Soft Avant-Guard
http://bostonreview.mit.edu/BR27.2/bedient.html
Calvin Bedient
Judith Goldman's avant-garde is not the soft kind prevalent in most of the more lively contemporary poetry magazines (among them The Colorado Review, Conduit, Fence, jubilat, New American Writing, Verse, and VOLT); it's the hard kind still associated with Language writing. But, unlike much of the latter, Goldman's work isn't earnest with didacticism. Almost always, it wants to delight as well as instruct
I had forgotten about the ominous soft rubber "hammer" reference which follows this... I would think Bedient would include Joshua Clover, Timothy Donnelly, Ethan Paquin, Brian Henry...
http://bostonreview.mit.edu/BR27.3/fischer.html
Barbara Fischer
As contemporary poets turn in increasing numbers to the fashionable strategy of combining experimental techniques with lyric and narrative modes, many of these recent efforts have taken on a familiar look and a familiar set of conventions. (Calvin Bedient, writing in these pages, recently dubbed it the "soft avant-garde.") One image leads to another in associative or nonsequiturial cascades. Sequences of sentence fragments are interrupted by bursts of conventional syntax. The page is manipulated as a visual space to the extent most word processors allow, with varied patterns of indentation and spacing. Descriptions reflect distraction and fragmentation, and are often accompanied by philosophical inquiries into the nature of perception. The poems explore (or ransack) personal and historical archives and document these explorations through cut-and-paste procedures. And throughout this accumulation and disjuncture, they dutifully rehearse the postmodern axiom that the natural, the personal, and the social are linguistically constructed.
But Kathrine, I think if Fulton wants fractal followers, then she's going to have to use and define her terms correctly! Daisy, I agree: it is boy art and girl art, and easier to think of in terms of visual boy art and girl art, which have more well-developed vocabularies now.
I think part of the problem here is that most LANGUAGE poetry was very political poetry, and I do not think most of these poets have been radicalized. Also, there's the way that third wave feminism seems to have left most younger white feminists out in the cold, because of the post colonial focus, while postfeminism is quite ecumenical. Then there are people like Lisa Lubasch, for example, quite focused on beauty, but I can't think of her work as soft avant guard.
1) I know absolutely nothing about John Ashbery
2) there are two Wallace Stevenses when the imagist-influenced blank verse Stevens is separated from the logical-mannerist Stevens, as is frequently done now! and I think it is Stevens' "snapped logic" which underlies so-called fractal verse
"If you put on an aquamarine choker and look in the mirror and don't see anything, then you must be the sea." a materialist lyric "she sang beyond the genius of the sea"?
3) New York School collage and etc. is derived from surrealism
4) John Cage has the more influential version of Chinese and Japanese poetry than Pound for most, I think, although he went through Pound, right??? and our current understanding of Japanese poetry, including Haiku, is far better than that of the imagists -- and it is that which is most important now, I think -- collage poetry, postmodern forms, collaboration (live & with lit, other arts, information, etc.) really do have a relationship to the Chinese book of poetry and poems written as alternate song lyrics as well as with Japanese season words, extreme constraints, etc. (which ultimately derives from Chinese in a way, but ... Sarah knows WAY MORE about this than I do)
5) let's not forget collage poetry master Marianne Moore
6) I would argue the "soft avant guard" poets are more influenced by James Tate's surrealism and David Lehman's version of the New York School than by Pound, Cage, and Ashbery, although they have been led to the male surrealists through Pound, Cage, Ashbery
While I know that this Janus-faced Stevens, together with Moore, Yeats, Pound (my first four poetry books) have influenced my own understanding of poetry -- perhaps, then, I read all poetry through this scrim --
there is a connection here. It's what my haiku class is about!
http://bostonreview.mit.edu/BR27.2/bedient.html
Calvin Bedient
Judith Goldman's avant-garde is not the soft kind prevalent in most of the more lively contemporary poetry magazines (among them The Colorado Review, Conduit, Fence, jubilat, New American Writing, Verse, and VOLT); it's the hard kind still associated with Language writing. But, unlike much of the latter, Goldman's work isn't earnest with didacticism. Almost always, it wants to delight as well as instruct
I had forgotten about the ominous soft rubber "hammer" reference which follows this... I would think Bedient would include Joshua Clover, Timothy Donnelly, Ethan Paquin, Brian Henry...
http://bostonreview.mit.edu/BR27.3/fischer.html
Barbara Fischer
As contemporary poets turn in increasing numbers to the fashionable strategy of combining experimental techniques with lyric and narrative modes, many of these recent efforts have taken on a familiar look and a familiar set of conventions. (Calvin Bedient, writing in these pages, recently dubbed it the "soft avant-garde.") One image leads to another in associative or nonsequiturial cascades. Sequences of sentence fragments are interrupted by bursts of conventional syntax. The page is manipulated as a visual space to the extent most word processors allow, with varied patterns of indentation and spacing. Descriptions reflect distraction and fragmentation, and are often accompanied by philosophical inquiries into the nature of perception. The poems explore (or ransack) personal and historical archives and document these explorations through cut-and-paste procedures. And throughout this accumulation and disjuncture, they dutifully rehearse the postmodern axiom that the natural, the personal, and the social are linguistically constructed.
But Kathrine, I think if Fulton wants fractal followers, then she's going to have to use and define her terms correctly! Daisy, I agree: it is boy art and girl art, and easier to think of in terms of visual boy art and girl art, which have more well-developed vocabularies now.
I think part of the problem here is that most LANGUAGE poetry was very political poetry, and I do not think most of these poets have been radicalized. Also, there's the way that third wave feminism seems to have left most younger white feminists out in the cold, because of the post colonial focus, while postfeminism is quite ecumenical. Then there are people like Lisa Lubasch, for example, quite focused on beauty, but I can't think of her work as soft avant guard.
1) I know absolutely nothing about John Ashbery
2) there are two Wallace Stevenses when the imagist-influenced blank verse Stevens is separated from the logical-mannerist Stevens, as is frequently done now! and I think it is Stevens' "snapped logic" which underlies so-called fractal verse
"If you put on an aquamarine choker and look in the mirror and don't see anything, then you must be the sea." a materialist lyric "she sang beyond the genius of the sea"?
3) New York School collage and etc. is derived from surrealism
4) John Cage has the more influential version of Chinese and Japanese poetry than Pound for most, I think, although he went through Pound, right??? and our current understanding of Japanese poetry, including Haiku, is far better than that of the imagists -- and it is that which is most important now, I think -- collage poetry, postmodern forms, collaboration (live & with lit, other arts, information, etc.) really do have a relationship to the Chinese book of poetry and poems written as alternate song lyrics as well as with Japanese season words, extreme constraints, etc. (which ultimately derives from Chinese in a way, but ... Sarah knows WAY MORE about this than I do)
5) let's not forget collage poetry master Marianne Moore
6) I would argue the "soft avant guard" poets are more influenced by James Tate's surrealism and David Lehman's version of the New York School than by Pound, Cage, and Ashbery, although they have been led to the male surrealists through Pound, Cage, Ashbery
While I know that this Janus-faced Stevens, together with Moore, Yeats, Pound (my first four poetry books) have influenced my own understanding of poetry -- perhaps, then, I read all poetry through this scrim --
there is a connection here. It's what my haiku class is about!
Comments