perverted by L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E

I think one of the things that made me lose a lot of my enthusiasm for the avant-garde, around the time I started college, was the sense that it was almost a matter of completing an equation. Okay we've done this and that: now what's the logical next step?
Visual art at its most avant-garde seemed to translate into concept art. I remember reading a Joseph Kosuth essay with a title like "Art 101" and he said something along the lines of, "That art is best which most questions what art is." I think this sounded exciting at some point, but eventually I decided I didn't really like the idea. It seemed to imply the potential for an endless one-up-manship. (I think of the contest of Zen patriarchs here to. The dust on the mirror blah blah blah beat by "What dust and what mirror?" or something like that.)

I don't think I can imagine a more radical reconsidering of what music is than Cage's, but ultimately I can't get with his program.

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry was the most current poetic avant-garde I was aware of, and in some of its most extreme statements (e.g. those of Steve McCaffery) it seemed to be asking for the Jonathan Swift treatment, except that no parody could really go any further. This might be the next step, or the next several steps, but I found the vast bulk of it so dreary. When I was in college I dutifully sat through readings by Ron Silliman and Charles Bernstein, among others, but I was not won over.

Of course, this doesn't mean I never like art that was or is currently presented as avant-garde, and maybe I just bet on the wrong avant-garde horses; but the avant-garde tendency to try to complete the equation and find the next most radical thing to do has gotten old for me.

It makes me laugh to read Perloff or McCaffery going on about the open-ended, undecidable, readings possible for a given language poem, allowing more maximum reader involvement; because when I look at these poems, I ask myself: why would I want to bother giving them any reading at all? Theorists get off on some idea of the reader generating the meaning or something, but why should I bother with verbal ink-blots?

Many of them have improved as they've gotten older and have "mellowed out".

Bernadette is utterly not a language poet (she's solidly Second Generation NY School) but she is a terrific poet and a really nice person, to boot. Feel free to reverse all of those statements for Bruce Andrews.

Ron Silliman is fantastic, warm and thoughtful and fascinated by the everyday with a great ear for putting a phrase together. Tina Darragh, Lyn Hejinian, Charles Bernstein, and others have written plenty of stuff that has moved and engaged me, made me laugh or made me get really excited about the possibilties of poetry. They've also all written stuff that bores me silly. So.

(And yes, the scenesterism is quite nauseating.)

"Notes. Only notes.

Was looking through In the American Tree, the "language poetry" anthology edited by Ron Silliman, tonight; came across a paragraph that casts the "reader has to work too" deal common to lots of avant-garde movements or traditions in a light new to me. The paragraph (from p. xviii):

"As is manifestly clear in the pages that follow, neither speech nor reference were ever, in any real sense, "the enemy." But, because the implicit "naturalness" of each, the simple, seemingly obvious concept that words should derive from speech and refer to things, was inscribed within all of the assumptions behind normative writing, the challenge posed by This was to open a broad territory of possibility where very different kinds of poets might explore and execute a wide range of projects. If nothing in the poem could be taken for granted, then anything might be possible. In turn, the poet must be responsible for everything. A parallel demand is made of each reader."

The last three sentences interest me the most. Saying that the poet must be responsible for everything makes the large responsibility often demanded of the reader seem more acceptable to me, somehow. For some reason I think the demand on the reader is often raised without keeping in mind the parallel responsibility, because the picture, instead, is more like "anything might be possible," without the focus on the greater responsibility required when anything is being attempted.

But if the picture I typically encounter associated with avant-garde artwork is something like "anything might be possible," then the reason I'm supposed to bother putting forth the effort is something like "man don't you like exploring new possibilities and stuff, you know?" Or something about challenging assumptions. But the talk about "responsibility" indicates that something different is going on when the picture involves shared responsibility of poets and readers: it's not just the responsibility to work harder, read more carefully, be more intelligent than readers of poetry of the past. Making the parallel demand a responsibility for everything moves things beyond just being more careful, more intelligent. I think it demands that the reader be responsible for doing the work of nontraditional reading and understanding, which means in part reading that is all tied up with that dirty social stuff "outside" the poem, and possibly reading that requires that the reader end up seeing something a different way before they get it. Moral responsibility, political responsibility. Why this makes more sense: it seems a bunch of obviously politically aware poets could not in good conscience demand "responsibility for everything" of their readers, when that responsibility is understood merely as a requirement to be avant-garde (formally speaking) as fuck - nothing outside the poems really, syntax itself, dumb little games. Only jerks seriously recommend that to others as a high ideal to strive for, and in that case few people take them seriously because they just seem like self-centered, snotty jerks. ("Our art is better because it's way more tricky and obscure and shit!" -- "Fuck off jerkface!") So, like, I don't know all that much about language poetry or its reception yet, but what I do know about its reception seems slightly sad: lots of people taking the language poets to be those jerks, and the language poets really really believing that readers working hard to understand the experimental poetry avant-garde poets are working to write can effect some kind of positive social change. And so the "lots of people" missing the point.

(Cf. posts here from Mark about Eddie Prevost and AMM, and a post from Eddie Prevost. No surprise that Silliman draws his own connection to say Anthony Braxton and others, as a parallel source of experimentation for reasons broader than simply experimentation for its own sake, or for "musical" or "aesthetic" reasons.)"

& thanks to RS & Chris for answering (+ you know I've got yr back andrew).

(I'm making the lecturer an arthur russell cd . . . baby steps . . .)

You are OTM.

And I think the truth, such as it is, lies somewhere in between those two viewpoints: Or, rather, I think both the langpos and their critics are wrong; there is worthwhile reading to be found in their work, and it will not change the world.

You guys might want to check out what's often called post-avant-garde poetry--poems written mostly by younger poets who've inherited some of the dislocation and diction from langpo, but possess more the more bourgeois goals of lyricism: Laura Glenum, Tony Tost, Tina Celona Brown, Joshua Clover, Aase Berg, etc. A lot of the discussion on poetics occur on blogs now too.

Ditto on scenesterism.

Poetry scenester comics: http://thejimside.blog-city.com/

I'm glad they have that covered.

His other behaviors, well, he was in a NYNEX radio ad a few years ago. I do think he'd like nothing more than to be invited on Letterman, if you know what I mean.

Observations that days come, arrive, approach, are blots, hangovers, reactionary reactions, said the doorkeeper at the Writers Union on Voinova
The future can't be made out with such metaphors, he added, tapping a new tabloid
So, it is my right to present this to an American
Plumbers' beauties are plumbers' proofs
And so, our new poets in leather jackets won't get wet
Only our cheerful tongues
Upstairs I met with Evgenii Ivanovich, who was translating the American metaphorist Raymond Chandler
A pale man with a tiny pad
He turned away and lifted its page
What does it mean, please, "The woman had rubber lips with no tread"
She's lost her grip on the truth
Or maybe what she says goes by him
We have no such metaphors, he said, but maybe I'll find one
Maybe something like, "The circle she made with her mouth was warped"

http://www.bostonreview.net/poetry-microreview/microreview-lyn-hejinian-my-life-nineties

http://archive.emilydickinson.org/titanic/material/three/fink.html