A note to my students of the avant-garde

What is the avant-garde, anyway, and are we doing it?

Aloha class--the question has come up, and it's exactly the right one. What, in the end, is the avant-garde? The "official" version of it goes something like this: the European avant-garde, including Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism, foregrounded the material of language and art over its content or meaning. Whatever meaning we find in these works we locate in some sense outside of it. Not: how do we read closely in order to find what the poet intended, a message, but what does this work of art do in the world? How does it disrupt our notions of reality, which begin with grammar, syntax, narrative structures? We end up reading ourselves more than we do the poems. In more recent decades, Conceptualism has taken up the banner of the avant-garde and engaged with questions of plagiarism and other norms that most of us have chosen not to break (much).

My argument in this class has been, however, that the avant-garde can be other things, especially when it travels to Africa, African American, the Pacific. It can find itself located in place. The disruptions made by writers from these places are disruptions of an imperial grammar, one imbricated in language and in other forms of power. This avant-garde may seem "tamer" to the adherent of the echt avant-garde, but it's equally powerful in its questioning of norms and cultural assumptions. Where works along these line directly take on questions of language (using more than one and refusing to translate, for example), they intersect with the traditional AG. Where they tell the stories of place, however broken they may be, perhaps they do not.

Are we writes of avant-garde works? Speaking for myself, I have been deeply influenced by Language writing, especially, and in recent many years by poets like Westlake who are seeking to include places like this one in their work with honesty (which I would here distinct in many ways from "authenticity").These are poets for whom there are tensions between various paradoxical inheritances (Hawaiian mele and Chinese poetry, say) and between desires for nationalism and internationalism. But my work is all about the meaning that the poem can generate improvisationally. It's oddly more NY School than AG, even if I've never lived in NYC. 

I see something similar in your work. None of you has become a fervent avant-gardist. Instead, you're taking what you need for the work you already do and enriching it, as the question ran last night. While sometimes I confess to wanting you to go crazy with the possibilities and abandon aspects of your own style, I've come to realize that's not realistic. Those of you who are Ph.D. poets, especially, are already deeply invested in what you do and how you do it. Easy for me to say, spend a semester mucking around with something else. 

BUT, I would like to see you thinking about the ways in which the avant-garde has influenced your work this semester, and also the ways it has not. What have you accepted, and what rejected? Are you more like Kenny Goldsmith, or like Hart Crane--essentially a late Romantic poet, but one who sometimes used the techniques of the AG--or like John Ashbery, who had only one book in the early 60s that might be termed "authentic" AG? That word again. Where are the boundaries, and where do they blur? To what purpose each? In what ways are your poetic heroes aligned with the most radical purposes of the AG, and in what ways not? Let me see the contexts that you're developing around these ideas. That work of analysis will help when you write your own poems, and when you think about literary history as a teacher.

As students, I want you to devise a narrative about the avant-garde; as poets, I want you to place yourselves inside (or outside) of it.

I'll also post this on the blog, and invite responses to it. 

aloha, Susan (who is also living with these questions )

Nature Unwriting: Stephen Collis & Jordan Scott, DECOMP

Avant-garde writing takes the tools of its trade and makes them into subject matter. If words are bricks, the writer starts with bricks and constructs a wall of words. This wall isn't intended to express the writer's ideas or feelings, but to show how the bricks and mortar of expressing those ideas and feelings can work, when divorced from them. Walling the reader out operates on her, interrupting her, demanding that she realize she's looking at language, not at a seductive narrative or image. Avant-garde methods include chance operations, and begin from rules; concept matters more than content (though content is often surprising, funny, jarring).

Avant-garde writing constructs a world, but it often appears removed from this one. Recent experimental writing suggests that such writing can be made from the real world, can be a new form of realism. As I proof-read a short essay I wrote on Alzheimer's, I find this sentence: "Experimental writing, which has traditionally started from language and worked back toward a life that considers itself sturdier than it is, can be used to write outward from identity's implosions." Poets now appropriate the avant-garde to engage with forces of history, nature, identity. Or is it the other way around?

Consider Stephen Collis and Jordan Scott. Their new book Decomp begins as concept-question: what happens when you take copies of Darwin's Origin of the Species and you put them in five ecosystems of British Columbia's wilderness for a year? Their only conscious contribution to the project--at first--was this laying down of books. A wait-see. An odd and compelling idea that would not germinate but fall apart. A mode of composition that would end as decomposition.

Their book is composed of photographs of the weathered books, poems, sections called "The Readable" that come from the decomposing texts, glosses, essayistic bits, quotations from Blanchot and other writers, reactions and poems from friends, including Fred Wah, dialogues between Collis and Scott. Unspoken dialogues with antecedent authors hum below the top soil: Susan Howe (on whom Collis has written beautifully), Ronald Johnson, Tom Phillips (where A Humument meets moss). 

"Typos in the accidental, a species of form and will, when the form is ever so clearly: cadence as rot," they write on 95. In one of the "Readable" sections we see this: "during the period great piles of or life had erritory hardly." In another this: 

Nature

when the

form

ever 

is

so

clearly

the

inside

plan

who 

red

Each ecosystem has its own textual form above and beyond loss. Some leave long lines, others short ones. Some ecosystems leave pine needles; others cover their books with a layer of dusky dirt. Some ecosystems leave more to read than others. Some reading is red.

The erasures by nature bleed into human typos: "the fosl of mmigration" (69). The writers are themselves an ecosystem, above and beyond, or at least beside, those of the forests they leave their books in. "An us, with our books, waiting at the edge in a kind of explicatory light, wondering what method mulch is, what understanding ensoilment. What is forbidden returned as litter. Our leaving on the ground, for the ground." Ground is precisely what the 20th century avant-garde wanted to refuse. Like place it was too sturdy a fiction, needed to be displaced. Displacement now replaced by decomposition, because place has regained its place in our world. It is what is most under threat, least to be taken for granted. Place itself devolves, becoming litter. The book is a place in this equation, and what we find in it comes in spite of destruction.

Allegory, then, of climate change? Of destruction as odd counterpoint to Darwin's evolution? Perhaps. But also a return to the avant-garde as politics, a very different form of it. If Futurism praised the machine, its maleness, its tendency to blow things up, then Decomp-ism praises a slower disintegration of the material world, even as it hints at a poetics of more--or less than--praise. Because, while the text is reduced to another kind of beauty than the one Darwin intended, it is also a symptom of unraveling. As in Alzheimer's the destruction of language becomes its remaining beauty. As in Alzheimer's what occurs is "natural," in the sense that decomposition and disease are natural. Until "The Readable" is an empty box only. "The book is buried and we cannot read a thing." 

For the ones who try to read the text the forest has toyed with, there is a stark lesson. "At the edge of forest, I'm all mystery of separation; hologrammed immensity of what the forest does with us, with our entitlements" (117). We are the ones who disappear, along with our texts. That we have set this erasure in motion only makes it more pathetic, in the original sense of pathos. We have undone our best words. The forest has done what we knew it would do.

And yet, in the absence of a reader, there is still an interlocutor. Steve and Jordan keep talking. They continue to curate these erasures, and to write off of them, around them, through them. The process is a doing and an undoing at one and the same time: "Us in crustaceous forms weaving what is undone and what is done by our hands' distant cupping. What is to. To our undoing. Joined" (128)

Dementia & Avant-Garde Empathies

In his memoir, Losing My Mind, Thomas DeBaggio writes about losing his ability to write: "The disease produces a literary trash pile of butchered words, once recognizable but now arranged in combinations neither I nor the spell-checker has ever seen," he writes (125).  My edition begins with a typo, "Many friends have helped with ths project," and the editions of my students and co-instructor begin with flurries of missing letters. (I'm trying to find out to what extent these omissions are "accidents," or intentions by the editors, and why different printings have different errors.) The passage that sent me back to poetry, however, is this one by DaBaggio:

As I type, my fingers hit unexpected keys and make words with similar sounds or rearrange letters. It began with small words. Recently I discovered the word "will" when I thought I had written "still." Another time the word "ride turned into "rice. . . Sometimes this "dyslectic" alphabet goes unnotced by me for several readings. Eye, hand, mind, the connections are weakening. Typos tell the story of the march of Alzheimer's. (134)

I was reminded of a passage in John Shoptaw's essay on John Ashbery and Charles Bernstein in The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry. In that essay, he quotes Ashbery on the deliberate cultivation of "typos": "I just wrote ap oem this morning in which I used the word 'borders' but changed it to 'boarders.' The original word literally had a marginal existence and isn't spoken, is perhaps what you might call a crypt word" (214). Like Garrett Stewart, Ashbery finds meanings between words, though not between material words, as Stewart does, but between homonyms. Shoptaw catalogues many of these crypt words and phrases, which include the shift from "screwed into place" to "screwed onto palace" and "Time stepped," rather than "stopped," both from The Tennis Court Oath. Charles Bernstein takes cliches and transmogrifies them by sonic shift, too:

half a loaf
would be not
so good as

no loaf (half
a boast not
so good as

no boast). (Tribe, 215)

My co-teacher, Lori Yancura, had just found an article by Aagje Swinnen on "Dementia in Documentary Film: Mum by Adelheid Roosen." At the end of this article, Swinnen uses Riffaterre (ah, blast from the critical past!) to read words written by the woman with dementia chronicled in the film, Mum. Mum was not yet mum, still had words and wrote them on a clear plastic "window." Taking what appears to be evidence of illness, confusion, and reading it through the lens of poetry, Swinnen finds important words, and parts of idioms.  She takes the following phrase: "No I don't have to be on the leg, on the dove . . . or on the breaking, but I do want to be free..." reads "breaking" as part of "breaking free" and then speculates that the word "leg" might also be related to "breaking," as in "break a leg."

I created a writing exercise out of these links, connections, breakings of words into other words. The resulting chaotic proliferation of meaning does not net communication or information, but fields of suggestive sounds.  We did a 10-minute automatic writing bout during which any word that could be flipped into another word would be flipped/flopped. My co-instructor, Lori, started writing and laughing.  When she finished and read her piece, which was suitably chaotic, she said she realized that every word she'd written, while it did not "make sense to anyone else," was important to her. Her words, like those of others in the class, came to her out of her recent experiences with cars, with her dog, and so forth.  Some of the material came out of the conversation we'd been having before class began, about Kapena's car, which was lost on the Honda lot, after he took it in for repair. My free write took the word "Cambodia" apart as "come boding in an rise paddy," where Cambodia came to mind based on a verbal/visual memory of the teeshirt I'd seen there that read "iPood," which came from earlier in-class conversation about measuring your health according to the color of your poo (our class is inspiring us to eat healthier food . . . ).

We had written "demented texts," but we were not dementia-sufferers.  We had laughed at our writing, whereas DeBaggio suffered deeply trying to write his. For him, the typo was horrible symptom of his disease; for us, the typo was mental liberation into zaniness.  So what was the point of the exercise?  We had not come to understand the anguish of trying to communicate, but instead writing word salad. When I asked if the exercise helped us to better understand dementia, Lori noted that she wants to use the exercise with caregivers, because this exercise made her more understanding (if not better able to understand exactly what dementia-sufferers say). Knowing that her own words meant so much to her, but couldn't be tracked by us without explanation, meant that efforts at communication by Alzheimer's sufferers likely include words that likely mean a lot to them.  I remember Florence, in my mother's Alzheimer's home, who talked so much about church.  Or Sylvia about her store. A woman who kept saying "baby" over and over again. Their sentences didn't make sense, but their words were meaningful.

The avant-garde poet is not usually looked to as a model of empathy. She's more a Brechtian alienist, setting herself apart from audience rather than creating a moving field of compassion. But this exercise reminded me that those poems that drive their audiences crazy are (linguistically) very like persons with Alzheimer's, and that those persons with the illness can perhaps be better cared for if we recognize in their words the feelings that individual and broken words carry.  Not words as sentences or words as stories, but words themselves, in their own frailty, losing letters here and there, shifting into other words, then wandering into other fields of meaning, getting lost, and only sometimes found.  I read a book called The Alphabet Keeper to my kids; I think I found it in a London bookshop. The alphabet keeper has a big net and keeps trying to capture words, set them down to be still, but they keep shifting into other words. It's a lovely book, and now I see how apt an analogy it is for the language of dementia and for our attempts to capture meaning in it.  The in-class exercise was at once a literary one (make an avant-garde poem) and also an empathetic one (make the poem and hear it as transcript of a possible dementia). Or, as the Riffaterre drenched Dr. Swinnen writes: "The semiotics of poetry is to be understood as the transformation of the signs from the mimetic level to the second, higher level of significance by the reader."

Notes:

Thomas DaBaggio, Losing My Mind: An Intimate Look at Life with Alzheimer's. NY: The Free Press, 2002.

John Shoptaw, "The Music of Construction: Measure and Polyphony in Ashbery and Bernstein," in Susan M. Schultz, Ed. The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1995: 211-257.

Aagje Swinnen, "Dementia in Documentary Film: Mum by Adelheid Roosen," The Gerontologist (53:1): 113-122, 2012.

The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature: forms or identities?

The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature is both a book I want very much to read (check out the price, though) and to throw across the room. The introduction, by editors Joe Bray, Alison Gibbons, and Brian McHale has been posted by Charles Bernstein on the jacket2 website, along with the book's Table of Contents. While it's hard to judge a book by so little evidence, I sense that the volume weaves unsteadily on a familiar tightrope that runs between issues of form and identity. It's not a tightrope that we haven't seen many times before, though it's one I'd like taken down, or at least moved to a chasm between newer skyscrapers.

The problem, as I see it, is this: on the one hand, experimental or avant-garde literature gets discussed as a series of formal issues. On the other hand, where gaps appear in the form-only mode, they are soon filled with work about identity positions, usually grouped together and somehow operating in an outer loop of the central formal issues. And so we see that, according to these editors, experimental literature can be characterized according to the following categories (and these are just a few):

--Realism
--Surrealism
--OuLiPo and Proceduralism
--Altermodernist fiction
--L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
--Concrete poetry and prose
--Found poetry, appropriation
--Visual art
--Genre fiction
--Interactive fiction
--Digital fiction
--Computer gaming

These headings suggest that we are entering a world where rules are paramount. Experimental rules are different from traditional ones. A noun + seven exercise is not a sonnet. The editors assert that what happens when you move from sonnet-world to noun + seven land is that "fundamental questions" about literature are "unrepressed," and "everything [is] open to challenge, reconceptualization and reconfiguration. And so verbal art gets thrown in the air, all the words of a Shakespeare sonnet tossed to the winds, and only a few gathered up to be re-placed on the ground as another poem, not about love and immortality, but about the words themselves. So far so good; I'd hardly disagree. I want to read the book, remember?

But somewhere in the middle of this table of contents the content shifts, briefly, to "experiments with identity." We've left the world of rules and words and entered a more real world, we sense, one where what's at stake are persons with marked identities. This is the world we live in, where more than linguistic rules apply, even when they remain crucial. Hence, we get a chapter by Ellen Friedman on "women's avant-garde writing in the 20th century," another by Aldon Lynn Nielsen on African-American avant-garde poetics and a third on "language and innovation in anglophone postcolonial poetry" (a behemoth of a topic on its own). The tension surfaces in the titles here: "experiments in identity" are not necessarily experiments in language, and vice versa.

But we turn back as soon as the next section is announced as "The New Experimentalism," which has nothing to do--it would seem--with race or gender or post-coloniality. There is but the word "globalization" to tease us. The editors say in the introduction that the globalization chapter is about "complex connectivity" and "proximity," but nothing about how those connections move across real differences. What is in the chapter may contradict my impression, but the introduction leaves me to think that what the last chapter promised of "identity issues" has now moved into something more theoretically abstract, namely, "an implicitly politicized aesthetic resistance to globalization," as Gibbons characterizes it. There is one paragraph in the introduction about "political subversion," but that relates solely to postcolonial literature and a critique of hybridity. What of uses of experimental poetry by white poets on behalf of the Occupy movement, or by Asian-American poets to write about the internment experience? By Hawaiian and local Asian poets to resist rampant land development? What about Kaia Sand's Tinfish book, in which she--a Norwegian American--writes about that internment camp experience and uses experimental techniques as buffers against the ethical pitfalls often fallen into by writers of her identity position?

If one were to launch a critique of the volume's identity politics, one might well wonder what happened to Asian-Americans, Hispanics, queers, and other minority groups in late 20th century (or even earlier) literature. And, if one were to critique the emphasis on form, one might ask, what are the intersections between identity and form, even outside of these minority categories? What is European about the avant-garde, anyway? Is it largely based on the appropriation of African art? Are all minority uses (appropriations!) of avant-garde techniques rebellions against it, or against other identity positions? How can avant-garde techniques be considered absolutely integral to the practice of writing realism about post-colonial situations that more resemble than differ from the writing of a European avant-gardist than one might think? If process is so crucial, then why is it used by persons from different cultures in different ways? Is experiment ever a form of content? What is content in an experimental poem or prose piece? The questions are legion, and I don't see evidence of them here.

At the end of a section on "The Persistence of the Historical Avant-Gardes" I find one root to the problem, a metaphorical root.  Let me quote: "The persistence of the historical avant-garde into the present guarantees a sort of family resemblance among the contemporary varieties of experimentalism. As with real families, resemblance here is not a matter of everyone possessing some essential feature common to all types of experimentalism; rather, it involves a series of overlapping similarities--common threads, some of which connect one subset of experimental practices, whiles [sic] others connect other subsets." The metaphor is family. If traditional, mainstream literature is one family, the one that doesn't question its own terms, then the experimental family breaks these terms open for inspection. Why then, are we using the identity-bound metaphor of "real family" and "resemblance," this very real adoptive parent wonders, rather than thinking of experiment as composed OF differences, and of a way to make connections (paradoxically, yes) across these differences? If family represents a kind of coherence, then what has it to do with a tradition of coherence's breaking? What happens when a member of that family suffers from dementia, loses his or her identity, begins to speak as if she is writing an experimental poem? The difference of one self to itself is surely part of what makes experimental writing necessary? It was to B.S. Johnson, who is quoted in the introduction, in his House Mother Normal, but the quote is about his dislike of the term "experimental writing" and not its uses.

In my work as Tinfish's editor and as a teacher of literature and creative writing in Hawai`i, I've found similar resistances to those inscribed in this book, although almost all of them are resistances to the avant-garde and not to traditional forms--which increasingly include Hawaiian forms of orature.  Resistances work against difference, but difference is where much treasure can be found. When a press's last volume is by an author who is a Coptic Christian Egyptian engineer living in Seattle and writing in English, who employs a form something like haiku, and when that combination of terms does not seem so surprising after all, that's when you know there can be no such separation between questions of identity and form as this introduction suggests. It's time to create anthologies that consider all these questions throughout, not simply moving from one to the other as if they lived in separate neighborhoods.