Day by Kenneth Goldsmith

After the touchy conversation about Kenneth Goldsmith in class, I was interested in reading more of his work out of curiosity. Kenneth Goldsmith works solely with Found Poetry. His book, Day, was published in 2003 and was comprised entirely of every piece of text, letter, or number printed within the September 1, 2000 issue of The New York Times.

Although I haven't read the whole piece, I have read an excerpt for research purposes. Here is the link to the excerpt:
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/day-excerpt

Before talking about my opinions of the actual content of the piece I want to talk a little bit about intentions. I think it would be safe to say that Kenneth Goldsmith is a type of absurdist through his occasional controversial appropriation of text (i.e. The Body of Michael Brown). With absurdism it is sometimes difficult to pinpoint the target audience of the work. After much speculation about Goldsmith's target audience, I have come to think that the ideal audience of his work is any American who consumes media. I believe this because I see Goldsmith's work as commenting on sources of media, especially within Day by taking its contents (word for word) out of context, rendering it as something other than a piece of consumable media.

Okay now for the content of the piece. I found that it read really interestingly. I don't know how it would be reading the entire piece all the way through but the excerpt was surprisingly very entertaining for me. I found myself most interested in moments that could clearly be read as either article titles or a successful line of poetry such as "The Rhetoric of Persuasion". Having those words in the form of a poem seem just as seamless as seeing that text titling a New York Times article. That dynamic interests me and I want to play with found poetry in a similar way.

Resources I used:
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/day-excerpt
http://bombmagazine.org/article/5522/kenneth-goldsmith-s-day