As you know if you've had the minutest discussion with me about my academic work, I've been on the defensive all year about my unwillingness to align myself with a specifically "experimental" tradition in poetry. In a conversation with my friend J(2) today, I formulated the reason like this. To me, the virtues people ascribe to experimental or avant-garde writing are the virtues that distinguish good poetry, period. If it's not inarticulable, irreducible, and counter-intuitive, if it doesn't take the world apart and put it back together off-kilter, it's not a poem. That makes me a postmodern reader, I guess. So if you're going to read like this anyway, if you're going to approach everything looking for what's off, what's inexplicable, what's a "site" of (linguistic, cultural, personal, etc) conflict, then a lot of effort in the writing intended to make you read this way just seems obvious. Rather than actually deconstructing your reading practices, it didactically congratulates itself for doing so--in the process undermining the very deconstruction at which it aims. For this reason, true experimentation within an "experimental" idiom is, at this literary moment, very difficult. Weird paradox.
Or that's my opinion, anyway. Now off to shower and then party.
1 comment:
I prefer J-Cab to J(2). And that was a good conversation. I agree that in the end whether a poem is "experimental" or avant-garde writing is not enough to determine its greatness, which is why you get a lot of writers in those circles "didactically" congratulating (I like how you put it) each other just because they're friends. Admittedly, "experimental" seems to be a moniker used to authorize one's work, yet with all the experimentation, there's going to be (and there often is) plenty of gimmicky and boring work produced. The question remains, which of it is any good? Too, the disagreements between the "avant-garde" and "official verse culture" are tied to that question: what is good poetry? Nevertheless, both sides seem to agree on a few of the greats. And even the avant-garde scholars often cite great poets as analogs, perhaps on different grounds, to further promote certain poets.
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