Comments on: Scattered Thoughts on Fracture

By: Diane K. Martin

Diane K. Martin — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 19:20:40 +0000

Hi Reginald,
I join the others in wishing that you be well soon.
Re your discussion — I’m very interested in what you say here, in part because I think paying attention to syntax is crucial and, at the very least, fun. I was wondering if the fracture might have been more important in the days of the High Modernists as a response to historic literature and to what was happening then in the early 20th century — but that now, when all is fracture, from Sesame Street to new music to our YouTube distracted minds, it might not be as necessary to take apart and dislocate as it is to locate and connect.
Hope this makes any kind of sense.
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By: Lydia Olidea

Lydia Olidea — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 18:28:54 +0000

Hello. And indeed wellest wishes to Reginald.
I know this is a blog and not an academic panel, and that we’re trying to avoid endless abysses of taxonomy. I hope it’s useful anyway to point out that this term “avant-garde” has enough current meanings to be worth hesitating over. Two very common senses that the term seems to have these days are (1) poetry that employs a series of formal devices derived (or simply repeated) from the formal experiments of the historical avant-garde in endless and old pursuit of the new, and/or (2) poets who are supposedly not part of the “mainstream” and have a hipster-intellectual cred, deserved or not, for what seems often enough just to be a kind of fucking about or willfulness.
But it seems to me that there’s another description of the historical avant-garde that’s not simply formal, and not simply subcultural, which is — along Burger’s lines, though I can’t entirely get with his program — art which expressly fashions itself as a political negation (and, rather consistently, negation of capitalism as far as I can tell). This gets mentioned here occasionally, and just as suddenly disappears from the discussion, and so we’re back to discussing the avant-garde in terms of “the new,” or specific formal choices like fragmentation/fracture — as if these things are the avant-garde.
Reginald has justly skewered both the first two categories, often in ways I agree with. The leap that puzzles me is how these complaints about knee-jerk “experimentalism” or about specific formal strategies are then used for a general tarring of “the avant-garde,” rather than an equally reasonable question about how its project of negation — call it what you want — might be better prosecuted in current situations.
Which is to say, I’m all for jettisoning failed bullshit. That doesn’t make less pressing a “ruthless critique of what exists.”
To proceed as if the avant-garde is the sum total of the failures of the avant-garde seems to get it wrong, and to be a method no one would want applied to their own tradition. So by all means let’s critique fragmentation, or the fetish of the new, or cliquishness — but let’s also maintain some distinction between baby and bathwater?
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By: john

john — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 16:18:12 +0000

Dear Reginald,
Your recovery is on my wish list.
I’m glad to see you quoting Spicer, and glad for the ensuing discussion. The quote intrigues, and he is indeed wily.
Who’s to say that poetry doesn’t need enemies? That enemies don’t give it tensility? As long as poets Make enough It along with the New, the invention can vivify the poetry; too much New without enough It or Making can break the tension, make it slack. (Not forgetting Jordan’s reminder that such making shall be Day by Day.)
I was reading a 1950s pocket paperbook edition of “New World Writing” the other day and noticed the back-cover blurb, “Avant-Garde Means YOU!”
Yeah yeah yeah!
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By: Mary Meriam

Mary Meriam — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 03:20:27 +0000

Reginald wrote: My questions are always, “How can these things be put together? What constellation do they form?”
Perhaps fragmentation is a way of avoiding the backbreaking work of the poet/god creating a “constellation” – a beautiful term for a poem. Make it whole, I’d say. Every word is a star in the constellation. We look up at the night sky, at billions of stars like random words, and we want to create form and meaning there. Once we see that the stars form Orion, we remember that constellation forever (just as I always remember you, Reginald Orion).
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By: Brent Cunningham

Brent Cunningham — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 22:32:31 +0000

Hi, Reginald,
I’d have to agree with Kent here about your use of Spicer–he’s a many-edged sword. For instance, you say:
“My interest in syntax, the relation of words and phrases to one another, arises from the desire to make or reveal connections among the elements of my poems and my world(s).”
But elsewhere in AFTER LORCA, Spicer is explicit to the contrary: “Things do not connect; they correspond.”
This isn’t simply a rhetorical hairsplitting between the term “connect” and the term “correspond”–rather, Spicer’s thought about whether, in art, things can or should be made to connect, whether art really must be “about producing and revealing relation” as you put it, is quite ambiguous. What he does more than anything is refuse to declare one or the other side of that particular binary realer than the other. He’s actually tormented by that irresolvability, and time and again tries to harness various versions of the whole/part paradox to make writing. I know your stated value is for work, i.e. for letting poetic work be and speak for itself without undue theoretical presuppositions, but in this false binary of connection vs fracture, with the latter as your strawman, you end up schematizing and reducing Spicer’s actual writing and thought on the matter.
At the same time I, too, wish deeply for the improved health of my own favorite foil & provocateur…
Yrs,
Brent
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By: Daniel

Daniel — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 16:05:13 +0000

This is an excellent, excellent article Reginald. I’d love to see it flushed out as a long, if you haven’t already done so.
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By: Henry Gould

Henry Gould — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 01:36:06 +0000

Recommend Elder Olson’s essay “An Outline of Poetic Theory” (in the book Critics and Criticism, ed. by R.S. Crane), for any consideration of wholeness, fracture, etc. in poetry.
A poem is, among other things, a made object, like a shoe; Olson contrasts the wholeness of a shoe to the “totality” of a piece of wire.
Those who promote fragmentation, collage, juxtaposition, etc.,on the basis of their relevance to contemporary experience, are “slice-of-life” realists in disguise. It’s possible to think of poems as something other than transcripts.
& those who, more radically, criticize aesthetic “wholeness” on the grounds that such (supposed) wholes maintain oppressive social forces (hegemonic ideologies, etc.) – this represents a kind of iconoclasm. If art objects are denied independent status as unique aesthetic (beautiful) entities, then the iconoclasts, if they don’t want to contradict themselves, will have to toss out all the “fragmentary” art too.
& maybe that’s exactly what they ARE doing : satirical phenomena like “language poetry”, “conceptual poetry” and “flarf”, for example, come across as ritualistic removals of self-tainted “abjects”…
so much depends upon
what is the
beautiful &
what & how
we feel
about it
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By: Johannes Goransson

Johannes Goransson — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 01:22:10 +0000

Reginald,
There is much to say about this post, but I’ll limit myself to a couple of brief comments:
1. I think it’s unconvincing to keep on attacking this un-named “avant-garde” and assuming that they hold certain caricatured positions. In order for this type of rant to be valuable you’re going to to have to find some specifics. Who are these barbarians?
2. The historical avant-garde was a huge influence on the Modernists (Eliot, Pound, Williams etc). It’s absurd for you claim that these supposed avant-garde types ignore the Modernists when the High Modernists you mention are the most canonized, most written-about poets in literary history. How often in discussions of High Modernism do scholars and critics pay attention to the influence of the historical avant-garde? In classes on modern poetry? How many people have even read Huelsenbeck’s Fantastic Prayers? (For example). There are texts of the historical avant-garde that have not even been translated into English!
Also: Best of luck with your health!
Johannes
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By: Lawrence

Lawrence — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 21:50:19 +0000

Mr. Shepherd,
First of all, I hope your recovery is speedy and complete. I have really enjoyed the last several posts (the posts on modernism plus this post), and I am mostly in agreement with your assessment of contemporary experimental poetry and its regressive relationship to the historical avant garde.
What I would love to see, though, is a positive elucidation of what you see as the most fruitful (i.e., politically relevant, to the extent that poetry intersects with the political) direction for contemporary American poetry. Maybe you would do us the honor in a future post.
I am interested in the dichotomy you suggest between a poetry of experiment and a poetry of experience (especially since the French word expérience translates both).
Also, you seem to be thinking through the concept of fragmentation in a way that isn’t often done. I feel like I often see writers accepting fragmentation either as a fact of social existence (which is usually a way of ignoring concrete relations or of foreclosing a critical totalizing moment) or as a subversive technique (which seems to forego direct engagement for a flimsy radicalism if not a capitulation to an “atomized” social reality).
You begin to offer a positive critique toward the end of your post. I’d like to see a full-post’s worth of it: Why do you ask the questions you ask (How to put together? What constellations?), and what do your answers assume about your relation to the historical past and to tradition? What is your interest in reconciliation?
I think that the interrelations between words (both the words in the poem and the words outside the poem, in other poems and other texts, other uses) is an interesting way to rethink the “materiality of the signifier” beyond the character of abject finitude that that concept has had for the major experimental poets of the past 30 or so years, and move towards, to borrow your line of thought, a concreteness of poetic discourse (which I could see, maybe, in poets such as Lyn Hejinian and Jeremy Prynne, just to name two).
I hope that you will oblige me when you are up to it.
– Lawrence
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By: Kent Johnson

Kent Johnson — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 20:23:48 +0000

Reginald Shepherd wrote:
>By now it has frequently come to seem like a form of keeping up with fashion: never wear the same outfit twice, make sure you’re wearing next season’s clothes. This is part of what Jack Spicer means when he writes to the long dead Federico Garcia Lorca that “Invention is merely the enemy of poetry.”
Regnald,
I hope, and we all do, of course, that you will be better soon. Stay strong.
I do have to make a comment on your above: for Spicer’s After Lorca is one of THE strangest and most “inventive” books of 20th century poetry in English, hands down. There was nothing like it before and there has been little like it since (what there is wouldn’t exist without it).
I guess all I would want to say for now is that Spicer, a very complicated poet (and person!), can’t usually be read as straight up as you seem to want to read him here.
Best wishes to feeling better!
Kent
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By: Joseph Hutchison

Joseph Hutchison — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 19:36:31 +0000

Reginald, I’m sorry to hear you’re back in the hospital. They can be as grim as airports. But it’s wonderful to see you’re still managing to post your typical, incisive musings. Hang in there!
By the way, I just posted something on my blog that bumps up against the same issues you discuss here: http://perpetualbird.blogspot.com/2008/07/comment-on-rupture.html
Enjoy!
Joe H
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By: Jordan

Jordan — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 18:50:37 +0000

For what it’s worth, “Make it new” is the second half of a quotation from Pound’s translation of the Analects of Confucius, the first half being “Day by day…”
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By: Aaron Fagan

Aaron Fagan — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 18:02:07 +0000

Doubt is a product. Privacy is protected by chaos.
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