The Dollar at the End of the Book: Vanessa Place, Inc., and Allegory in Conceptual Poetry

This article engages the poet Vanessa Place’s recent “corporate” venture, Vanessa Place, Inc., in order to ask in what ways conceptual poetry can be understood as a conflation between art object and commodity. What becomes clear through a reading of not only Vanessa Place, Inc., but also Place’s critical poetics in Notes on Conceptualisms as well as her long-form conceptual poem Dies: A Sentence, is that the relationship between the conceptual poem and the commodity form is by no means simply antagonistic or complementary. Ultimately, this essay argues, it is Vanessa Place, Inc.’s precarious but dialectical nature as a commodified poetics that allows it to successfully and critically, if provisionally, embody the complexities and contradictions of late capitalist culture itself.