Reuse Case: Conceptual Poetry

A conceptual poet decides to recite official documents in a performance at a poetry festival. These documents describe in detail the autopsy of a teenager who was recently shot by the police. The performance of the autopsy of a Black teenager by a White established poet, presented as a as a piece of conceptual poetry, creates an outrage. The poet does not apologize and insists that he “took a publicly available document from an American tragedy that was witnessed first-hand (in this case by the doctor performing the autopsy) and simply read it”. The autopsy documents are available in the public domain.