Illustration by Patrick Morgan

To appreciate the beleaguered position that Kenneth Goldsmith finds himself in, you have to know that in 1997 or 1998 three avant-garde poets, one of them Goldsmith, drinking in a basement bar in Buffalo during a blizzard, decided to start a revolutionary poetry movement, one that went on to endorse “uncreative writing,” a phrase and a field that Goldsmith invented. Goldsmith lives in New York. The other poets, Christian Bök and Darren Wershler, are Canadian. They had driven from Toronto to listen to Goldsmith read from “No. 111 2.7.93-10.20.96,” which is a collection of syllables, words, phrases, and sentences that Goldsmith gathered between the dates in the title. It’s a species of list poem. Chapter 1 has words of one syllable. It begins, “A, a, aar, aas, aer, agh, ah.” Chapter 2 has two-syllable phrases. It begins, “A door, à la, a pear, a peer, a rear, a ware.” Around Chapter 50 or 60, the progression grows irregular. The last chapter claims to have seven thousand two hundred and twenty-eight syllables.

According to remarks on the back cover by the poet Charles Bernstein, “No. 111” is an “alphabetic bestiary of the ribs, joints, sinews, and bones of language’s alluring lore.” This is a highbrow impression, and possibly also a singular one, since not even Goldsmith has read the book all the way through. He likes to say that he is “the most boring writer who ever lived,” and that his books are “horrible to read.” Proof of this, he said recently, is that they often have spelling mistakes: “My books are so boring that even the copy editors can’t read them.” He believes that the propositions his writing presents—uncreative writing’s permission to borrow entire texts, for example—are more interesting than the writing itself. “I don’t have a readership,” he said. “I have a thinkership.”

In Buffalo, the poets agreed that modernism was dead and that “language needed to respond,” Goldsmith said. Their movement became known as conceptual poetry, and it made Goldsmith as famous as an experimental poet usually gets—anyway, it made him the most famous uncreative writer. In 2011, along with mainstream poets, including Billy Collins and Rita Dove, and the rapper Common, Goldsmith read at the White House, and in 2013 he became the first poet laureate of the Museum of Modern Art. “He’s received more attention lately than any other living poet,” Cathy Park Hong, a poet and a professor at Sarah Lawrence, told me resentfully. “Academia has canonized him.”

Goldsmith, who is fifty-four, likes pranks and provocations and making people uncomfortable—challenging behavior, he thinks, is an artist’s prerogative. He is about five feet nine and thin, with a long face, and he usually has a beard or a mustache. He dresses flamboyantly, sometimes in suits with big paisley patterns. He has one in brown and one in blue, which he wore to the White House, with saddle shoes—Obama asked why he was wearing golf shoes—and he often pairs them with a small-brimmed hat that he wears pushed back, the way a child might. Appearing on “The Colbert Report,” he wore a salmon-colored suit, with a candy-striped shirt, a bow tie, and one green sock and one red sock, a reference to David Hockney. He also likes to wear long, flowing skirts over his pants, because they make him look as different as possible from the threadbare image he believes most people have of a poet. “I’m a dandy, and hyperconscious of image,” he said. “Every time I’m in public, I’m a persona, and people really hate that.”

He tends to speak slowly and enunciate clearly, in a stagy voice, and he models his public manner on Andy Warhol and Salvador Dali. He is an obsessive reader of difficult books and a patient and close listener. He does not try to dominate a room, but when the spotlight falls on him he is prepared. Periodically, he embodies the archetype of the trickster who sometimes pushes things too far, even against his own interests.

Before Goldsmith became a poet, he was a text artist—that is, he wrote words on surfaces. He began by making sculptures of books and carving words on them. The surfaces got bigger, until he was writing on panels that were larger than doors. For his last piece, “Soliloquy,” in 1997, he recorded every word he spoke for a week. He printed the words on pages and pasted them to the walls of a gallery. They covered the walls from floor to ceiling. “You were supposed to drown in my words, but the piece was a failure,” he said. “Nobody in the art world wanted to read, and I love language. That was the end of art for me.”

Goldsmith then published “Soliloquy” with an art-book publisher, and claimed that it was poetry. He divided the text into seven acts, one for each day. At times, you can tell where he is—in a restaurant ordering food, for example, or in bed with his wife—but you can’t always be sure whom he is speaking to, because only his side of the conversation appears. He said that he lost more than one friend when people read what he thought of them.

After “Soliloquy,” Goldsmith wrote “Fidget,” which is an account of practically every movement he made on Bloomsday—June 16th—in 1997. (Goldsmith deeply admires Joyce and has read “Ulysses” several times.) “Fidget” begins with Goldsmith waking up: “Eyelids open. Tongue runs across upper lip moving from left side of mouth to right following arc of lip. Swallow.” He described each movement into a tape recorder, which was laborious. It took him an hour to get out of bed. By the afternoon, he was exhausted, and at around five he fell asleep. He awoke after an hour, anxious at having the evening and night to describe. He bought a fifth of whiskey and drank it while sitting on a pier beside the Hudson River. He began to slur his words, then he accidentally turned the tape recorder off, so he lost the rest of the day. The last chapter is the first chapter typed backward, with each gesture except the last one reversed. If he moved his left foot forward, he wrote that his right foot moved backward. The last sentence is “.pil fo cra gniwollof tfel ot htuom fo edis thgir morf gnivom pil reppu ssorca snur eugnoT Eyelids close.”

After “Fidget,” Goldsmith decided to spend a year practicing “uncreativity,” and during that year he wrote “Day,” the book for which he is probably best known. A strict work of appropriation, “Day” is a typed copy of the edition of the Times for September 1, 2000. The date is simply the day that he happened to be free to start a new project. “Day” begins with the upper left-hand corner of the front page and ends on the lower right-hand corner of the last page. The book is eight hundred and thirty-six pages long and took a year to type. Nearly two hundred pages are financial tables. “When you take a newspaper and reframe it as a book, you get pathos and tragedy and stories of love,” he said. “It’s a great book, and I didn’t write any of it.”