Comments on: What Would the Community Think?

By: Jennifer Bartlett

Jennifer Bartlett — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 12:38:59 +0000

I wrote just a bit about this on my blog. I think it’s important to level the playing field for men and women in academia and publishing. However, I do think we need to look at other numbers too. Aff. actition exists for women and different races. But, what about people with disabilities. I wish people would give it a thought. How many women do you would with? How many people with a disability? How many female poets can you name? How many disabled ones?
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By: Laura Carter

Laura Carter — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 02:55:52 +0000

Brian, In all fairness I should mention that I borrowed Zizek’s idea of cutting across (the diagonal of the Jew was his point, I think) but added the bit about belonging to more than one community (that’s the best I can come up with for nomadic responses to what often feels as if it (community) is tethered to one or other platform of poetics)).
Best,
Laura
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By: john

john — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 17:57:30 +0000

Yesterday I read a remininiscence about T. S. Eliot by John Malcolm Brinnin. Brinnin does the common thing of writing about himself as if he were a very different person than the one doing the writing: Namely, Brinnin-the-character is someone who is discreet and slightly judgmental about gossip, and Brinnin-the-writer LOVES gossip.
And I-the-reader love gossip too.
Brinnin knew Eliot in the ’50s. Eliot comes across as someone who is interested in and willing to lend support to *poets* regardless of his aesthetic affinity with them.
Some of my best friends don’t like my music. And you know what? That’s OK.
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By: Brian Salchert

Brian Salchert — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 15:30:58 +0000

I am with Laura Carter, and thus with “Zizek’s thesis in_The Parallax View_:
that the wandering artist cuts across the chasms of community, perhaps by belonging
(not merely included in, though this is always a possibility) to more than one.” –
and with Ange’s agreement with it/// because that is exactly where I am.
The making of a poem does not need to be true to a particular agenda
other than the DNA of its own being. One never knows/ what/ one’s/
subconscious will birth, but one should be wary of trashing/ what it births.
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By: Vivek Narayanan

Vivek Narayanan — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 09:48:00 +0000

Simply: I think it makes much more sense to ally with other poets on the basis of a shared or overlapping politics than the subscription to one or another particular aesthetic agenda.
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By: Henry Gould

Henry Gould — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 11:22:11 +0000

Ange & Brent,
I’m feeling really flattered today, too. I don’t know why. Maybe because I’m in Providence Rhode Island, and the sun is shining.
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By: Brent Cunningham

Brent Cunningham — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 02:00:59 +0000

well, obviously I don’t see it as a contradiction: why can’t it both be important to have a set of principles, some texts & contexts to measure and think against, some ideas, theories and a history, AND ALSO be important to redefine and reinterpret and thus maybe even keep actually living for another time that history and those principles in new editions? It’s at least a true contradiction as I see it: we’re somehow both determined & free…
But I sense & agree this exchange has gone on overlong. I admire & appreciate your responsiveness, tenacity, and esp. the liveliness of your mind, so thanks, & flattered of course, always, to be answered…
yrs,
brent
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By: Ange

Ange — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 00:55:29 +0000

Oh, Brent. I think you might be manuevering me into the position of those men who are so “flatter[ed] to be argued with!”
Surely this is not the first post of mine you’ve read. Surely if you look at my archives (found here) you’ll see that I’ve discussed or reviewed a variety of, dare I say it, poets of “other traditions” (Carter Ratcliffe, John Wieners, Peter Gizzi, WC Williams, Jasper Bernes, Cathy Park Hong, Oskar Pastior…). And maybe you’ve also seen this review or this. So your saying that I am promulgating “the rather depressing position that the conventional must be gold” is either a rhetorical tactic or complete blindness to my rhetorical tactics.
Can I just point out where you contradict yourself? You say:
“To me it just sounds like your own sense of something in those poets doesn’t jive with your own sense of the avant garde. So I wonder whose idea of the avant garde’s borders is in your head, and more importantly why you don’t redefine the a-g instead of accepting those borders on some hazy authority, then imagine this authority critiquing you and the writers you care about…”
but before, you said:
“But one thing about the avant garde, unlike the mainstream or the conventional, is that it has a body of theory and a history to it. … There are not one but two books called The Theory of the Avant Garde (Burger, a male german & Poggioli, a male italian), both of which are worth looking at to get a sense of the term’s history. The nice thing about having this body of theory is that when someone claims to be participating in an avant garde tradition it’s possible to question those claims against something (not that Poggioli or Burger get to be final authorities somehow, but at least the claims don’t happen entirely in a vacuum).”
I mean, which is it? Do I, and you, and anyone, get to have their own avant-garde (Alicia Stallings, my metrical, Hardy- and Housman-lovin’ blogmate, agrees with Stevens that “All poetry is experimental;” does she get to be avant-garde?)?
My original post (one strays so far from one’s carefully-worded initial post in these comment threads!) suggested that women — and, well, of course men — who want to be great poets — don’t have to seek the approval of oppressive little communities (and I do name names. You want me to name more? Aren’t I already in trouble with Christian Bok and “the insular temple of Small Press Traffic?” Did I not dismiss an important anthology?). Brent, I’m happy you have an expansive view of the unconventional. So do I. I won’t call it “avant-garde” though. I’ll stick with the Ashberian “other traditions” and I’ll be happy to discuss it in the far-reaching pages of Poetry magazine, and this blog, sans internecine turf battles.
Cheers,
Ange
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By: Brent Cunningham

Brent Cunningham — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 21:12:12 +0000

Hi again A,
I think I was asking for specifics in terms of formal markers for the avant garde poem, & it was great to hear a few of them & I would be interested to discuss them further. But do you not see how when you say “those are two poets who might be misread as the bad kind of conventional” that you’re the only one speaking the division there, that it’s your own anxiety about some supposed mislabeling that is being expressed, not an objection to something some avant gardist (and avant garde by what license?) has done or said? Who has put forward Tom Pickard or Anne Porter as the bad kind of conventional? This is the first I’ve heard of it: where are these line-drawing enemies? To me it just sounds like your own sense of something in those poets doesn’t jive with your own sense of the avant garde. So I wonder whose idea of the avant garde’s borders is in your head, and more importantly why you don’t redefine the a-g instead of accepting those borders on some hazy authority, then imagine this authority critiquing you and the writers you care about, and then being left with the rather depressing position that the conventional must be gold…
yrs,
Brent
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By: Ange

Ange — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 19:28:45 +0000

“the wandering artist cuts across the chasms of community, perhaps by belonging (not merely being included in, though this is always a possibility) to more than one.”
How utterly perfect. I wish I could pare my entire post down to that one quote.
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By: Ange

Ange — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 19:25:28 +0000

Brent, first you ask me to get specific and then you use my words to accuse me of “making the list of who is avant garde and who isn’t?”
What to do? It’s too early for scotch.
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By: Laura Carter

Laura Carter — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 19:16:22 +0000

What I value: my friendships with poets from both “mainstream” and “avant-garde” communities here in Atlanta. I spent last weekend with friends from my MFA program (which is notably conservative) and then this weekend I am going to be writing a semiotic-tinged polyphon for the experimental community’s poetry night at an artist’s gallery/collective space. Last week I had lunch with Kate Greenstreet (was sorry to miss Kate and Sandra’s reading though) and next week I’m having lunch with Joshua Clover and going to his reading in Athens. What I wish: that the extremes of community’s disparity would not exclude each other. I hear poets speak of “mainstream” poetry disparagingly, and alternately “language” poetry as something to be avoided…. I think there just needs to be a little bit more historical understanding on both sides. I do think there are sides, at least I see them. I don’t want that they should exist, but I try to participate in what feels helpful to me and to my poetry. I understand that there are many things taken for granted in workshop discussions, but these workshop discussions (cliques? groups?) are perhaps the best hope for finding good readers of poems. I like Zizek’s thesis in _The Parallax View_: that the wandering artist cuts across the chasms of community, perhaps by belonging (not merely being included in, though this is always a possibility) to more than one.
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By: Henry Gould

Henry Gould — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 17:54:23 +0000

Brent,
the kind of self-conscious, creative revision of available “conventions”, which you describe quite well, is what every good poet has done since the days of Euripides, if not before.
The new thing since the advent of modernity (as we understand that term) has been the programmatic – nay, automatic – “mainstreaming” and prestige of change for its own sake. The term “avant-garde” is one of the brand names of this (mostly market) phenomenon; the assumption of team formations (“conventional” and “experimental”) – & all their clubby maneuvering – is one of its consequences.
I agree pretty much with the comments of Tarn & Paz posted by Don Share : we inhabit a sort of mirror-world, in which “post-avant” generations have so completely absorbed the hoary lessons of early 20th-century experimenters, that they regurgitate them through their pores : “experiment” as a self-conscious artistic technique has become utterly conventional.
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By: Brent Cunningham

Brent Cunningham — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 17:13:22 +0000

But wait, Ange: who does Steve Burt email to check that he’s not crazy? What if he emails you to check just as you’re emailing him? Where then shall we build our shining City of Sanity?
how-ever I didn’t intend to say the avant garde is simply free of conventions: it’s not like “originality” is the point, it’s subtler & more difficult than that and involves seeking approaches that subvert conventions, reuse them strangely, revive them, turn them upside-down, or otherwise do things with them I can’t or wouldn’t want to try to determine beforehand (but all of which, to be what I’m desirous of, would manifest as something more than the robotic acceptance of the convention). Indeed these are hard & actually impossible things to pin down in general terms and reach agreement: one person’s cliche is another’s mind-altering revelation, etc. But I do think what you’re encountering as an avant garde “program” is, to me, just a very loose and internally divided group of people, not so different from Gould’s definition of a school, who yet would probably have some similar senses as to what is cliched and conventional in poetry if they sat down in a room with 1,000 new books and went through them.
In any case what I was more interested in was just whether you who think of the avant garde as restrictively programmatic (rather than generatively so) have a single set of formal characteristics in mind for the avant poem. It’s a straightforward question, driven by real curiosity. It sounds like you have various formal characteristics in mind, not one paradigmatic poem, which is itself interesting tho I don’t know exactly what that means at the moment. I’m not sure I’d consider “oulipo procedures” a formal characteristic though. An n plus 7 procedure performed on the bible is markedly different from n plus 7 performed on a script from Who’s The Boss, isn’t it? Of course there’s the counter argument that one “mainstream” poem where the speaker has a self-realization of their place in the cosmos when faced with sublime nature is markedly different than another. Still, while you can argue that if you want, when I read those poems I just don’t feel that difference (“anymore” that is–I did once, maybe I’m now jaded or an avant-snob).
But I do think oulipian formal markers, or the other avant approaches you named, could become deadeningly conventional–certainly they could, that’s part of my point. They would then stop being, for that particular time in their use, avant garde, even if historically they operated differently. Quatrains could also become radically surprising, even a rallying point for all kinds of changes. Right now I don’t feel that way about oulipo procedures nor quatrains, I find the opposite, but I’m interested & open to thinking about it since you seem to disagree. I wonder how two people could come to some consensus as to what is “really” tired and overdone: counting the published books using oulipo procedures seems really not worth it or to the point, I must say.
Anyways I suppose I’m indicating that my notion of the avant garde is much larger than you seem to be picturing: it doesn’t preclude, for instance, the lyric, and what’s really interesting is that here YOU are the only one making the list of who is avant garde and who isn’t. I mean, who are these vague forces are doing all this denigration of writers you value? To whom do you grant the authority to consider x writer conventional? Whose power is greater than yours? Did Ron Silliman say something disparaging about Mark McMorris or Barbara Guest recently that I missed?
So really your list of names confuses me: I don’t think any of them would be inclined to embrace the idea that they were or are conventional or mainstream in the way I’m talking about it. You’ll have to point me to someone who is theorizing the value of an aesthetic “mainstream”. Meanwhile I really I have no idea what you’re talking about when you connect the lyric to anti-avant-gardism: to me the lyric is a formal technique, such that used one way it could be conventional, while used another it could be a radical illumination of lived conditions. If the lyric is music, Zukofsky’s musical to me and also writing an avant garde poetry, same with Guest or Rodrigo Toscano. If the lyric is the singularly constituted self, I think Mina Loy, say, or more recently Bhanu Kapil or Renee Gladman or many another do many an avant garde thing with that convention. I could list a lot more names closer to the Now. But in each case, for me, the vital question would probably be whether the lyric surface is presented as natural or unproblematic, i.e .whether the poem believes it possible or acceptable to be seduced by sound or a singular speaking self into a kind of unengaged reverie or uncritical bonding, rather than, in contrast, whether it’s used as a surface productive of engagement, to produce tensions & illumine the living picture behind the pretty picture. Again: hard to agree when and where that’s happening versus when and where it’s not. Once again we’ve gotta sit in a room with a 1,000 books together I guess.
The marxist question you ask depends, I suppose, on what one means by marxism. Is it *possible* to write out of a different intellectual tradition than the marxist and neo-marxist tradition/s? Of course it’s possible, and of course there’s lots of legitimate avant garde poetic traditions, even still staunchly “political” poetry (say, American Buddhist-influenced poetry in someone like anne waldman) that aren’t in a particularly overt line back to marx. But if you’re asking “Am I allowed to both consider myself an ethical person but also write poetry that’s detached from consciousness of the unequal distribution of resources in this country and the world, or which can simply ignore the way language is used every day to support, obscure or justify that unequal distribution?” then I’d probably first say I don’t really have the right to give you that permission or withhold it. But if you insisted I magically had that permission somehow, I’d probably choose to say no, you can’t.
yrs,
Brent
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By: James Reston

James Reston — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 15:41:45 +0000

This is so stupid. When is the last time any publication printed any masculist poetry? Where are the men’s groups allowed to go? Nowhere, nowhere. But certain people demand feminist this, feminist that, as if it were a belief we were all required to take part in. Bah.
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By: Henry Gould

Henry Gould — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 13:26:44 +0000

I’m on my sixth scotch here, but I can still distinguish between “schools” & “cliques”.
Genuine schools or literary movements have to do with a certain shared enthusiasm (usually youthful) for a literary style or technique, or a sense of the world & history (a philosophy), or the dynamic confluence of all these elements. French Symbolism, clustered around Baudelaire & Mallarme (& exploded by Rimbaud); Russian Acmeism, forwarded by Gumilev, Akhmatova, Mandelstam; the NY School (wherein both style & worldview were kept self-consciously informal, ironic & playful); etc. etc.
Such movements seem natural & inheently interesting – they provide supportive context or launch-pads for individual poets. That, it seems to me, is their main purpose : they should be viewed as “facilitators” rather than as ends in themselves.
I suppose when a school becomes an end in itself, it starts to take on more of the features of a clique.
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By: Vivek Narayanan

Vivek Narayanan — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 05:22:24 +0000

I’ve read the exchange now between Ashton, Spahr and Young now, and I have a very different set of thoughts on that– but elsewhere.
I just want to add a couple of things to Anonymous Ange’s responses to Brent.
One, very simply, if it is possible to tell an avant garde poem at a distance of say, five feet away from the page, without actually having to read the words, absorb them, and see if they do in fact unsettle the status quo or merely adorn it with quaint, self-important and deeply redundant disjunctive play… well, there’s a problem.
Two, it’s not really a question of form so much of lineage and network. To insist that you must buy into a particular lineage (eg. black mountain) if you want to be part of the club would certainly help to make it (for instance) a “white male” lineage. As for network, I mean clique. Is there really any difference between “school of poetry” and “clique of poetry”? Being outside the scene and far away, I have often struggled to understand why someone is included in one club or another only to discover, much later, that it has more to do with the hidden histories of personal friendships or enmities than with that long history of theoretical justification and theoretical self-promotion that you speak of. Well, if you’re considered avant garde or not based on who your friends are, that’s would also be something that might restrict the demographic. Don’t get me wrong– I have nothing at all against white men, I read a lot of them and some of my very best friends are white men. Now the question is, once the avant garde is forced to do away with imposing a particular lineage or enthroning a particular clique, what is it left with?
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By: Alicia (A.E.)

Alicia (A.E.) — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 04:00:35 +0000

Oops. “Anonymous” is moi.
What a nifty little (anagrammatic) poem in its own right!
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By: Kristen

Kristen — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 03:44:49 +0000

“But if a poetry is in dialog with other arts, sciences, and philosophies than Marxian ones, does it count?”
Let’s hope. And in the meantime, pass the Scotch!
cheers
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By: Ange

Ange — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 01:57:51 +0000

Oops. “Anonymous” is moi.
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By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 23:12:01 +0000

“But one thing about the avant garde, unlike the mainstream or the conventional, is that it has a body of theory and a history to it.”
Hi Brent. I emailed this sentence to Steve Burt with a plea along the lines of, “Am I going crazy?” Because if there’s one thing the “mainstream” has, it’s history. It also has had its theorists, from Sir Philip Sidney to Coleridge, to Arnold to Eliot, to Jarrell to Longenbach to Kinzie to Stewart to Grossman … should I reach for my Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry & Poetics, or is this a sufficient sample?
Have you even seen the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry & Poetics? It’s 1,383 pages long and its history didn’t begin with the French Revolution.
“But if the poems eventually matter, which I hope they do, I’d need some evidence for that claim of formal restrictions and formal conventionality there–it’s not enough to say ‘because the avant garde critiques cliched conventions it is therefore a program and convention all its own, the program of not being cliched.’”
Agreed. But that’s not what I’m saying. Formal restrictions/conventions of the a-g might include “Disjunctivitis” (see the Don Share comment & the Paz quote) Steinian repetition, and, my favorite, the “hybrid” text! Are you really suggesting that there are no conventions with regard to those styles, or the Frankfurt School, post-structuralist theory, and left wing politics? Isn’t it true that repeating decades-old Oulipian experiments is okay, whereas writing in quatrains ain’t?
My point is not that I don’t enjoy some disjunctive texts or Oulipian experiments; my point is that they constitute conventions.
(Even the phrase “I enjoy some x or y” indicates a less-than-a-g criterion for judgment — taste; enjoyment itself carries a distinctly bourgeois taint.)
I suppose I’m a little annoyed at your assumptions because it’s so easy to mislabel good poets as “conventional” when they’re not. I’m going to post in the near future on Tom Pickard’s new book from Flood Editions. My last review for the Poetry Project Newsletter was on Anne Porter. Those are two poets who might be misread as the bad kind of conventional. I think too of Mark McMorris, and Christopher Middleton. Was the Yale Younger Poet Joan Murray (d. 1947) conventional? Doesn’t James Schuyler look a tad conventional?
On a side note, I’m very curious indeed as to why lyric, in particular, gets such a beating from the avant-garde, or why lyric has to be continually ousted then slowly reincorporated. I suspect that’s the secret mechanism by which a-g calls itself into existence, and to face it head on would actually destroy it.
The one thing you said that I agree with is that a-g practitioners are in dialog “with larger social and philosophical positions.” True. But if a poetry is in dialog with other arts, sciences, and philosophies than Marxian ones, does it count?
Thanks. And thanks to everyone who comments here; I’d like to shout out to everyone, but I’m getting fried. Where’s the Scotch?
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By: Henry Gould

Henry Gould — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 18:23:39 +0000

Brent,
You asked about formal similarity or conventionality within the avant-garde. I suppose there are at least two factors which would push the a-v in that direction, both of which you mentioned yourself. The first is the idea that the a-v is “by definition” commited to resisting what it sees as convention. This commitment places its practitioners in a certain plotted adversarial role. The second is that, unlike the conventional poets, a-v poets have a defined THEORY, promulgated by not one but TWO authoritative works. Now whenever you have a doctrine instantiated in sacred books, you are going to have certain rituals and priestly orders of inclusion/exclusion, based on the dogma of the sacred texts. This would seemingly also tend to channel a-v writing into certain shared techniques and characteristics bearing the official theoretical imprimature.
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By: Jordan

Jordan — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 17:35:25 +0000

Brent, would you mind providing a list of five poems written in the last five years that satisfy your definition of conventional poetry? Backchannel preferred.
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By: Don Share

Don Share — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 17:31:42 +0000

Fuel for the fire, as if any might be needed, may be found in the remarks by Octavio Paz reproduced at the Verse blog, e.g.:
“Many have commented on the disappearance of a true avant-garde and its replacement by avant-gardism… I see this as a prolongation of experimentation usually leading further on from collage and montage into ever-increasing fragmentation and eventually into a degenerative disease which, adapting an already common usage, I call ‘disjunctivitis.’ The argument, used by some producers who, correctly locating the seats of available power in the academy, have ensconced themselves therein every bit as much as the establishment ‘mainstream,’ to the effect that the disruption of the common linguistic coin is part of a war against ‘late-capitalist’ discourse is singularly inept. I do not see oppressed workers of any kind devouring the products of avant-gardism. The death-of-the-author thematics, as commonly adapted, are another inanity: when society does its very best to homogenize us, what is wrong with a strong, knowledgeable, and responsible ego crying in the darkening wildnerness?”
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By: stan apps

stan apps — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 17:15:06 +0000

Hi Ange,
I think you may have some misunderstandings about the strict military-style discipline of the avant-garde. Let me try to clear things up.
Now, I take my orders directly from Nada Gordon. If Nada Gordon has no orders to give, or is unavailable, then I take my orders from Vanessa Place. Now if Vanessa Place is incommunicado, or indisposed, then I take my orders from Juliana Spahr. Now if Juliana Spahr is on a trip around the world, or too busy to answer email, then I take my orders from Jane Sprague. Now if Jane Sprague doesn’t want to talk to me or doesn’t have anything to say to me, then I take my orders from Anne Boyer.
Goddess forbid any of these people ever disagree about anything! If they did though, I’d probably have to ask Katie Degentesh, or Christine Wertheim, or Stephanie Young to mediate between them.
Now, just because the “top brass” don’t involve themselves in the petty arguments of the foot soldiers, (i.e. the kinds of neurotic argumentative blog discourse you condemn) don’t get too confused. The top brass don’t like to be seen as “sweating it” in public. Staying out of pointless arguments is an important characteristic of an effective management style.
Yrs,
Stan “PFC” Apps
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By: Sandra Simonds

Sandra Simonds — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 17:10:36 +0000

This post is better than PhD school. Thank you.
Sandra
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By: Brent Cunningham

Brent Cunningham — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 17:01:16 +0000

In many of these comments I hear a kind of vague consensus or presumption I’d like to question. I hear it in Ange’s “The a-g is all about telling you what to do, how to write, and whom to address,” in Simon’s “the programmatic nature of the avant garde,” in Vivek’s “the AG produces, by now, within itself a mainstream and a periphery,” and etc. It might be phrased this way: “if the recent American avant garde (whoever that might be) ever was truly open and experimental and inventive (which it probably wasn’t) it has by now most certainly fallen victim to being as conventionalized, closed and rote as that which it supposedly critiques, if not moreso.”
Leaving aside some of the historical and philosophical assumptions in that position, one thing it seems to imply is that there is now a formal similarity, a conventionality, occurring in the poems the current avant gardists are producing. I’d be curious if people really do feel that way? If so what are the formal qualities that make up an avant garde poem?
I generally use the word “conventional” instead of “mainstream”. When I use that term I have in mind an admittedly hazy notion of a standard “conventional” poem. But I do feel I could tentatively list some of its attributes. It wouldn’t be hard and fast any more than any other formal taxonomy, and it would rely on the word “often” a lot: “Often the conventional poem has a speaker or implied speaker; often the speaker reaches a moment of self-realization or epiphany; often there is a marked preference for latinate terms rather than the anglo saxon except when it is a matter of describing “firm” “foundational” images of the natural world; often there is some formal habit that evinces a heightening in a direction away from daily speech (i.e. no contractions); often the meter becomes iambic at moments of emotional catharsis” and so on. Many of these attributes could be used in non-conventional poetry, but unless irony is at work too many of them begin to add up to conventionality to my ear. Do people here feel that they have an equally structural avant garde poem in mind? What are some of its (tentative) attributes?
For me the avant garde is by definition committed to resisting and questioning conventionality. Certainly it’s possible that particular groups or people claiming to be avant gardists have begun to write conventionally or enforce sorts of conventionality–since thankfully there’s no police in art anything’s possible. But one thing about the avant garde, unlike the mainstream or the conventional, is that it has a body of theory and a history to it. True it’s a very white, very male, and specifically european tradition in most ways (although many of the originary moments of avant garde theories can also be shown to owe a lot to non-white, non-male and non-european cultures as well–nothing springs sui generis, least of all european white men), but nevertheless it exists and has some things to say. There are not one but two books called The Theory of the Avant Garde (Burger, a male german & Poggioli, a male italian), both of which are worth looking at to get a sense of the term’s history. The nice thing about having this body of theory is that when someone claims to be participating in an avant garde tradition it’s possible to question those claims against something (not that Poggioli or Burger get to be final authorities somehow, but at least the claims don’t happen entirely in a vacuum). Thus it is possible to notice (here I’m maybe thinking of Francisco Aragon’s comments to Emily Warn next door on as similar topic) that many of the aesthetic principles of the european avant garde have had a signficant presence in latin american literary culture of the 20th century, i.e. that although the avant garde has been largely flavored rather white, male and european as we now have it, a potentiality to be renewed in other cultures and contexts exists. And to me that’s because highly debatable but distinct principles exist (themselves in dialogue, importantly, with larger social and philosophical positions). While on the other hand the principles that exist for the conventional are by definition impossible to reinvent, mostly because they aren’t specific but entirely formal: whatever is cliched is therefore conventional. Thus the problem with the “mainstream” as I define it is exactly that: they’re writing tired, cliched, hackneyed work, and if they’re not, they’ve left the mainstream.
As with any social grouping, I’m aware that there are deep problems of exclusion/inclusion and power struggles and who gets to speak and ways of feeling mis-characterized related to a particular avant garde or gardes. But if the poems eventually matter, which I hope they do, I’d need some evidence for that claim of formal restrictions and formal conventionality there–it’s not enough to say “because the avant garde critiques cliched conventions it is therefore a program and convention all its own, the program of not being cliched.” Or if it is a program, please sign me up for it, because it sounds like it’s just in favor of renewing and revivifying whatever is dead & empty…
Yrs,
Brent
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By: Kevin Doran

Kevin Doran — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 21:57:35 +0000

Thanks for that. They don’t seem to be bitching, or doing so freely through blog, but it’s a start. Interesting read, though came away little the wiser.
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By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 17:19:17 +0000

“Following absolutely no (as far as i can see) bitching about ‘male oppression’ in poetry from English poet-bloggers …”
You must not have seen this:
http://jacketmagazine.com/34/wagner-forum.shtml
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By: Kevin Doran

Kevin Doran — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 13:21:14 +0000

Following absolutely no (as far as i can see) bitching about ‘male oppression’ in poetry from English poet-bloggers, and a never-ending cascade of salivation about it from America, and endless confusion on my part, i’m starting to think either America is one seriously sexist country (and i’ve lived in Ireland…), or the people there are more head-toasted than i thought. . . .
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