A group conversation held at Sea Ranch
on New Year’s Day between
in response
to
A gem
from The Volta
Showing posts with label post-avant. Show all posts
Showing posts with label post-avant. Show all posts
Thursday, May 31, 2012
On numerous occasions, I’ve made the point that the recognition of community – starting implicitly with the Black Mountain poets & the New York School and continuing explicitly with Langpo – is exactly that which distinguishes the post-avant from its predecessor, the avant-gardist late modern. Having taken community as an antidote to individualism, it is disconcerting to see the category figured negatively either by one’s peers who are not reactionaries (Johanna Drucker is one of writing’s most positive forces, for example) & by those who come immediately thereafter (as were the “new coast” poets of the O●blēk Anthology). What third term might exist that would untie the knot created by conflict between the endless competition that is the hallmark of individualism & the social elitism of inside-vs.-outside of any community? If I have a frustration with the post-Langpo / pre-Conceptual poets of the past few decades, it is largely that no such third term has been forthcoming, merely a sense of alienation toward the two pre-existing alternatives.
Listening to the talks of Poetry Communities and Individual Talent, I’m struck not just by John Paetsch’s use of “ collectivity” or “collective” as a potential third term, but even more profoundly by just how much this conference is not about community so much as it is about credentialing and canonization: credentialing the speakers – all intelligent & well-intended in their work – and canonization of the figures of their work, most often by foregrounding a previously overlooked, misunderstood or controversial aspect of the writing itself. But the core fact of the conference was that of younger academics talking on panels moderated by their elders. Of 22 speakers who presented papers (the one on Prynne is mysteriously absent from the PennSound record), only a few – Damon, Dworkin, Karasick & Schultz – are known primarily as poets. Only a few – Paetsch, Jessyka Finley, Kaplan Harris – fully address the construction of community itself (or, in the case of Spicer, the refusal of same). None of the speakers, moderators included, is him- or herself free of an academic context.
Monday, May 09, 2011
After a long, intense day of events at the Text Festival in Bury – the morning spent at the museum where my neon excerpt from the still-in-progress Northern Soul has become the public face of the festival itself, the afternoon at a reading in Bury Parish Church – the building dates from the 19th century, the congregation from circa 900 – to an evening at the Met where mostly a sequence of sound and performance poets (but nary a sign o’ slam) tickled & occasionally ripped at our ear drums, I found myself the next morning reading Sarah Riggs’ 60 Textos, simple one-stanza lyrics (or perhaps anti-lyrics) feeling that there was more that was genuinely new in her tiny poems than I had seen the entire previous day, even as I’d been immersed work that everywhere proposed itself as new (my own included) but was in fact something different altogether.
The axes that converge in something like the Text Festival – poetry as visual art, as performance, as sound – have their roots in traditions that are at least 100 years old (in the case of the Russian Futurists or the Dadaism of Hugo Ball, twice that or more in the case of William Blake & illuminated manuscripts). It’s fascinating to watch Christian Bök build a career out of two or three very divergent types of work: obsessive, jaw-droppingly brilliant contained projects like Eunoia or the ongoing Xenotext; performance poetry that draws knowledgeably from the masters of Futurism, Dada & fluxus; sound work that extends the legacy of Steve McCaffery, bpNichol and the Four Horsemen in Canada. But it’s those obsessive projects of his that represent something transformational in poetry. Much of the rest of it is theater that enables him to go places, entertain & build a public presence. That’s more about marketing than innovation, tho Bök is as thorough a scholar of performance poetics as I’ve ever met. Nor is there anything new, as he himself acknowledged, about him writing a set of responses to the questions of my work, Sunset Debris. Alan Davies beat him to that over 30 years ago, and such responses are threatening to become a genre (or at least genre-twitch) of their own. What’s new in Bök’s approach is the use of a computer program and artificial intelligence to “write” the responses. Frankly, it’s refreshing to hear a machine forced to admit repeatedly “I don’t know.”
Thursday, May 25, 2006
Eliot Weinberger, who has himself attempted to persuade New Directions to publish William Carlos Williams’ Spring & All as a separate edition; wrote to Andrew Schelling after I ran Andrew’s meditation on the role of New Directions as a post-avant publisher (and Andrew’s assertion that one could, in fact, base a bookstore’s poetry collection on New Directions, at least a couple of decades ago). Eliot cc’d me and the two of them eventually gave me permission to run Eliot’s email here. All ellipses are Eliot’s, and I corrected just one date, that of Duncan
Hi Andrew —
I read your letter about New Directions on Silliman’s blog, which got me wondering whether there really is a 20-year "gap" in ND’s commitment to "EP/WCW/HD" tradition. So off the top of my head, I made a list...
Bearing in mind that they only publish about 40 books a year, mainly prose (they are not primarily a poetry press) and that they were publishing a lot of poetry in translation — the list seems pretty impressive.
One problem was that it was difficult to take on new people while still keeping up with new books by their old people. In the 60's they added quite a few people — probably too many (in terms of ND’s size, not the worthiness of the individual poets) and a bunch of them ended up going to Black Sparrow.
It’s safe to say they had no interest in the NY School and subsequent generations (Berrigan, Padgett, etc) — until Bernadette in the 90's. And they had no particular interest in Langpo — but let Messerli do that (pretty bad) anthology in the 80's.
But what I don’t see is your idea that they neglected an entire generation. Certainly there are individuals they missed over the decades. Sometimes because they simply didn’t have the opportunity; sometimes because of a mix-up (Bunting, notably); sometimes because of personal animosity toward Laughlin, or vice-versa (Zukofsky) It would be interesting to know who they actually rejected. (The only poetry book Laughlin told me he made a mistake in rejecting was Blackburn ’s "Proensa."Around the office, they most regret the Niedecker and Rexroth collecteds.)
It’s true that the list loses steam in the 80's, in terms of new people. Perhaps this was because Rexroth was dead and Laughlin didn’t have anyone he really trusted to talk with about the new poetry. (Most of the new people in the 60's and 70's were Rexroth enthusiasms.) And of course he was getting old, and less receptive.
So here’s the list. I’ve kept it to "EP/WCW/HD trad"and New Americans, ignoring some one-shots, and some odd regulars like Edwin Brock in the 60's and 70's, and Allen Grossman and John Allman later on. And I’ve probably forgotten some....
1960's:
Continuing: Pound (d. 1972), Williams (d. 1963), Rexroth, Levertov, Ferlinghetti, Merton (d. 1968).
New people: Oppen, Rakosi, Duncan Tarn , Snyder, Jonathan Williams, Corso, Bob Kaufman, Carruth.
1970's:
Continuing: Rexroth (d. 1982), Levertov, Ferlinghetti, Everson, Oppen (d.1984), Snyder, Corso, Carruth.
New people: Creeley, Rothenberg, Antin, HD (d. 1961, pub by ND posthumously), McClure, Corman.
[Rakosi, Reznikoff, Everson, and Tarn go to Black Sparrow. Oppen & Laughlin decided "Primitive" was too small a book for ND — you can’t say he was "dropped" by ND, as they published everything else. Corman goes to many presses, comes back in 90's with one book.]
1980's:
Continuing: Creeley, Rothenberg, Antin, Duncan (returns from silence; d. 1988), Levertov, Ferlinghetti, McClure.
New people: Sobin, Weinberger (since you mentioned me, though hardly a poet), R. Waldrop, David Hinton (as translator), Peter Dale Scott.
[Snyder goes with his friend Shoemaker to North Point. ]
1990's:
Continuing: Creeley, Ferlinghetti, Rothenberg, Antin, Levertov, R. Waldrop, Weinberger, Sobin, Hinton, McClure, Peter Dale Scott. [Plus one book by Corman.]
New people: Palmer, S. Howe, Gander
[Sobin is dropped after three books; d. 2005]
2000's:
Continuing: Creeley (d. 2006), Ferlinghetti, Rothenberg, Palmer, S. Howe, Gander
New people: Mackey, Thalia Field.
Continuing posthumous publications: Pound, WCW, Rexroth, Oppen, Duncan, Levertov, HD, Merton. [Creeley, just before his death, bizarrely decided to go to Univ. of California Press
Adding the non-avants, and various strange one-shots, in any given decade they published about 15 living English-language poets, as well as unpublished/uncollected books by the dead, and many foreign poets. In the 60's there were maybe half a dozen more — but of course books were cheaper then. So it's hard to say that a "generation" is missing. Regardless of what one thinks of the individual choices, the living poets on the list right now are in their 40's, 50's, 60's, 70's, and (Ferlinghetti) 80's.
Well, that kept me up! Hope you saw the anthology ("World Beat") I just did of all the foreign and some of the Americans ND has been publishing in the last 15 years...
all best —
Eliot
Wednesday, January 22, 2003
In the past week, I’ve read
on various discussion lists that nobody reads blogs but other bloggers. I’ve
also read that bloggers “control” poetry. I’ve seen an article that quotes incoming
Guggenheim executive Edward Hirsch calling language poetry a “cult,” & read
another listserv message suggesting that there were far too many avant-garde or
experimental poets – an estimate of 10,000 was offered. There does seem to be a
diversity of opinion.
The fear of an Other is an interesting, if sometimes dangerous, phenomenon.
Denial of its existence and/or importance is really only the flip side of the
paranoid nightmare that It, whatever It may be, has
overrun & secretly governs the world. Need I suggest that the truth is
probably somewhere in between?
One of the values of
blogging for poets is that it can deepen the degree of critical thinking poets
themselves do, more so I suspect than the scatter of listserv discussions. If
there is a bias hidden in the blogging form, it’s toward poets who think
critically, but that by no means ensures that said poets will be post-avant,
let alone any particular flavor thereof. It also suggests that there is a role
for critical thinking & writing outside of the received forms of the
academy – & I am convinced that this is all to the better as well.
If there is a potential for
post-avant poetry in raising the bar of critical thinking, it might be to help
address the question that is rather unspoken in that wildly overdone estimate
of 10,000 experimentalists: how, as the post-avant heritage expands to yet
another generation, are those poets going to create the necessary sense of
shape to differentiate between all these young, interesting poets? If the New Americans
broke uneasily (& somewhat too artificially) into their various clusters of
NY School, Projectivism, Beat & SF renaissance – the latter is almost
entirely a fiction – when there were only a hundred or so poets practicing in
the Pound/Williams tradition in the 1950s, how many such tendencies are really
just waiting to (a) get their act together and/or (b) be recognized as such?
That problem of “shape” or differentiation is I think – I know I’ve said this
before, I know I’ll say it again – the primary critical issue facing younger
poets in 2003. The squabble among Canadian poets between those interested in
the use of forms & those more interested in, say, a politicized version of
the NY school is at the least a sign of life. I’m in favor of both sides of
that debate. As I am heartened every time chris
cheek complains that some version of post-avant history is too book & page
oriented, even though I’m certain I must be part of that problem.
Another value I’d hadn’t
anticipated from blogging is the simple verification effect of being able to
register how many readers come to one’s site. Ten thousand visitors to this
blog in just four months should answer any fear I might have that Ed Hirsch is
correct in his assessment of my work, or even the idea that it’s simply an
elite practice, too arcane for many.* Currently, this blog averages slightly
over 130 readers per day. Yesterday saw 198 visitors to this blog, the most
ever – that the average number of readers can continue to expand in the face of
the explosion of poetry blogs makes me realize just how much we need to rethink
the idea of the post-avant audience. It’s larger than we imagine.
But of greatest value to me
are all the other blogs that are now focusing on poetry, poetics & closely
related literary concerns. Not only are the numbers increasing, so is the
diversity – aesthetically & otherwise. Below is the list of the literary
blogs that I currently check at least once or twice per week. One thing I’ve
definitely noted among these blogs is the presence of several people who might
be characterized as either New York School, gen XXXVII or as post-NY School
(there being different ways of looking at this), a tendency previously imagined
by some folks as allergic to critical thinking. Guess again. This may be the most
significant theoretical development that has come out of blogging to date &
it will be interesting to see how it evolves.
The list below consists of
37 bloggers, maybe 28 of which are less than six months old. “The creation of new
forms as additions to nature,” as William Carlos Williams wrote. There is a
group blog, an audioblog & even a blog that
denies its own blogitude.
Since “abortive” blogs are
also a part of the phenomenon, I’ve only included sites that have updated since
the beginning of this year with the notable exception of Camille Roy’s site, Ich Bin Ein Iraqi,
which uses the blog form for a piece on the subject of her Iraqi childhood. It
may be the first instance of serious blog literature – as distinct from literature
merely published in a blog – & absolutely needs to be read.
<![if !supportLists]>§
<![endif]>Cahiers de
Cory (Josh Corey)
<![if !supportLists]>§
<![endif]>Chaxblog (Charles Alexander – the background color
really does change as you read)
<![if !supportLists]>§
<![endif]>Eeksy Peeksy (Malcolm
Davidson)
<![if !supportLists]>§
<![endif]>for
the Health of it (Tom Bell)
<![if !supportLists]>§
<![endif]>Free Space
Comix (Brian Kim Stefans, one of the first bloggers)
<![if !supportLists]>§
<![endif]>HG Poetics
(Henry Gould)
<![if !supportLists]>§
<![endif]>Hypertext
Kitchen (Blog of Eastgate, the hypertext software
folks)
<![if !supportLists]>§
<![endif]>Ich Bin Ein Iraqi (Camille
Roy)
<![if !supportLists]>§
<![endif]>Ineluctable
Maps (Anastios ??)
<![if !supportLists]>§
<![endif]>jill/txt (Jill Walker)
<![if !supportLists]>§
<![endif]>Jonathan
Mayhew’s Blog (His list of the best sax players includes neither Steve Lacy
nor Anthony Braxton?!)
<![if !supportLists]>§
<![endif]>Josh Blog (Josh Kortbein)
<![if !supportLists]>§
<![endif]>Laurable.Com
(One of the first poetry blogs & one of the best – with a focus on
recordings of readings)
<![if !supportLists]>§
<![endif]>Lester’s Flogspot (Patrick Herron’s sock puppet has an attitude)
<![if !supportLists]>§
<![endif]>lime tree
(K. Silem Mohammad)
<![if !supportLists]>§
<![endif]>Mike
Snider’s Formal Blog (the only new formalist blog I’ve found)
<![if !supportLists]>§
<![endif]>Nether
(Angela Rawlings)
<![if !supportLists]>§
<![endif]>Overlap
(Drew Gardner)
<![if !supportLists]>§
<![endif]>Pantaloons
(Jack Kimball, currently trying to forget everything Joe Brainard ever
remembered)
<![if !supportLists]>§
<![endif]>Pepy’s Diary (The Ur-blogger has risen from the grave –
welcome to 1659/60)
<![if !supportLists]>§
<![endif]>Possum
Pouch (Dale Smith, though he denies it’s a blog, has converted his web
newsletter to…a blog)
<![if !supportLists]>§
<![endif]>process
documents (Ryan Fitzpatrick’s long poem in progress)
<![if !supportLists]>§
<![endif]>Ptarmigan
(Alan de Niro)
<![if !supportLists]>§
<![endif]>reading &
writing (Joseph Duemer)
<![if !supportLists]>§
<![endif]>San Diego
Poetry Guild (a group blog)
<![if !supportLists]>§
<![endif]>SpokenWORD (Komninos Zervos’ Australian audioblog)
<![if !supportLists]>§
<![endif]>Squish
(Katherine Parrish)
<![if !supportLists]>§
<![endif]>texturl
(Brandon Barr)
<![if !supportLists]>§
<![endif]>The Tijuana Bible of
Poetics (Heriberto Yepez, who also has a poetry blog in Spanish)
<![if !supportLists]>§
<![endif]>The Year
of Living Musically (Joseph Zitt, poet, musician
& webmaster of the long-running John Cage listserv, Silence)
<![if !supportLists]>§
<![endif]>Ululations
(Nada Gordon)
<![if !supportLists]>§
<![endif]>Wine
Poetics (Eileen Tabios)
My own blog would make 38
& I’m sure that I’m missing some. I’m finding that the ones I learn the
most from are not necessarily those that may appear closest to my own
aesthetics – in addition to Camille Roy, Jonathan Mayhew, Heriberto Yepez &
Nada Gordon have all kept me awake at night, rethinking my assumptions about
the world.
That’s the point, isn’t it?
* I’m a
subscriber to the theory that the only people who find langpo “difficult” or
“obscure” are a small set of people who have become developmentally challenged
through graduate school.
Sunday, January 05, 2003
To the best of my knowledge,
I’ve never seen René Ricard
read live. Although we’re the same age & have both been around the post-avant
scene for three dozen years, we’ve mostly lived on opposite coasts. There was a
time when I did see several of the Andy Warhol films with which Ricard was
involved, but the only poet I can recall from them is an image of John Giorno
sound asleep.
In addition to the
geographic gap between us, we also have obviously had very different approaches
to the scene. Where I’ve focused on the two or three things I do moderately
well, Ricard has been something of a renaissance all to himself. In addition to
his poetry and his work in film, he’s a painter, art critic and bon vivant of
legendary stature. Michael Wincott, who played Ricard in the Julian Schnabel film Basquiat,
refers on his website to Ricard as a “flamboyant art critic.” Ricard’s own
website adds the occupation “historian” to that list.
One side effect of these
varied activities is that Ricard actually hasn’t nearly as much as one might
expect of a poet born in 1946. I believe I owned Ricard’s Dia
Foundation book at one time, René Ricard
1979-1980, but couldn’t find it when I looked for it this morning. So when
I saw his name attached to three poems at the end of Angel Hair 3 (in The Angel
Hair Anthology), what I brought to them by way of background were some
disparate facts –the Warhol filmography, that he was born Albert Napoleon
Ricard, a middle name worth remembering – an impression of him as someone who
shows up a lot in lists that have, say, Anne Waldman in them somewhere, and Wincott’s portrayal from Basquiat. Six factoids in search of an author.
Angel Hair 3
came out originally in 1967, when Ricard was just 21. He had already been
around the scene at The Factory for a couple of years and been a part of the
scene in Boston
Oh yes the page is blank
At first; And now to confuse
The issue;
I take a long chic drag from my
Gauloise
I’ve done it before. This could
be a great poem
If I didn’t rather jerk off
instead
Already I’ve begun three
consecutive lines with
I; Something is meant by this
I; Something is meant by this
Perhaps I’ll jerk off
eventually
What could be more essential
(Notice a lack of continuity)
Recurrent theme
Several stanzas and a modicum
of internal rhyme
Measure Measure
Measure My dear
Is not poetry without tit
les vox
Da Do you
know how much poetry
How much good poetry was written in
Say the 50’s?
Lots I’ll bet
Down through the ages
We each pick our favorites
Down through the ages
We each pick our favorites
It would be easy enough to
argue that this is a pretty slight poem, but it would be hard to argue the
point any better than the poem does itself. In fact, reading it some 35 years
after its initial publication, what struck me was how admirable “Oh” is as an
act of writing. It’s very nearly a perfect example of how the “I do this/I do
that” aspect of New York School writing is itself very much a process of
thinking – the very point on which NYS and langpo come together as literary
tendencies. &, not coincidentally – Ricard was originally associated as a
poet with John Wieners – the point at which langpo & Projectivism come
together as well. “Oh” is virtually all about manifesting this process &
the competition between the poem & all other plausible endeavors, right up
to the point when the text acknowledges the presence of “you.” At that moment,
Ricard’s focus shifts to invoke a broader sense of history. All
of which he accomplishes with absolutely the least amount of pretension
imaginable: poetry is placed into a spectrum alongside taking a “chic drag” on
a French cigarette & jerking off. Neither of which, it’s worth noting, are figured here pejoratively.
My favorite moment in the
poem – actually, I have several – my first
favorite moment is the acknowledgement that the instant pen is put to paper (or
pixels to screen) the “unconfused” state of the poem-as-possibility is lost
forever. The unwritten poem has a lot in common with virginity – things get messy
in a hurry. Ricard’s sense of humor as he proceeds is exceptionally nuanced –
we get the cigarette before the sex,
for example. Another wonderful moment here is in the way Ricard distances
himself from meaning – “Something is meant by this.” An entire critique of
meaning is figured in that statement.
The poem’s first major shift
occurs with “What could be more essential,” a rhetorical question that is then
framed parenthetically as a fla
You can see Ricard here as
interested in the idea of artless art – a concept very close not only to the
whole Warhol scene but also to conceptualism as well, which was just starting
to enter the arts scene en masse.* The desire for an artless art is also quite
evident in his other poems in the same issue. In this sense, Ricard is closer
to the work, say, of Vito Acconci – who immediately precedes Ricard in Angel Hair – than, say, to Ron Padgett
or Bill Berkson, even as the “I do this/I do that” aspect of the work makes
Ricard a natural for a little magazine edited under the spell of Ted Berrigan.
Reading a journal such as Angel Hair 35 years after the fact in
some ways is more meaningful than it ever could have been at the time it was
originally published – we know now how all of these artists “will turn out,”
who will be brilliant & who tragic. Ricard is someone who clearly chose to
have an extremely diverse career, which like anything else has its advantages
& drawbacks both. A poem such as “Oh” stands as a reminder that a “pretty
slight poem,” written well, can still fully illuminate the whole world of
poetry decades later.
* Indeed,
conceptualism offers a logic through which Warhol’s cinema can be viewed as
“attacking” the pop art of Warhol’s paintings.
Monday, December 09, 2002
The title piece of Jennifer
Moxley’s extraordinary The
Sense Record is an astonishing poem – astonishing because it
dares to go where virtually no post-avant writing has gone in a generation.
This is the first stanza:
Under the threat of another light downpour
Eros, soaked by the rain-water,
spoke to the sentient flowers.
Sadness, no longer extraneous,
began the derangement of nerve,
bypassed the bleeding heart
to pierce the blood-brain barrier.
This all en route to the two-car garage.
I was worn with the labor that augurs despair,
life in the futile percentile, when past
my squeamish eyelash, buffeted by scallops
of small will, the slightest fairy brushed.
My rubber soles conformed to the stones
as I followed and spied the backyard starlet
allongée on an orange blossom, delicate
beside the drinking bees, blithe amidst
sharp blades of grass, a rain-drop seductress
entertaining ants on the folding lip
of a pinkster leaf.
Sadness, despair, futile, squeamish,
derangement, “the bleeding heart.” Yet Eros communing with the “sentient flowers,” it becomes
apparent by the end of the next stanza, was the cheery part:
From
aloft
the insect mezzanine these patterns
portend the rot of hours, as one paperstrip
wilts atop the next. Little deaths
sufficient to wake the council of
discarded causes. Under the concrete cracks
the tenacious weed-roots rattle,
reassigned from lawn destruction
to ankle espionage, and in the grass
the poet whispers:
“death death death death death
between two hopes
in brittle mid-years, all is vanity”
Or later, from the second of
the poem’s six sections:
I feel sick to think that she, that we
had, and have, but one pursuit
and one pursuit alone.
Or the opening of the final
section:
Eros tell me why, without love,
without hate, listening
to the softly falling rain
upon the rooftops of the city,
my heart has so much pain.
What I write in truth today
tomorrow will be in error.
Yet the words keep coming,
mundane and repetitive
With no job “to be done”
nor doctrine to stand for.
Oh postmodern irony, where
is thy wink? It’s not to be found anywhere in this poem’s eleven pages. Largely
bracketed between two quotations from Verlaine, “The Sense Record” presents the
grimmest view of contemporary alternatives we have had since perhaps William
Bronk. I don’t normally think of Moxley in that context – she is so much more
the stylist that one can slide easily into the elegance of her forms &
almost luxuriate at that level alone.
That, I think, is why
“death” is repeated five times in the most utterly artless moment in the entire
book. Moxley doesn’t want to let us off the hook – one can almost imagine how
another poet such as Ashbery would deflect the absolute directness of this address,
bringing in everything from elderly aunts to whatever he’s rescued from the
Disney back lot. For anyone with such access to style, the argument that the
pleasure of the journey is life’s point might well be enough. For Moxley,
clearly it’s not.
This is where the question
of fashion gets interesting. In pure terms of traditional stylistics, Moxley is
an absolute master – much more adept than, say, Geoffrey Hill’s hurdy-gurdy
efforts. To make matters even more complicated, Moxley associates with – and publishes
in the journals of – the newer generation of post-avant writing, which
allegedly eschews direct address & seems to treat the absence of irony as
one of the great sins of the poets of quietude.* Some of the other poets
published by Rod Smith’s Edge Books include Anselm Berrigan, Kevin Davies, Tom
Raworth, Aldon Nielson, Mark Wallace, Phyllis Rosenzweig, Joan Retallack and
Chris Stroffolino. So how is it that Moxley fits in here? Why isn’t she hailed
as the salvation of traditional values in literature? And why is she accorded
such great respect from poets who refuse to write an elegy without slipping in
at least a triple-entendre somewhere?
I know a few folks who would
argue that Moxley might be yet another item in a list of evidence suggesting
that it’s not what you know in poetry that determines where a writer plays so
much as who you know. But I don’t think that’s it at all. Rather, I think that
the reason one doesn’t find her line up alongside the “anti-anti-coherency”
contingent is that her work déjà toujours
presumes the context of post-avant writing. That little barb out of Pound’s Cantos at the end of the poem’s first
section is a tell-tale clue. The directness of her address & that loving
attention to the nuances of syntax is a combination that makes its greatest
sense situated midway between, say, Anselm Berrigan & Tom Raworth.
Just as John Berryman’s Dream Songs would make for dreadful
language poetry, but whose excellence shines through when set against the
backdrop of the Boston Brahmin variant of the school of quietude, Moxley’s
poetry takes its razor’s edge from its social context. In one way, she is as
out of place in her time & her crowd as Jack Spicer once was amidst the
speech-based (& often enough linguistics-ignorant) poetics of the New
American Poetry. It’s as if she has decided to be the bad conscience of
post-avant writing, the one who reminds everybody else that “this is serious –
you are doomed.”
Poets who take this kind of
stance are often in for a certain amount of tsuris. Barrett Watten has had to
contend with readers who, struck dumb it would seem by his demand for a serious
reading, can’t begin to see where the marvelous sharp wit in his poetry lies. I
know major post-avant writers who say point-blank that Spicer is somebody they
just don’t get. And I know others who would argue that this is why William
Bronk falls outside almost every major post-avant anthology, as though he were
everybody’s designated blind spot (as he seems to be mine).
So Moxley has chosen not to
take the easy road, but rather the most difficult one of all. And she does it
with such great skill in places that it makes you want to cheer – until you
remember that she means it. You are doomed.
* Thus when
Jonathan Mayhew complains of my blog’s ”earnestness,” he’s absolutely serious
& not at all out of step with a lot of contemporary post-avant writing. I
plead guilty even as I note the difference between my critical writing & my
poetry.
Tuesday, December 03, 2002
Ron—
It's VERY nice of you to mention me on your BLOG as a person you like to
read--you're somebody whose good opinion means a lot. And you're one of a number anti-coherent poets I read with pleasure. [Just trying out "anti-coherent" as a general
semi-neologism for language poetry, Ashbery poetry and various offspring.
Hmmm....]
Now, I assume by conservative you don't mean politically
conservative--though I also realize you perhaps you don't separate politics and
poetics much, but still--Dugan (my hero!) is a clearly a red, and Hass is or at
least used to be left-liberal, as is Annie F., and Muldoon seems to be pretty
left...etc...
So do you think it's automatically conservative to value closure, to be
generally accessible in traditional (which is different from conservative)
ways, or to not be particularly interested in the opaque signifier? Is it
automatically liberal on the other hand, to do the kinds of processes/
practices/writings that are lately called experimental? From other remarks you
made on the BLOG I think you would say no, so I'm just curious about your use
of the word 'conservative'.
Lucien Freud and Alice Neel were painting
bodies all during period when abstract expressionism was the last big
innovation, and painting even the slightest bit representationally was a big
no-no. But now the general consensus is that they were pretty damn good and
innovative. And I don't think it's possible to call them conservative...[well,
I don't know anything about Freud's politics; Neel
was a member of the Communist part--but I mean their aesthetic is no longer
thought to be conservative either, right?] Is there an analogy here?
Also, all this experimental poetry, or lang-po/post-lang-po
(and you'll forgive me for throwing around terms in this inexact way) seems deeply
academic to me. Which is no indication of its quality one way or the other, but
most of the so-called experimentalists are middle-class kids who go to grad
school and are taught by people of your generation, if not by you, how to be
avant whatever, no? Just like the other middle-class kids who go to the other
schools where other kinds of poetry are taught by various generations. Nothing
against middle class kids who go to grad school (if I'd gone, and I almost did
once, that would have described me too) but it sort of seems against the whole
idea of being experimental or radical or anti-mainstream in ones work, to learn
how to be those things from a university teacher, doesn't it?
All best,
your fan,
Daisy
I want to respond to two points. One is my use of the
term conservative, the other is the concept of anti-coherency, which Daisy
concedes is a neologism she’s just trying on, but which is also an idea that
I’ve heard enough times before to understand is a conception that might exist
in the world.
I wouldn’t characterize what I call the post-avant
traditions, even in their most extreme forms such as vizpo
& sound poetry, as anti-coherency. If anything, I think that the very
opposite is true, that they form a poetics of a greater coherency, precisely
because it must be a coherency earned by & within the writing, not
something easily assumed. Too often, bad writing within the school of quietude
presumes that simply by positing a narrating persona, coherency will follow.
That is precisely the same kind of presumption that lies behind the use of
family or workplace as the contextual site for almost all television sitcoms,
and to parallel result. If anything, poets of the easy coherency tendencies
have it harder, because the idea that the work of the poem has already been
done for them is so terribly seductive. Those who can write past this do ind
It is not that bad poetry cannot be written in the
post-avant mode – sign on to the Poetics List for awhile – but that almost all
practitioners of post-avant writing have had to confront such questions of
form, content, coherency, implication, context, responsibility and any other
number of qualities of the poem from
scratch. On average, they have had to work much harder and far more
thoughtfully than their counterparts on the far side of the genre in almost
anything they have written. & when they don’t do their homework, it shows
immediately. There may be self-delusion, but there is no hiding allowed for
post-avant poets.
I would cite the example of my own poetry as a
demonstration of this – I was able to publish in such magazines as Poetry, Tri-Quarterly, Southern Review &
Poetry Northwest within three years
of starting to write poetry seriously. It was not because I was good, but
because it was easy. It was much more difficult to appear in publications of
the post-avant tendencies of that time, because such writing demanded so much
more of me as a poet.
If I were to define poetry, it is that art of
language that demands the most of me, both as a reader and as a writer.
And that seems the
appropriate segue to Daisy’s core question:
So do you think it's automatically conservative to value closure, to be
generally accessible in traditional (which is different from conservative)
ways, or to not be particularly interested in the opaque signifier?
The question of accessibility is a potential problem
here. What makes poetry of the schools of quietude “accessible” is only that
they have been institutionally ingrained for a century (or, in some ways, far
longer), mostly in high school & undergraduate curricula. Having given
readings in such venues as streetcorners or the
Maximum Security Library at Folsom State Prison, I don’t think there’s anything
“inaccessible” about my poetry, even when the audience has had little in the
way of formal education or the context of a rich literary heritage. If
anything, it is educational malpractice that may make post-avant poetics
sometimes seem difficult, not the poetry itself. There is a qualitative
difference between asking the reader to use all of their senses to read and
being deliberately obscure.
As to the question of tradition, my one response
would be whose tradition? It is
post-avant writing, I would argue, that more accurately represents the
tradition not just of Pound & Williams, Stein & Zukofsky, Stevens &
Crane, but also Whitman & Dickinson, Blake, Wordsworth & Coleridge. The
schools of quietude represent exactly those counter tendencies within Anglo
heritage with whom those poets invariably had to contend. And while there are
some important writers who arose out of that other poetics, such as my distant
in-law, Mr. Tennyson, I would happily put up my tradition against any other
over time.
Ultimately, I use the term conservative as a literal
description – not, for example, the way I would describe George W., who would
have to move well to the left to become a conservative. I always pick Wendell
Berry as my demonstration for what I mean, because in his work conservative
& conservation are wedded seamlessly as values – and it is in this sense
that he strikes me as a very great poet. Berry
Different genres of art respond to changes in time
& history in different ways. When Pound, Joyce & Stein were first
demonstrating how a poetics might respond to the modern world prior to World
War I, Bing Crosby had yet to discover the ways in which the microphone could
be used to transform the public art of song. Poetry since that time has changed
less than has popular music, in part because the latter, not unlike painting,
is artificially accelerated through the influx of capital and the need to
continually generate new markets. Lisa Jarnot, Jena Berry
If I continue my comparison with popular music a
little furth labe
If there is a counter argument to be made along the
lines of my music analogy, it would be constructed around that tradition that
used to be called folk music but that now more often goes under the heading of
the “singer-songwriter” tradition, a creation not so much of Appalachia as of
the Popular Front of the 1930s. Here also, as with Wendell Berry, the music is
constructed around a complex of political ideas that are not accidental. I
happen to like a number of these ideas*, frankly, which may explain why I do
listen to folk music, along with avant-garde jazz, rock, world music & even
occasionally opera. But I would note that the folk tradition has changed
considerably over the decades and that the Kingston Trio-Limelighter 1950s is a
far cry from the O Brother Wherefore Art Thou 2000s. Anybody who proposes to
play acoustic Delta blues today is understood exactly as an historic re-enactor
of a tradition, not an actual participant. That is exactly the position into
which most “traditional” poetry falls, with the notable exception that blues
literally began after World War I with the work of people like Charlie Patton.
What we are really talking about in the case of poetry is more like Stephen
Foster imitations presented as images of contemporary life. Just
the sort of thing that Jeff Koons loves to make fun of.
So yes, I would call what you term “traditional”
poetry conservative – that’s the positive
term, when such poetry & its practitioners understand what they’re about.
More of it I fear is simply pathological, which I find the much more disturbing
aspect of the troubled school of quietude.
* The commitment to community &
human scale in particular. Interestingly, I find these same values in
contemporary post-avant jazz, such as in the Rova Saxophone Quartet or the work
of Steve Lacy, Anthony Braxton et al, but not in commercialized smooth jazz.
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