The look of the post-avant, today

Silliman, Armantrout & radical poets everywhere

Time was when the radical poet looked like one: angry, lean and virulently au contraire. S/he certainly wouldn't be caught dead seated in comfy corner tables in La Jolla (on this kind of perpetual whirlwind tour through the good ol' days), sweaters stylishly draped, necks stiff from looking to one side and then other to see who's passing by& who cares. Only greys reflect sagaciously against pasty white brows & betoken pure open-endedness : look! well-fed beauracrat-poets to a person (Samperi was so right!), who lean heavily into their wicker seats, water glass in front, & who most likely sparkle with perfect SFU-speak .

A veritable rondure of the well-heeled l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e poet here, but with none of the rough jaggedness of truth or youth, none of the unadorned ressentiment (as if they'd ever had any). How dare the comfy static & utterly satisfied baby boomer-bard still hang on a name like 'avant'. But, who knows, a book of poetry may arise out of this collocation of slouching paradoxes, one last time, one final kick at the radical can: perhaps another anthology of verse to be called the Patio Table (a more airy complement to their first august Grand Piano, perhaps).

How this roundtable (but without Siege Perilous!) could ever have once bemoaned the commodity of art and tested boundaries, is beyond me (I'm open to suggestions). To look at them, huddled in each other's birthdays, agog with prizes: well, you'd think they had just enough energy left to pat each other's cheek and coax out one more syllable, one more letter...Oh yes, they are meeting again, these radical poets,& waiting for their orders. Smoking exotic bidis and leering contemplatively through their own smoke would certainly have been preferable to this feeble lurching to water glasses. How the redoubtable have crumpled.

C'mon guys: where's the 'ol "no reference", "no image", "no meaning" mantra! Let's hear the old school motto, one more time: "Stick signifieds up your ass. Give us the evitable, arbitrary and airy Sentence instead. Bitte wiederholen Sie das!" Inject a little lividness into this fading colloquy, please. I thought l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e was supposed to be the enemy of the State: but alas, like Silliman's chic cardigan, I think it's been googled and namebranded to death, & having reached saturation, will lie discarded like bleached jawbones in New Mexico. Or set up as subway installation art. I think Silliman, Armantrout et al. forgot about Capital.

But enough of that.  It's nice outside: patio chairs & floor tiles are even interestingly mismated enough for an incongruous verse or two, to be written on napkins. Faces, gestures, and delicious pasty white of the poet's brow--all you need to kick start another "approximation of the poem".