On a recent radio interview, Language poet Bruce Andrews talked about how, back in the early 70s, using a paper cutter radically changed his work, breaking up his writing into a modular process. It was the correct response for the time. Today, we have immense information moving capabilities at our fingertips and new movements like Conceptual Writing or Flarf are the correct responses for our time. If writing is not taking these new conditions into its poetics, it simply cannot be considered contemporary. If nothing else, what the Conceptual Poetry and Its Others conference did was codify this tendency for the record.
