35.

Ultimately, Conceptualism seeks to prepare poetry for a future milieu, where all scales of writing transect each other across an enormous spectrum of dimensions — a milieu perhaps akin to our own emergent dystopia, where a molecular substrate (like the ACE2 receptor on a lung cell) can become the site for microscopic inscription by a coronavirus, whose replication causes every human on Earth to download an app called “Zoom” so that we might interact with each other while quarantined (each of us sharing recorded readings of poetry, broadcast from our prisons of atomized solitude). Conceptualism lets us zoom into the future of poetry, beyond the routinely predicted demise of poetry— a demise upstaged in advance by other cultural concerns more epic than any poem, even one immortalized at the puny scale of an atom or at the vast scale of the void.