Comments on: Writing and Failure (Part 5)

By: Nick T.

Nick T. — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 13:58:46 +0000

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?

By: Don Share

Don Share — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 13:45:01 +0000

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?

By: Ray Davis

Ray Davis — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 11:34:03 +0000

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.

By: Ben Friedlander

Ben Friedlander — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 17:27:12 +0000

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.