These People Live Here: Conceptualism and the New Documentary Poetics
ARCADE (Stanford University Colloquium), 2016






“The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.”

A maximalist take on a now commonplace idea that demands the equally commonplace response, “what relationship exists between the texts and the writer?”  And the more immediate question, “who, then, do the texts serve?”  The answer to these questions is at the core of the struggle to develop a documentary poetics adequate to our new and increasingly textual world...