The controversial author on turning an autopsy report into poetry, not reading his own books and his golden love letter to New York
How apt to be meeting Kenneth Goldsmith at Eisenberg’s. An old-school Jewish diner (est 1929) in New York’s Flatiron district, and these days a slightly self-conscious throwback to an era long before the neighbourhood was slathered with nail salons, salad bars and frozen yoghurt stores, it has a board outside that declares “You either get it or don’t.”
It’s here, swaddled in the aroma of pastrami sandwiches and matzo ball soup, that this self-proclaimed “American maverick” – and in some quarters, reviled poet – is talking about Capital, a 920-page “love letter” to 20th-century New York assembled entirely from other writers’ verse, novels, letters and histories that weighs more than three pounds and comes in a gold slipcase. “But who’s going to start at the beginning and plough their way through?” asks Goldsmith. “No one!” Capital is a tribute to, and cover version of, German philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, a legendarily incomplete patchwork of quotations and ruminations about mid-19th-century Paris – structured around topics such as boredom, collection, prostitution – that offered a wholly original way of thinking about modernity and urbanism. The first English translation was published in 1999 and Goldsmith was hooked.
They hated me at first. Then they grew to love me. That seems to be the way things go with me
Related: US poet defends reading of Michael Brown autopsy report as a poem
Continue reading...