Renominalization

From the literary side, of course, the assumption has long been that poems are meant to be read, and so the mere idea of a poem made of words does not intervene in the discipline in the same way as conceptual art’s linguistic turn does. Indeed, the equivalent move for a poetry that wanted to model itself on conceptual art would be to posit a nonlinguistic object as “the poem.” That kind of conceptual poetry would insist on a poem without words. Although they often abandon traditional aesthetic criteria, none of the works included here attempts that kind of radical renominalization.

Craig Dworkin, Against Expression