With the poem, ‘French Writer Wins Nobel’, Kenneth Goldsmith demonstrates how poetry is all around us by taking a random newspaper, locating an article and turning it into a poem simply by letting his eyes wander in order to locate something interesting.

Goldsmith’s poetry is often based on plagiarism. Taking other people’s words, placing them into ideas of context and claiming them as his own poetry. This has led him as far as to the White House, where he read traffic reports to the quite entertained President of the United States, Barack Obama.

Kenneth Goldsmith (b. 1961) is an American conceptual poet. He has published numerous books such as ‘Day’, ‘Seven American Deaths and Disasters’ and a New York Trilogy consisting of ‘Weather’ (2005), ‘Traffic’ (2007) and ‘Sports’ (2008). He also teaches uncreative writing at the University of Pennsylvania, where one of his classes in 2015 is the much debated ‘Wasting time on the internet’. Since 2013, Goldsmith has been a MoMA poet laureate.

Kenneth Goldsmith reading the poem “French Writer Wins Nobel” was filmed in New York City, October 2014.

Camera: Pierce Jackson and Kasper Bech Dyg
Produced and edited by: Kasper Bech Dyg and Pejk Malinovski
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2014

Supported by Nordea-fonden