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Reginald Shepherd
Avant-Garde and Modern, Part Three
I’d like to thank everyone who has commented on “Avant-Garde and Modern, Part Two.” This piece began as a response to Brent Cunningham, those scruples and whose comments are both appreciated—I do indeed enjoy principled disagreement, and am getting to the point in my recovery that I can again take pleasure in such meetings of the mind. But as it expanded I decided it would be better positioned as one or two additional posts.
As I made clear in the first part of my post, in which I discussed Peter Bürger’s idea of the historical avant-garde, the term avant-garde can be useful as a historical term referring to some movements, mainly Dada, Surrealism, and Russian Constructivism, which, however interesting in themselves, failed (inevitably?) in their aims to unite what Bürger calls the institution of art and the praxis of life. Their attempts to produce such a sublation or reconciliation revealed and helped make possible the false achievement of that aim through capitalism’s attempted subsumption of semi-autonomous art.
Reginald Shepherd
Avant-Garde and Modern, Part Two
From the haze of fever, fatigue, and nausea emerge further thoughts on the title topic. I hope that they will prove to be of interest. If not, I’ve got more up my sleeve…
The poetic avant-gardening (to adapt Ron Slate’s clever phrase) of the past sixty years or longer has largely been a process of rediscovering the Moderns, turning over the soil, rediscovering things that had been buried or at least lost sight of (including re-seeing a figure hiding in plain sight like Eliot, who in his poetry and in much of his critical prose is far from the conservative curmudgeon he’s made out to be or that he later made himself out to be). There is very little in today’s self-proclaimed avant-garde that wasn’t done by the Modernists: collage, montage, pastiche, quotation, parody, juxtaposition ironic and non-ironic, fracture and fragmentation, ungrammaticalities, catachresis, and syntactic deformation, decentered subjectivity, non-referentiality (whatever that can mean as applied to language, which only exists as such in and as the nexus of concept, sound, and physical mark—in language, sense and reference are not the same thing), critical or celebratory incorporation of popular culture, critique of mass culture, bourgeois society, and/or capitalism, critique of art as a social institution, etc.
There’s nothing wrong with such reusing and even repurposing per se (as someone said once, there is nothing new under the sun). After all, none of us invented the English language either, or the Roman alphabet, which doesn’t mean that we don’t have the right to use them or the potential to do interesting things with them. But there is a great deal wrong with pretending that one has invented these techniques, modes, and approaches oneself, especially when one then goes on to congratulate oneself for one’s daring and perspicacity and to denigrate the literary past for its backwardness.
If one is in the “avant-garde,”? then one is part of the leading formation of some army or another. Besides questioning the teleological nature of such a conception (what exactly is the goal of poetry in this progressivist conception? I feel a grand narrative coming on), I also wonder just what army one imagines oneself to be in the vanguard of, just what other army is one pitted against in this violent struggle, and just what are the spoils of victory? Why, to mention two of my favorite poets, is the work of Jorie Graham, whose work at its best is as complex and challenging as anyone’s, not “avant-garde,”? while the work of Ann Lauterbach is? (Or is Lauterbach also not properly “avant-garde”?—she has written of her sense of marginalization with regard to Language poetry—because she is published by Penguin?) I am asking about the work not the people (though at this point Lauterbach is only barely less established than fellow MacArthur Award winner Graham). And why, for that matter, must interesting, challenging, difficult poetry be labeled or accountable as “avant-garde”? or “post-avant”? in order to be taken seriously? The term “avant-garde”? too often turns into a synonym for “the poetry that I like”? or even just “good poetry.”? Perhaps it’s time to retire it.
Reginald Shepherd
Avant-Garde and Modern, Part One
I am back from the dead if not yet from the walking wounded (fever and fatiuge, nausea and vomiting, hot sweats and cold chills), and am posting a piece on which I’ve been working for a while. I hope that it proves to be of interest.
In his provocative book Theory of The Avant-Garde, German art theorist Peter Bürger makes a useful distinction between avant-garde art and modernist art. The historical avant-garde (in his view comprised of Dada, Surrealism, and Russian constructivism), which Bürger sees as a failed project that is now finished, sought to destroy the institution of art in order to merge art and the praxis of life: “Creativity would cease to be the eccentric prerogative of individuals, with society itself revealed as a work of art”? (Peter Conrad, Modern Times, Modern Places, 301). Though German critical theorist Jürgen Habermas points out in his essay “Modernity—An Incomplete Project”? that “A rationalized everyday life…could hardly be saved from cultrural impoverishment through breaking open a single cultural sphere”? (Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic, 11), the project of sublating the institution of art with the praxis of life succeeded in a negative, parodic form (the danger of which Bürger recognizes), as capitalism has colonized all areas of life and human experience, including, as critical theorist Fredric Jameson points out, the unconscious. (I have dreams about buying things, or stealing them, or finding them, dreams about finding or stealing money.) Bürger notes that the sublation of art into the praxis of life can only be destructive of art’s capacity to critique and imagine different shapes for reality if the praxis of daily life remains one of capitalist instrumentality: “In late capitalist society, intentions of the historical avant-garde are being realized, but the result has been a disvalue. Given the experience of the false sublation of autonomy, one will need to ask whether a sublation of the autonomy status [of art] can be desirable at all, whether the distance between art and the praxis of life is not requisite for that free space within which alternatives to what exists become conceivable”? (54).
Reginald Shepherd
Tiene Dolor?
Pain is my constant companion. This has largely been the case for over a year, with all my emergency room visits, operations, and hospital stays. But since my abdominal perforation and the month-long hospitalization and three surgeries it entailed, pain has never left me. Pain that would have seemed unbearable two years ago now often seems merely a baseline level—unpleasant, uncomfortable, but not requiring any extraordinary measures. Only what my oncologist calls breakthrough pain is worth special notice.
Each time I’ve had some episode of overwhelming pain for hours and hours at a time, I’ve writhed around thinking or crying out “I can’t stand it, I can’t take it anymore.”? And each time I’ve discovered that I can indeed bear it, that I can take it. This isn’t a discovery I would have liked to make. All my illnesses, along with the various other crises in my life, have made me realize that I’m a much stronger person than thought I was, physically and psychically. But I would have been happy never to have known how strong I could be, never to have been put to that test, even though it’s a test I’ve passed over and over. One gets no prizes for passing it, though I suppose that having survived this most recent incident when many people wouldn’t have is a reward in itself.
Reginald Shepherd
Long Hard Road Out of Hell
As some of you know from Emily Warn’s recent post, my recent extended absence from Harriet has been due to severe illness and a long hospital stay. I hope to begin blogging regularly soon.
The short version: I was in the hospital for over a month, and almost died during the first week. According to my infectious disease doctor, by the odds, I should be dead.
The long version: Around April 14 I suffered a perforation of my small intestine which filled my abdominal cavity with unfriendly bacteria and led to a bad case of peritonitis, an inflammation of the intestinal tract. No one knows why or even exactly when the perforation occurred, so no one knows whether it might happen again, let alone how to keep it from recurring. The bacteria spread to my circulatory system, and I developed a nearly fatal case of septicemia, blood poisoning. I had three surgeries to clean out my abdomen over the course of ten days, including a resectioning that removed part of my small intestine (in addition to the portion of my colon that was removed in November along with my tumor) because it was irreparably infected. I was so swollen and distended that I couldn’t be fully closed up after the first two procedures, because the internal pressure would have been too great. Before the first operation, my blood pressure collapsed (to something like 40 over 20), I had a heart attack, and my kidneys briefly stopped functioning; immediately after the second procedure, as I was coming out of anesthesia, I had a seizure. For quite a while I was on a ventilator, because I couldn’t breathe on my own. The surgeon also discovered a bone fragment in my liver, probably the cause of some of my pain in that region.
Reginald Shepherd
Who Can I Be Now?
In the interstices of being horribly sick (this was another chemotherapy week, with the usual panoply of crushing exhaustion, constant diarrhea, intermittent attacks of abdominal pain, continual nausea, and serial vomiting), I have been thinking about Lin Dinh’s fascinating recent Harriet post “Our Bodies, Our Selves,”? which begins by juxtaposing my recent litany of my various physical ailments with Kenneth Goldsmith’s claims that an undefined “we”? no longer have coherent selves, that “We’re infinitely adaptable and changeable minute-to-minute.”? Lin Dinh’s response to Goldsmith begins with these words: “Could someone with even a single serious illness believe that he can be ‘everyone and no one at all’? That’s he’s ‘infinitely adaptable and changeable minute-to-minute’? I don’t think so. Hell, even a simple headache brings me back to my senses, reminds me of the limitations of my body and mind.”? I think that everyone is at least a somewhat different person in different situations, but I don’t believe that people are wholly malleable. Nor do I think that anything is infinite, not even the universe: the most decentered self still has boundaries. But I can see the truth in both viewpoints.
Reginald Shepherd
Online Intimacies
I’m sure this isn’t a novel observation, but I am often struck by how differently people interact online and in person. Though people are capable of both shocking cruelty and viciousness and amazing generosity and kindness, in general face-to-face interactions are guided and moderated by social norms and mores, some of which are purely arbitrary, but many of which make such interactions go more smoothly and painlessly. While America is in general the land of instant intimacy, this phenomenon seems even more pronounced in the online world.
Reginald Shepherd
Good News From My World
Now that it’s official, I can finally tell the world that I have, on my fifteenth try (yes, I’ve been applying since 1993), been awarded a 2008 Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. While I would certainly have liked to have received one earlier, this fellowship could not have come at a time when I needed it more, as my medical bills for my cancer treatments and surgeries have been mounting at a frightening rate.
I keep looking at the list of Fellows on the Guggenheim Foundation web site to confirm that my name is still there. Sometimes the world does give one what one needs when one needs it. Just not very often…
Reginald Shepherd
Avant-Garde Technophilia
Once more illness has kept me away from the blog for a while, this time due to surgery to kill the tumors on my liver. The surgery was successful, or so I’m told, but I ended up in the hospital for several days due to complications.
It recently occurred to me (I’m not sure why it took so long) that there’s a decidedly disproportionate representation of the self-proclaimed avant-garde in the online poetry world. Bloggers in particular are much more likely to be what poet Ron Slate calls avant-gardeners than to be more “mainstream”? poets. (When I first started my own blog a little over a year ago, someone wrote to say that she had been waiting for “a mainstream Ron Silliman”? as a counter-balance, an indication of his iconic status in the online poetry world.) There seems to be a high degree of technophilia among “post-avant”? bloggers. This is in part due to the fact that most of them are relatively young white men, who tend to be aficionados of all things computer-related: blogging, social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, which I confess to being too old to know much about and too stodgy to care, computer and video games, text messaging, iPods and iPhones and Blackberries and Bluetooths, etc.
Reginald Shepherd
Read This and Tell Me What It Says
Once again illness has kept me away from blogging for a bit. I had surgery on Friday on the tumors on my liver, which the surgeon believes he has gotten (yay!), but I had to go the emergency room on Saturday in intense pain that turned out to be caused by pneumonia in my right lung. As Frank Sinatra sang, everything happens to me. Yeesh.
I’m sure that every writer remembers his or her first review. I’m even more sure that every writer remembers his or her first bad review. To be honest, I don’t remember the first review of my first book, where it appeared or who wrote it, what it said or where I was when I first read it. But I remember exactly where I was when I saw my first bad review, of my second book, Angel, Interrupted. I was at Borders in Chicago, in my old hipster/gayboy/yuppie neighborhood of Lakeview. I haven’t been to that Borders in many years, but ten years ago they had an excellent selection of literary journals. I picked up a copy of Chelsea, in which my work had appeared several times, and there it was.
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