Thanks again for the ongoing comments in response to some of my thoughts. A few of you have suggested that, because no one can really know the standards by which a future reader might judge our achievements, the avant-garde makes “unanswerable” claims about the merits of its own experimentation. I propose, however, that the avant-garde still warrants an “answer” to its claims, insofar as they almost always test the degree to which critics of poetry can actually do their jobs. A modern critic who argues that we cannot test the merits of the avant-garde merely absolves themselves of any duty to confront the problems posed by such work; hence, the critic can evade any need to refashion his or her own standards of judgement—and by refusing to make any committed arguments on behalf of the new, the critic never has to risk being wrong about its value….
4.
Critics who dismiss avant-garde poetry often object to the temerity of these investigations because such experimentation can cast doubt upon any reliable standard of value for excellence, leaving the field open to a permissive, if not nihilistic, attitude, in which “anything goes.” Critics thus perceive such experimentation as galling, because it is “unseemly”—when in fact it is more likely to be “untimely.” Failure in the avant-garde almost always seems to coincide with the notion of being out of step with the pace of history, the poet arriving on the scene either too soon or too late to feel at ease in the modern milieu. The avant-garde almost always fails because of this untimeliness, either by being “before its time,” addressing an, as yet, unforeseen, future audience (doing so from a modern viewpoint in a tone of historic anticipation), or by being “beyond its time,” addressing an as yet, unawakened, modern audience (doing so from a future viewpoint in a tone of historic renunciation). The avant-garde adopts a stance, both unfashionable and noncomformist—“unmodern” in the sense that it does not abide by the contemporary determinants of success. The avant-garde prefers instead to experiment with paradigms that produce critiques and surprises rather than accolades and lullabies. Such poets see that the acceptable conditions for success in the modern milieu can no longer generate innovation, because such success, by its proven merits, always spawns imitatable repetition, which in turn reiterates what we already know in a tone of historic reassurance—and thus such success must be repudiated or overhauled, if the poet expects to make any further epistemological contributions to an understanding of poetry itself.
- but have you confronted some of the paradoxes? A mode of activity that can so completely rationalize, explain, defend, justify itself, has already institutionalized itself. And in fact there are many social &/or academic organizations which will support, fund and glorify avant-garde pomposity.
Here’s another paradox : the PROCESS of experiment provides a crutch for the avant-garde artist : sort of a ready-made justification of an activity-for-its-own-sake, rather than of the mysterious alterity of the art-work, which is the supposed goal of the artist.
Art and beauty are actually more difficult than the difficult rationalizations offered by the experimentalist. Perhaps that’s the hard reality which motivates all such futile attempts at justification.
Ars est celare artem.
I fail to understand your obsession with critics. The days when any critic can validate a poem, much less a poet, for a believing public are long gone—and good riddance. (Sorry, Cynthia O.!) What you seem to want to avoid is the question of readers. I mean all readers, of course: people who buy books, people who read them in libraries, and other poets (even if they moonlight as critics). If you can put forward a coherent approach for readers to take in “testing the merits” of an avant-garde work, please do. Of course, when the maker makes the rules for evaluating his own creation, we must be forgiven for being suspicious of the test.
I have to add that your observations about “untimeliness” make no sense to me. ALL poetry is “of its time”; what else could it be? When you write about “the poet arriving on the scene either too soon or too late to feel at ease,” you’re talking about the psychological situation of the poet, and that has nothing to do with “the times.” Such poets may become so ill at ease that they invent for themselves a “future audience” as a mechanism for helping them write: I have no problem with that; every writer resorts to favorite headgames now and then. And I can’t object if the headgame involves the fantasy of speaking “from a future viewpoint.” But I don’t imagine you seriously expect any rational person to believe that the “future audience” or the “future viewpoint” are real. That would be … well … kind of crazy.
I believe that a future audience is much more plausible than a past one, at the time of conjecture. A future viewpoint is almost inevitable. I believe that someone will read this tomorrow. There is nothing crazy there. I have read you several hours after you posted your comment, for instance. I’m am therefore your future reader, the one you imagined at the time of your writingl. The timestamp verifies this for me. Your writing is not timeless, but rather dated. Your writing is past. My response was the part of the future of yours but whoops, now it is past.