbered reception and the open text.

—MARY KELLY

Conceptual writing teaches us to write about the wrench, not the monkey. Take Notes and get the idea....

—CHRISTIAN BÖK

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