Comments on: Who You Callin’ “Post-Avant”?

By: Brian Salchert

Brian Salchert — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 22:21:01 +0000

I have come to this/ days too late, and reading through all of it
has put a knot in my tum-tum. So there’s no need to approve
this comment, such as it is. Anyway, here’s a little silly:
. . . . 9
When his golf ball didn’t
go in the hole,
the golfer drilled
a hole in his golf ball,
and turned his tee
upside down. So there.

By: Archambeau

Archambeau — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 12:15:20 +0000

Interesting stuff, Reginald! And I like both Henry Gould’s response and Ron Silliman’s, both of which bring context and tradition to bear. I’ve posted a long-winded response called “Negative Legislators: Ethics of the Post-Avant” (I’d had a lot of coffee) over at my blog ( http://samizdatblog.blogspot.com/2008/02/negative-legislators-ethics-of-post.html ).
Gluttons for punishment are welcome to check it out.
Bob

By: Don Share

Don Share — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 17:34:52 +0000

Or as Ezra Pound once put it, “it ain’t the splendours that make grouping. And booze is not the river of enlightenment.”

By: Paul Hoover

Paul Hoover — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 02:00:47 +0000

Since the subject of Flarf has come up, I’ll offer my blurb for Sharon Mesmer’s recently published Annoying Diabetic Bitch, published by Combo Books late in 2007:
Who or what’s eating Sharon Mesmer now? Saint Brave tugging on Jesus’ weenie? There’s more to this book than just a bullet to the brain! A kind of Dadaist courage to destroy form through the contents of discontent. She makes the surrealists look like sissies. “Rock and Roll” originally meant Sharon Mesmer. This book could give a girl a stiffy. No one has a more permanent home on the face of the page! “An acerbic visionary” (Lungfull). Half angel, half park ranger. For those who love distraction in poetry and art.
______________________
Here’s what I offered about the indigestible to Christian’s blog which equally belongs on Reginald’s, excerpted. The entry began in response to D.W. Fenza and swerved to:
But despite all of its influence and the fact that major presses publish some of its authors, language poetry retains its Outside status. No one ever mentions Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, or Leslie Scalapino as a “third way” or “lyric postmodernism.” They resist assimilation. Yet you can read Lyn’s book SLOWLY as meditative lyric; lyric, that is, that doesn’t try to slather the reader in the greasepaint of feeling. The avant-garde practice that has proved least assimilable is, strangely enough, performance poetry. There’s something within the body of poetry that resists its invasion. It never quite makes the mainstream, and by the mainstream I mean those of us, regardless of aesthetic, who make up poetry’s central economy: the Caroyn Forches, Charles Bernsteins, and Christian Wimans. Edwin Torres is fabulous, but why has language poetry, despite its difficulties, had so much more impact?
All of humanity wants to be considered innovative. It’s disconcerting.
A student of mine in Chicago, a female Hispanic, first-generation college student, was accepted to an MFA program in the East through an ethnic scholarship. So far, so good. But her work was rejected in the workshops as inaccessible. She could engage the meditative mode, the ‘abstract,’ but her poems were lyrical and so firmly framed as to be narrative. Beautiful poetry, but her workshop instructors claimed not to understand them. They asked her if she wouldn’t like to write some nice poems about being Hispanic. But she already was! The experience was a torture for her. She was perceived to be a carrier of these parasites D. W. Fenza imagines to exist. One of her professors took a summer vacation in San Francisco and returned with startling news. “There’s something called language poetry there,” she declared to her class, “Do you think it will come here?”
Why was Holderlin such a great poet? He failed at power.

By: susan

susan — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 01:30:06 +0000

Careful, boys. You do know that when you start talking about your contemporaries by name, you just look resentful? Nietzsche would be proud.

By: john

john — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 20:19:16 +0000

Reginald,
The critique of self-destructive emotional release through alcohol etc. echoes Frederick Douglas’s critique of the Christmas revels, during which too many slaves spent their too much of their “time off” drinking too much. I’ve seen similar self-destruction (among the lower and upper classes), and have experienced my own self-destructiveness and self-limitations in other ways.
Woody Herman commissioned “Ebony Concerto,” which I’ve never liked, from Stravinsky. The Bartok is called “Contrasts for Violin, Clarinet, and Piano.” Goodman recorded it with Bartok on piano and Joseph Szigeti on violin. I’ll email details to you back channel.
Cheers –
John

By: Kent Johnson

Kent Johnson — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 19:43:54 +0000

I have been posting to much, I am aware, but I just had to share this poem, sent to me today by an MFA student in California who attended the AWP. (I promise the piece is not by me!):
“In the Bathroom At AWP”
This one’s a post-modernist,
this one’s avant-garde,
this one writes long
narrative poems
about horses and blood.
And yet, though they may assume
different poses,
they’re all holding on
to the same fucking thing.

By: Kent Johnson

Kent Johnson — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 19:40:26 +0000

>I don’t see how Joshua Clover’s work is indigestible by the academic institutional belly, especially given its theoretical apparatus.
Reginald,
Could be my poor prose, but my point there is that the theory-charged poetry of Clover *is* perfectly digestible– just as the Flarfers and Goldsmith, whom Hoover mentioned, are digestible.
Of course, this implies no judgment on Joshua’s work, which I admire in many ways.
Kent

By: Reginald Shepherd

Reginald Shepherd — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 18:47:06 +0000

Hi John,
Thanks for reminding me that I can also get caught up in over-heated rhetoric. I was probably unfair to Goodman–I think it was the Ebony Concerto that he commissioned from Bartok, but I could be wrong. My point was that most of what we think of as jazz Adorno didn’t know about and wasn’t writing about. He might not have liked it if he had heard it, but that’s speculation. People often accuse Adorno of racism because of his criticisms of jazz, but he’s writing about white musicians and at one point says that there might be something more authentic in the black music on which they were drawing.
Adorno’s was definitely a puritanical Marxism. He wanted a better society in which people could experience true joy, but until we got there, he wasn’t taking any substitutes. Again, I can’t imagine what it would have been like to spend time with him, as he seems to have been utterly humorous and incapable of relaxing. But I value him for his writing and for his ideas, not for how fun he might have been at cocktail parties, which are the kind of thing I hate anyway. I don’t believe in judging writers or thinkers by their personalities or biographies.
I’m not saying that some people are real people and some people are automatons. I’m saying that capitalism turns real people into automatons who act out their inchoate frustrations through drinking and taking drugs and abusing one another and themselves in almost unlimited ways, with very little opportunity even to become consciously aware of their unhappiness, let alone do anything about it. Maybe that sounds too harsh, but I live in a very working class area and I see it all the time. When I was working menial jobs in Boston I did a lot of stupid, self-destructive, or just wasteful things to try to block out the fact that I was a wage slave, so I don’t exempt myself.
Take good care. I think that now this post must have exceeded the Harriet record for number of comments. Cool.
peace and poetry,
Reginald

By: john

john — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 18:19:01 +0000

Reginald — thanks for the stuff about Adorno on Stravinsky — very interesting!
I want to respond to one piece of you what you said:
“Let me put it another, harsher way: our society screws people over and that screws them up. It gives them distorted ideas about their own interests (yes, there is such a thing as false consciousness), makes them work and believe against their own interests, . . . ”
I’m with you 100% of the way here. I’ve seen it too. I’ve known homeless people who vote Republican.
You continue:
” . . . and provides no opportunity to become real people; it turns people into automatons who participate in their own oppression.”
I get what you’re saying, but the rhetoric of “real people” v. “automatons” is disconcerting to me. Dehumanizing people — even rhetorically — ain’t right. People who work against their own self interests are still people.
And, by the way, Goodman’s music wasn’t stereotyped dreck. He hired many brilliant and individualistic musicians, including Lionel Hampton, Teddy Wilson, and Billie Holiday, and he himself was a brilliant, individualistic player who later commissioned Bartok to write something for him (a terrific piece, the name of which is escaping me). Even if you don’t like Goodman, beating up on him to defend Adorno’s ignorance of Ellington doesn’t really help Adorno.
“A deep suspicion of pleasure” is representative of a not-uncommon strain of puritanical Marxism. Bummer.