U B U W E B :: Anthology of Conceptual Writing
“Accordingly, the conceptual writing collected here is not so much writing in which the idea is more important than anything else as a writing in which the idea cannot be separated from the writing itself: in which the instance of writing is inextricably intertwined with the idea of Writing: the material practice of écriture.

“Conceptualizing writing in that way returns us, perhaps surprisingly, to a poetry of form. But not to a form – to the received forms of sonnets and quatrains and the like, with their familiar schemes of stress and rhyme. Instead, the new forms and structures of conceptual writing recall the sense of artifice, constraint, and perversity that the sonnet too must once have embodied. Conceptual writing is the writing of the new new formalism, and far from being a relic of the period Lucy Lippard documented in her invaluable Six Years (1966 to 1972), it has characterized some of the most rigorous and exciting work from twenty-first century writers such as Dan Farrell and Mónica de la Torre.”

John Dewey, Art As Experience:

“This is what it is to have form.  It marks a way of envisaging, of feeling, and of presenting experienced matter so that it most readily and effectively becomes material for the construction of adequate experience on the part of those less gifted than the original creator.  Hence there can be no distinction drawn, save in reflection, between form and substance.  The work itself is matter formed into esthetic substance…the act itself is exactly what it is because of how it is done.  In the act there is no distinction, but perfect integration of manner and content, form and substance” (p. 109).