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Poetic Expectations
Al Filreis recently posted a quotation from George Hartley’s book Textual Politics and the Language Poets. He also posted a link to a larger excerpt from that book, which is one of the most illuminating pieces I’ve seen on the subject. In the excerpt, Hartley explains that Language poets are united by their “rejection of the dominant model for poetic production and reception today—the so-called voice poem.Read More
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Smackdown? Not exactly…
Kenny Goldsmith takes on Al Filreis here. No contest.Read More
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Going to School with Kenny G—UPDATED
If you’ve ever wondered what goes on in one of Kenny Goldsmith‘s classes, here’s a glimpse.* This is what passes for profundity among the avant-garde, and evidently Goldsmith is successfully conning his students into his quasi-mystical faith in “the artistic significance and process of transcription.” I see the attraction.Read More
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Hello, Hoa
Hecate Lochia, by Hoa Nguyen. Bernadette Mayer and Alice Notley ghost through this collection, but Nguyen’s voice is her own. Some of it’s cryptic, some fascinatingly fragmentary, but never coherent in a mainstream sense. The difference may be utterly subjective. Here’s one example of each mode: Washington* Washington (George) is not inthis poem powdered wig powderyand anyway who chops down a fruittree (idiots) My sense ofhistory lies We buy things::::chickenwings::::::butter::::: Yesterday Dave took awaymy office my boss Saturday ______________* In line 7 the sets of colons number as shown here: 4 then 6 then 5. A puzzlement.Read More
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Reading Into and the Avant-Garde
Jacket Magazine has published a peculiarly passive-aggressive 4,000-plus word response by Jeffrey Side to a 193 word statement by Seamus Heaney, quoted from Heaney’s interview with Dennis O’Driscoll as published in Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney. (The interview is no longer available online, alas.) Here is the Heaney excerpt; his initial “it” refers to the term “avant-garde”: It’s an old-fashioned term by now. In literature, nobody can cause bother any more. John Ashbery was a kind of avant-garde poet certainly and now he’s become a mainstream voice.Read More
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Post-Avant David v. NPR Goliath
Ron “Solo” Silliman endorses Palin’s “poetry” as part of his devastating attack on Garrison Keillor, Commander of the Public Radio Death Star responsible for destroying post-avant planets across the universe.Read More
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Solipsist Jottings
There’s a curious and interesting essay by Christopher Rizzo in the new Jacket Magazine. It’s essentially an response to a rather dismissive October 2007 review by Charles Simic of Robert Creeley‘s The Collected Poems (both Volume I, 1945-1975, and Volume II, 1975-2005). Rizzo is clearly a smart person and a fan of Creeley’s poetry and poetics. My admiration for Creeley is strong, but I have to admit it wanes when I read his work from Pieces on.Read More
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A View from the Outside
If you haven’t seen Martin Earl’s farewell post on Harriet, read it now.Read More
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“Avaunt, malignant enchanters!”
Regarding my just previous post, you can find Kenneth Goldsmith’s introduction to the Flarf/Conceptual Writing section of the latest issue of Poetry here.Read More
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Parsing the Pointless
I can’t resist pointing this blog’s readers to today’s entry on Silliman’s blog, wherein he lavish roughly 2,800 words on a book whose aim he characterizes thusly: “[I]t wants to place conceptual writing — including flarf & more than a few kinds of appropriative techniques — into a historical context that renders all that has come before obsolete & irrelevant.” In other words, the authors use history in order to render history meaningless. In true intellectualoid fashion, Silliman parses the pointlessness of this effort in a way that foregrounds not only his own poe(li)tical obsessions but his shirt size.Read More