The controversial author on turning an autopsy report into poetry, not reading his own books and his golden love letter to New York

How apt to be meeting Kenneth Goldsmith at Eisenberg’s. An old-school Jewish diner (est 1929) in New York’s Flatiron district, and these days a slightly self-conscious throwback to an era long before the neighbourhood was slathered with nail salons, salad bars and frozen yoghurt stores, it has a board outside that declares “You either get it or don’t.”

It’s here, swaddled in the aroma of pastrami sandwiches and matzo ball soup, that this self-proclaimed “American maverick” – and in some quarters, reviled poet – is talking about Capital, a 920-page “love letter” to 20th-century New York assembled entirely from other writers’ verse, novels, letters and histories that weighs more than three pounds and comes in a gold slipcase. “But who’s going to start at the beginning and plough their way through?” asks Goldsmith. “No one!” Capital is a tribute to, and cover version of, German philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, a legendarily incomplete patchwork of quotations and ruminations about mid-19th-century Paris – structured around topics such as boredom, collection, prostitution – that offered a wholly original way of thinking about modernity and urbanism. The first English translation was published in 1999 and Goldsmith was hooked.

“I just thought this was the best book I’d ever read. It was written between the cracks of history, a negative-space version of history. It’s all about Benjamin’s taste; in the hands of anyone else it might have been a disaster – pedantic, dull. Like a Zola novel, it offers a 360-degree examination of an urban landscape, but it tosses away the narrative structure. The Arcades Project is, I believe, like the Guinness book of records for Paris. I never get tired of the Guinness book: it’s a new model of world literature. It’s a big book of information. But it’s eccentric. It’s subjective. It’s really human.”

He says The Arcades Project is a conceptual work of literature that anticipates the ways we assemble information today – “gathering bits and pieces, shards, folksonomies. Its subjectivity replaces and makes expertise obsolete. Benjamin was like Marcel Duchamp, who in the teens said he was making art for a generation hence; nobody understood him until the 1960s. It took the digital age 75 years to understand the value of his project.”

These kinds of assertions and analogies have made Goldsmith’s name outside poetry circles in the US. While acolytes regard them as thought bombs, HD provocations and amusing wind-ups, they are dismissed by naysayers as obnoxious and PowerPoint-shallow.

Capital provides citations rather than decontextualised text grabs. It’s split into 52 sections (on themes such as dirt, gentrification and advertising), frequently alludes to photographer Robert Mapplethorpe who Goldsmith believes “embodied New York in the 1970s” in the way Baudelaire did mid-19th-century Paris, and ends with a slim but resonant selection of texts about “apocalypse”.

Goldsmith, a dandy showman who wears skirts, paisley-print suits and, like the equally divisive Joseph Beuys, is rarely seen without a hat, was invited to read at the White House, appeared on The Colbert Report, and in 2013 became the first poet laureate at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. This degree of visibility is especially surprising for someone associated with conceptualism – described in 1966 by Sol LeWitt as art in which “all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair”. Goldsmith was born in 1961 and has described himself as “an upper-middle-class Jewish kid from Long Island”. He studied sculpture at college, and spent much of the 1980s and early 90s carving out a reputation as a text artist (“I was into hip-hop and words that rhymed; there are no rhymes in modernism except for minor poets like Ogden Nash”).

His eureka moment came in 1993 when he was at his kitchen table in front of a computer reading about punk and skateboarding, hoping to plunder the vivid, neologistic language. “I highlighted the text and then realised I could copy it on to a Word document. Oh my God! I thought: writing will never be the same again after this. The whole thing had changed for ever. I got the idea for conceptual writing at that moment.”

Over the next few years, influenced perhaps by hip-hop’s analogous use of sampling, Goldsmith focused on one particular aspect of conceptual practice: appropriation. For Day (2003), he typed out every single word that appeared in the 1 September 2000 issue of the New York Times; the resulting book, which, like almost all his books, he claims never to have fully read, was 836 pages long. He assembled an “American trilogy” – Weather (2005), Traffic (2007), Sports (2008) – which transcribed verbatim broadcasts on those topics.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Walter Benjamin in 1925. Photograph: Alamy

These books were time-based exercises in framing quotidian life. They drew attention to all manner of “invisible literatures”. They were also ideas as much as texts to be read, and as such reflected Goldsmith’s belief that in the era of the internet certain literary totems – subjectivity, personal expression, the importance of close reading – were less important. The web’s language, he argues in his forthcoming book Wasting Time on the Internet (based on a class he teaches at the University of Pennsylvania whose syllabus declares “distraction, multi-tasking and aimless drifting is mandatory”) is innately “disjunctive, compressed, decontextualised and cut-and-pastable”.

“People don’t want to hear what I say. It’s painful. They want to kill the messenger, but it ends being sort of true. I’m sorry! It’s very hard for those of us who’ve come up in a place of deep engagement with content, but the new content is the acquisition, distribution and management of information rather than the information itself.”

Goldsmith’s don’t-worry, go-with-the-flow stance rather than a more conventionally critical rhetoric on these and other issues is reminiscent of Andy Warhol or Jeff Koons. But if digitalism is so ascendant, and if conceptualism privileges ideas over realisation, isn’t it conservative to have his texts published as physical artefacts? “Borges said that the act of writing books is a futile and ridiculous process. That perhaps it’s better to just propose books rather than write them. Most of my books are difficult to read and not very interesting. But I want people to feel and hold the weight of language. I want them to feel the materiality of language.”

They hated me at first. Then they grew to love me. That seems to be the way things go with me

Capital provides citations rather than decontextualised text grabs. It draws almost exclusively on literary sources and, even though New York is manically multilingual, from English-language texts. “I missed big things,” concedes Goldsmith. “Most of Wall Street: I got Gordon Gecko, but I’m not really interested in the stock market. Governmental politics, too: I don’t think I mention any of the mayors except Jimmy Walker, and that’s only because he was a dandy, an anti-intellectual and a night-clubber.

“New York is vulgar, man! This is probably the most vulgar and deeply unethical place on the planet. The book is gold – like a Godiva chocolate bar. It’s crass. It looks at the city through a hyper-realist lens and presents it as such. New York in the 20th century is a city of reflected surfaces. It’s like Warhol. It’s jazz, stainless steel, glass. I couldn’t come up with a whole lot of depth in the literature written about New York.”

He suspects a lot of “Benjaminians” will be disappointed by the book because he’s not Walter Benjamin, and New York in the 20th century is not Paris in the 19th. “By the way, my book got completed; his didn’t! By the way, I’m alive; he’s not! So the romance around the life and martyrdom of Benjamin ain’t gonna happen to me. In a weird way, I wanted to take Benjamin off the pedestal and on to the coffee table.”

Capital could be seen as Goldsmith scaling up, a skewed take on the Great American Novel. Many of his admirers, though, think his greatest achievement to date is UbuWeb, an online repository of rare avant-garde film, poetry and sound recordings that he set up in 1996 and that, run by volunteers and ad-free, still flourishes today. “It’s my community service, my activism, my politics,” he declares. “It makes the world a better place.”

It also features some recordings from his notorious tenure as a DJ on New Jersey’s freeform radio station WFMU where, from 1995 to 2010, he had a fiercely idiosyncratic radio show. “I sang Walter Benjamin to background music from the Allman Brothers. Fredric Jameson to John Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things”. I can’t sing! But I went on air and I sang for three hours. It was horrible!” What reactions did he get? “They hated me at first. Then they grew to love me. That seems to be the way things go with me. It’s not a boast. Unfortunately it’s a pattern in my life. I never want to be disliked. I don’t do things to be disliked. I tell truths that people find disturbing, but I never do it to disturb people purposely.”

US poet defends reading of Michael Brown autopsy report as a poem Read more

Accusations that he does reached fever pitch earlier this year. In March, at a conference exploring the relationship between art, language and digitalism at Brown University, Goldsmith read aloud “The Death of Michael Brown”, named after the unarmed black American teenager killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014. The poem, with a few minor tweaks to make its terminology clearer, reproduced the medical examiner’s autopsy on Brown. It was performed in front of a photograph of the young man in his graduation outfit and ended with a line from the autopsy – “The remaining male genitalia system is unremarkable”.

The response, especially across the internet, was livid. Poets, academics and old associates found Goldsmith guilty of exploitation and insensitivity, of racist appropriation, of “symbolic lynching”. His piece, they argued, exposed the social deafness of conceptualist poetics and the reactionary politics of self-professed avant gardes. Goldsmith received antisemitic abuse and death threats. Talks and performances were cancelled. The man of many words went silent.

Today Goldsmith is torn between wanting to defend himself and being reluctant to fan flames. “The idea that I would be in some way sympathetic with the state by re-enacting is a very painful thought to me,” he says quietly. “I’d been out protesting with my kids over Brown and Garner’s deaths. I had to get them the fuck out when the police horses started charging at us sitting in the middle of Times Square.

“I made that work as a political protest to show you in no unsparing terms what the state has done to a body. That autopsy report was written by a person; they had to look at and describe that body – which is exactly what a poet does through direct observation. The word ‘autopsy’ in Greek means the act of seeing with one’s own eye. It’s hyper-realism. It was a difficult piece to write, to read and to listen to. However, it is true. And it’s an ugly truth.”

What perplexes Goldsmith is the claim that his poem was a stunt. “That word’s a historical categorisation of anything that’s avant garde, a way to easily write off very complicated new ideas. They said that about Duchamp, Warhol, Cage: that’s my lineage. I believe my methods and what I did were well intentioned. What I did was a critique and a work of social protest. I believe that in the future, after the emotion and the moment passes, the gesture will be understood.”

An earlier book of his, Seven American Deaths and Disasters (2013), featured transcriptions, culled from radio and TV reports of the deaths of John F Kennedy and John Lennon, the shootings at Columbine, the death of Michael Jackson. “They were historical bodies,” reflects Goldsmith. “Warhol could photograph Jackie mourning and capture that trauma in motion. I think I attempted to do something similar here and wasn’t able to do that. History is easy. It’s really hard to be contemporary. That’s what I learned. I wanted to see if it was possible.”

What has the response to the piece taught him? “This piece held up a mirror to the mechanics of our culture. I accept that. That’s what conceptual work does: it kickstarts a conversation it’s necessary to have. My work before was a-ethical rather than anti-ethical. I don’t think I was a good listener. My place was always to get up and speak. Right now I’m listening, I’m listening really hard.”

• Capital by Kenneth Goldsmith is published by Verso. To order a copy for £20 (RRP £25) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.