Some commentators on this weblog have pointed out that the effects of “neglect” upon the history of poetics might constitute a great topic for a dissertation. l totally endorse this idea, and I hope that, one day, some plucky critic might embark upon such a titanic project—but I suspect that, in keeping with the cynical ironies of the academy, research about “neglect” might end up suffering from the very condition that it proposes to study, much like the virologist who ends up contracting, from his diseased patients, the very contagion that he is trying to cure. I might suggest that, even if critics deign to read such a study, thereby learning how and why great poets have, in the past, gone underestimated by their contemporaries, critics of today are still going to fail in response to these lessons of history, thereby perpetuating such neglect when faced with modern brands of poetic genius….
5.
Writers in the avant-garde recognize that, if poets can earn acclaim too readily from the modern critic, then such poets must have failed to push their experimentation to an extreme beyond the acceptable parameters for innovation. Since the avant-garde sees its ongoing practice as the evolving outcome of contradictions within a literary paradigm, such poets argue that, when poets succeed according to the standards of a bygone tradition, such poets have nevertheless failed, according to the standards of a future posterity. Only failure can reassure such poets that, yes, they are in fact pursuing the correct pathway to an, as yet, unknown insight. The irony here, of course, is that, in the end, the avant-garde can only succeed by failing. Its failure has become inherent to its practice—and despite the lessons of history, which show the eventual prestige of these losers, the modern critic always seems to greet their failure by contributing to it rather than by compensating for it. The avant-garde does its best to mystify the modern critic by being difficult and resistant, evading analysis and scrutiny—because once such a critic can in fact appraise and classify the innate merits of the avant-garde without much provocative controversy, then obviously such experimentation has outworn its utility by conforming too closely with the official standard of appreciated achievement. The avant-garde, therefore, has little choice but to cultivate a kind of recalcitrance in the face of its own potential successes, doing its best, wherever possible, to test the limits of such tolerant approval. The avant-garde sees that its microscopic revolutions must be recursive and permanent—subject not only to self-dispute, but also, quite literally, to self-abandon.
Actually, Christian, it’s not the great who make this topic interesting; it’s the obscurity of the near-great and almost-good that gets to the heart of things. Which for me is not the bad conscience of tradition (the correction of perceived injustice, which is where tradition and avant-garde clasp hands and sing), but its good conscience, the belief that there are those who “deserve to be forgotten.”
What a book on neglect would show, I think, is that literary judgments are neither permanent nor inevitable; that readers make tradition, and so abdicate their power when they accept blindly what tradition hands down; that recuperation rarely has much to do with being “on the right side of history”; and that lives validated by posterity and lives that aren’t, aren’t very different at all.
My own life (and, I think, the lives of those around me) improved immensely once I stopped wanting to rectify “the canon” and began viewing it as just one not-to-be-long-privileged selection from an ever-expanding multitude of canons. The quantum theory of parallel paradises: in some Emily Dickinson posthumously ascends to glory and in others she doesn’t, but in all she worked her work regardless.
I wonder who decides which poets, poems, and poetries are “failures,” that is to say, which are “avant garde.”
Perhaps a good case study can be found in Ron Silliman’s critique of Charles Simic’s recent judgments of Robert Creeley’s collected work; Silliman sees Simic as a “neophobe,” but by the criteria above, Creeley – who was about as far from underestimated as a poet can hope to be – cannot qualify as “avant garde.” Which poets, I again wonder, do? And if I know about them, must I be wrong?
To quote: “The avant-garde does its best to mystify the modern critic by being difficult and resistant, evading analysis and scrutiny—because once such a critic can in fact appraise and classify the innate merits of the avant-garde without much provocative controversy, then obviously such experimentation has outworn its utility by conforming too closely with the official standard of appreciated achievement.”
Interestingly, you position the avant garde as necessarily in opposition to the “modern critic” and thus, seem to locate the AG and its battles in the comfortable environs of academia, or thereabouts. What of a movement, poetic or otherwise, that works in opposition to the literary establishment, but also to larger establishments, such as the Black Arts movement? There has been a lack of discussion about the avant garde and its relation to things “extra-literary”; is it naive to ask if an AG literature should strive to stir up more than just a few elbow patches and tweed jackets?