Ben Friedlander has remarked in a commentary here that “readers make tradition, and so abdicate their power when they accept blindly what tradition hands down.” I agree with this statement, and I suppose that, in my acts of thinking out loud here, I am suggesting that too many critics of poetry abdicate their power to the already written, failing to recognize that most poetry deserves to be forgotten—unless it becomes an engine for subsequent innovation. I think that the avant-garde suggests that no poet can “rest on their laurels” for very long without reinventing the future of poetry itself—and hence, the avant-garde has often seen the need to revisit the neglected, unexalted techniques of writing for overlooked potentials….
6.
Granted, such a strategy can, of course, become its own formula for success, which in turn spawns its own repeatable imitations. Critics might even go so far as to argue, therefore, that the avant-garde lacks merit, because the avant-garde reserves for itself the privilege of being accountable to no other aesthetic judgement but its own. Critics might argue that, for this reason, the avant-garde does little more than make a biased virtue of its own ineptitude, deliberately reiterating the mistakes of both the untalented and the uninformed, doing so in order to avoid any obligation to counteract these failures. Under such permissive conditions, even the most amateurish poetasters can pass themselves off as noteworthy innovators simply by admitting with ironic aplomb that, yes, their work may have failed by the official criteria of success, but because such work has already preempted any criticism with a shameless admission of guilt in advance, such work can evade the cruel brunt of any dismissive judgements. These pretenders to the avant-garde simply resort to the worst genre of casuistry in order to defend the feeble merits of their crappy poetry. Sure, it’s shit, but unlike other poets, who don’t know that it’s shit, and thus they don’t know that they can’t get away with it, we all know that it’s shit, and yet we show that we don’t need to be good, so long as we don’t fail to get away with it—ergo, it’s shit, but it’s good, because we get away with it! Such argumentation suggests that any self-conscious, self-justified failure constitutes a species of success. In poetry, this kind of argumentation leads only to the most abject kitsch. No other artform can in fact tolerate such an incorrigible affirmation of maladroitness among its practitioners.
Thank you for this continuing interesting series of posts.
Posted By: Michael Gushue on September 24, 2007 at 9:05 am“No other artform can in fact tolerate such an incorrible affirmation maladroitness among it practioners” is a wonderful statement and might even be true. Artists in other media have been accused of this (my kid could paint that. I could bang pots together and make that), but these arguments seem to have much less purchase. I guess my question is why?
I’m also a bit fuzzy on these terms: readers, critics, (also) audience, public. Who are these exactly?
Muir says that poets no longer have an audience (thanks to industrialization, maybe capitalism). There’s only the public, to whom you may or may not appeal as you choose.
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