[...] Faced with an unprecedented amount of available digital text, writing needs to redefine itself to adapt to the new environment of textual abundance.
Both the new conceptual writers and their well-established models, the Language poets (among which David Antin, Clark Coolidge, Lyn Hejinian, Bernadette Mayer or Ron Silliman also authored conceptual writings), have been placed by the critic Marjorie Perloff in an American tradition dating back to Gertrude Stein and the Objectivists.
[citation needed] The Flarf poetry group is often mentioned in the same context and at least some of their works are considered conceptual, but are different in some aspects to the "pure" conceptualists.
Marjorie Perloff, to whom Craig Dworkin and Goldsmith have dedicated Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (2011), considers in Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century (2012) that the "paradigmatic work" of the "unoriginal genius" is Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project (which inspired the concept of Goldsmith’s 2015 book, Capital).
[11] Largely critical of the "closed" and "exclusive" politics of avant-garde groups, Amy King points out the strategies through which the American conceptual writers have achieved institutionalization: "Now crowned the descendants of Language Poetry, both of these groups have calculated and curated a lineage, garnering attention by using the capitalist pop culture tool of sensationalism, specifically a faux-conflict, curated imitative performances of artists who successfully achieved status via the cult of personality [...], along with prolific referencing, reviews, and applause for each other’s efforts.
[...] What took the Language poets a few decades, these two groups have achieved within a fraction of the time: the paved road to institutional acclaim, centrality, and canonization.
In the second part of her article,[13] Amy King criticizes a large number of claims authored by Marjorie Perloff and notes Kenneth Goldsmith’s recent appearances on the TV and at the White House.
[14] In 2009, Vanessa Place had started tweeting Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind in order to highlight its racist language and stereotypes, according to an artist statement that was posted on Facebook.
These poets may often combine "confessional/affective/lyrical" and "mechanical/conceptual" aspects, while engaging with the "death of work" (in symmetry with the "death of the reader" of previous theory): "This would mean falling into the messy muck of libidinal flows (or the Internet or ‘whatever’) without leaving a trace of authorship and without giving in to those dominant modes of leftist discourse (that mark the academy, the art world, and politics), which require the artwork to pave the way for didactic redemption, and require that art be boxed into the framings of queer theory or speculative materialism or poststructuralism or affect studies or Badiousian-Zizekian, etc.
"[24] Felix Bernstein cites as examples Sophia Le Fraga, Andrew Durbin, J. Gordon Faylor, Trisha Low, Josef Kaplan, Joey Yearous-algozin, Holly Melgard, Danny Snelson, Steve McLaughlin, Steve Zultanski, while also mentioning in a footnote the Goldsmith-curated project Poetry Will Be Made By All,[25] which contains 1,000 books by 1,000 young poets (in English and several other languages).