*Well, yes.
(...)
"It's not uncommon to see blogs that recount someone’s every sneeze since 2007, or of a man who shoots exactly one second of video every day and strings the clips together in time-lapsed mashups. There is guy who secretly taped all of his conversations for three years and a woman who documents every morsel of food that she puts into her mouth. While some of these people aren't consciously framing their activities as works of art, Wershler argues that what they're doing is so close to the practices of sixties conceptualism that the connection between the two can’t be ignored.
"And he's right. Younger poets find it stimulating: they are reclaiming this "found" poetry and uploading it to the self-publishing platform Lulu. They create print-on-demand books that, most likely, will never be printed, but will live as PDFs on Lulu—their de-facto publisher and distributor. These are big, ridiculous books, like Chris Alexander’s five-hundred-and-twenty-eight-page "McNugget," which reprints every tweet ever posted that contains the word "McNugget"; Andy Sterling’s "Supergroup," which appropriates over four hundred pages’ worth of Discogs listings of small-bit session players from long-forgotten nineteen-seventies LPs; and Angela Genusa's "Tender Buttons," which converts Gertrude Stein's difficult modernist text of the same name into illegible computer code.
"And it keeps coming. Last week, the poet Josef Kaplan issued a Lulu book called "Kill List," a fifty-eight-page list of poets' names followed by their presumed economic status ("Natasha Trethewey is a rich poet"; "Ron Silliman is comfortable"). Like much conceptual poetry, the book was designed more to ignite discussion than to actually be read. Right away, a book was published on Lulu in response—it contained only a heated Facebook thread about "Kill List."
"Quality is beside the point—this type of content is about the quantity of language that surrounds us, and about how difficult it is to render meaning from such excesses. In the past decade, writers have been culling the Internet for material, making books that are more focussed on collecting than on reading. These ways of writing—word processing, databasing, recycling, appropriating, intentionally plagiarizing, identity ciphering, and intensive programming, to name just a few—have traditionally been considered outside the scope of literary practice.
"It's not clear who, if anyone, actually reads these works—although they are often cited by other writers working in the same mode—and there are no critical systems in place to identify which books of this type are better than others, though some literary critics have begun to pay attention (Marjorie Perloff devoted much of her latest book, "Unoriginal Genius," to these ideas). For now, these authors function on a flat, horizontal field, creating a communitarian body of work where one idea or one author is interchangeable with another. This ethos is evident on the smart art blog Jogging, where art works in the form of JPEGs are posted anonymously and last only until they are pushed off the page by newer works...."
