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".

April is poetry month: what's good and what's not

The good...

    "I know you, monster-head! Once more face to face. We
take up the long debate where we left off.
    And you may urge your arguments like snouts low over
the water: I will leave you no rest and no respite.
    On too many frequented shores have my footsteps been
washed away before the day, on too many deserted beds has
my soul been delivered up to the cancer of silence.
    What more do you want of me, O breath of origin? And
you, what more would you drag from my living lips..."
                                                                      (from Exile, St.-John Perse)

The bad...

Word's a sentence before it's a word -- I write
Sentences -- When words are, meaning soon follows -- Where
words join, writing is -- One's writing is one writing --
Not all letters are equal -- 2 phrases yield an angle --
Eye settles in the middle of word, left of center -- Reference
is a compass -- Each day -- Performance seeks
vaudeville -- Composition as investigation -- Collage is a
false democracy -- Spelling's choices
                                                             (from FOR L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Ron Silliman)
____________________

Again, Perse's perfect mythopoeia and language fit, drinking at the same stream. And think of all the great  monsters it's foreseen: from Sidney to Proust. I've borrowed his Peregrine and made the conversions to dark exilic moods myself. With him I've made cancer-leafs and burned Jesuits with the anvil-necklace for wanting illusional peewit wives. I know who the Father really is. Why do only the great Talmudists, the great ones! get to enjoy a language fit for the Master of the Universe? La simple chose que voilà applied to skeletons and shores...? Why can't Perse be my Corman?


In Silliman's abcediary a word, phrase & sentence at a time peck in the dirt, envying the superior snouts. Not being one means he has to form the vowels with his ope lips and blow them out, a disgraceful ritual that's sometimes sputters through the beard. In fact, there's neither sense nor Sentence here if you look carefully, just the child's rambling (minus the child's imaginative vision), the sand (minus the seas). Silliman writes sentences (and nothing could be easier) while Perse breathes. In Silliman a series of equal signs to help connect the lines while Perse's "a language free of usage and pure". Silliman's banausic verse fit for advisory boards...puffing at the shores.

Some ideas for an "other shore" poetics: reading Samperi's "The Prefiguration"

Frank Samperi

passes over stream
into
dream
other life
pauses
water
other shore (sanza mezzo)         

To be saved I must
slip away from the moderns (The Prefiguration)

It is better, I mean, to be here,
   Where the mind can act
   And make light where there is none,

Than with the crowd, whose mouth defies the sun.
   No I can never go; it is dark beyond my gate;
   And my mind could not live out there (The Prefiguaration)

Why hasn't the abject particling of Language poetry today really gotten anybody's attention? Silliman who's the neoned eye of contemporary America & who likes to post Occupy protesters, of course, will never see as poet Samperi does,"noticing less in front/than behind" (Infinitesimals). Like leftist scholars watching the action from their hotel windows.The transfigurative potential of work, i.e. the sense that it's been done & yet is perpetually nearing the poet's ear, "as if that time [of sitting, journeying, writing] were without reference to another time far back or up ahead" ("Morning and Evening"), seems to have been lost on America's most influential avant (ironically enough!). John Martone certainly knows that nearing presence as if Samperi "stood behind me, looking over my shoulder." Presence felt as breath & spirit. Of transfigurative poetry it can be said (what can never be said of Language poetry),  

The moment you looked into a pool to see heaven was
the moment you in heaven saw a man looking into a pool
to see heaven—("Morning and Evening")

Silliman and Samperi can't ever have been in the same city, can they? They were both reflecting on language at about the same time, weren't they? Every place poet Samperi passes equals the angel in the park, which is to say that a thing seen in a state of motion will reveal its own true nature ("Crystals"). In a kind of Marxian equation we can say the angel is the poem's true "value-form", but not ,of course, til its physical form (the "matter language") has been shucked: here Dante's being stood not on his head but on his poet laurels. It's the spirit of a poetry that we want but without the period associations with the great Florentine. With single-minded devotion to one seer, one late medieval work, Samperi, by his Bronx window, writes angels, old men, the homeless: Samperi who's occupied the park a long time ago & ridden the bus long before the author of Ketjak.

Towards the ideal (goal) of an "other shore" poetics I'll reflect on some exemplars culled from my reading of The Prefiguration, the first in Samperi's celebrated three-volume work comprising of The Prefiguration, Quadrifariam and Lumen Gloriae. By exemplar I mean a distinctive principle of verse construction inspired & guided by the primary Dantean archetype, and capable of its own Commedia journey. In exemplars matters of relation, direction & backwards and forwards motion (any "commotional" concept like these) are irrelevant. As in a collective memory anything able to be 'transfigured' is revealed in poetic forms (or shadows or "companionships" or "confrontations", etc) only: of light, wind, falling birds, almost always randomly given and, again, part of poet Samperi's daily journeys. Though to be found in these only a syntax can be learned and above all an integrity that leaves the poet with no real audience in this world ("Morning and Evening") and a courage to write honestly, since he's bound for the "other shore".

I admit I've carved Language opposition firmly in stone, with Silliman mentioned often as he's done the most to hide the "other shore" from view. The Sentence is, to begin with, a fake abstraction "non solum quantum ad formam, sed etiam quantum ad materiam" ("Morning and Evening"), & worth the pains of disavowing. Any poetical principle that's been accepted by decades of followers as a chose jugée will necessarily occult and denigrate the real. As an object of material consumption only it's been tragically cut adrift from the spiritual with which alone the poem can form community, a neighbourhood, park. The poet reciting the alphabet in the streets is bound to be ignored. And all the poet-academics huddled around their grand piano who think the Sentence, scribbled in the margins, is an essence-grasping thing will also be ignored. Again Aquinas, "in rebus quidem corporalibus apparet quod res visa non potest esse in vidente per suam essentiam".

The mistake, in other words, is to look for the "multiplicity of individuals in a single species":  the sea instead of shorelines gesturing continually towards it, as poet Samperi will say. The sea is at times nothing but ice ("Ferns"). There's too much thought (and the logic of poetry can't do without its pounding negatives), & not enough movement. It's also why Wallace Stevens got it wrong: lakes are never more reasonable than oceans. In short, remove the individual, the Poet, lyrical "I" (whatever), and the man, poet or work, however coerced, will remain eternally perpendicular to the world ("Morning and Evening"). The matter & form of the Sentence, without the true glorified body of the world, won't appear different from anything else & that is the poorest way to get along with angels:

If there's longing for confraternity with the angels, then
every movement a man makes to establish such is a move-
ment toward specific difference ("Morning and Evening")

I once said, for example, that a Watten line, given in many Google translations at once, is suddenly nowhere to be found. Extinction always results from decontextualization. And because something dead like a Watten verse doesn't move— perhaps only an academic's circularity at best— journey is out of the question. Exclusion from the Commedia is another terrible result of decontextualization work. Samperi's poem, on the other hand, is the Gift ("Morning and Evening").

So the "other shore" poetics is, at a literal level, a "Cry out to the angels above the city—"a type of invocation or representation certainly of the misery of quotidian existence ("Morning and Evening") but, more crucially, a figural balance between poets and the world. Echoing Levinas poet Samperi speaks of the "face to face" encounter, vision sanza mezzo, one where not even poetry can ever be reduced to an approach ("Crystals"). With Levinasian ethics comes a care for the other the experimentalists have all but trashed. Why would Watten not want to be properly "prefigured" in the first place and not recognized as a transmitter of vital literary culture? Do Watten & Samperi not live in the same world? Through successive generations of readers—not reasoners!— the 'figural' is always destined to appear as a 'prefiguration': and it's angels who gesture the most assiduously towards a world. Subserving the marketplace appetite (as poetry theorists & practitioners do) is a living death equal to the State ("Crystals"), as if we were talking about cultural bureaucracy. And the fate that awaits the poet playing with linguistics can be particularly bad: the most incoherent type of logomachy imaginable.

Below are found some ideas (intimations, perhaps) for an "other shore" poetics gathered together as a lengthening set of recommendations,meant not so much as a curative as restorative: the restoration of something like a world lost in pernicious Language simulacra. They're also referred to as exemplars. I offer, after poet Samperi, only the singular since it alone is the giver of calm and only a "multiplication of species" sings a world that's been stolen from us. To develop the singular into full-blown exposition, however, would be to bring it within earshot of the next generation of Samperi readers: never quite near enough to be felt per suam essentiam but definitely close to the ear.

1. Substitute Commedia for langue: the angel's idealized rhymes for abject particling. The torqued heave of creation itself is sufficient;

2. shed the poetry body to free the seer. Language poets who can't shed the poem necessarily resort to "commodity fetishism";

3. restore the rich tenant of Form/Song, who goes by many names, Dolores, Claudia ("Ferns"), & a child's moon repeated over and over ("Morning and Evening"), the forsythia of conjugal love ("So Close");

4. reading is a type of wing beat: no, reading like the I walking past the El is pure wing beat;

5. the tercet in Dante is certainly an Infinitesimal;

6. the Infinitesimals on rag paper become the new minimalism (interchangeable with verse, sura, sutra, etc), not the"stripped down poetics of Cid Corman" Silliman thinks it is;

7. poetics is never the political but simple poverty or life before God,  the feeling useless, taking the bus home, walking over a "dried stream" ("Branches"), alone;

8. spirit is attentive to rivers and beyond river-banks to the "other shore", like the I riding. In the river the impetus is to go forward. As both Chesterton and poet Samperi wish to say, only the dead can be a complete "afterthought";

9. in Samperi the pigeons flash like the angel at composition. Let's face it, Armantrout, Watten would probably self-consume trying;

10. the Sentence is always "a mean reflective position" ("Morning and Evening") and is why the poem must be shed. I rather like poet Samperi's reducing contemporary poetics to a "Unitary Field Theory" that misses shorelines altogether, everyone being usually too sea-avid. When will they perceive, "Unde perfectio naturae angelicae requirit multiplicationem specierum, non autem multiplicationem individuarum in una specie."

11. talk of failure's forbidden here ("Of Light");

12. in langue metaphor is a trap (Infinitesimals), to be shucked like the poem;

13. like the skop who sings of dead warrior-princes set adrift sings poet Samperi;

14. every poem is a "chipped virgin" or a broken Cupid's head ("Song Book"): the ones protesters haven't taken outside yet and smashed in the streets. The soft self-effacing voice of the "chipped virgin", in particular, imitated by poet Samperi;

15. don't ape the avants, not even Dante or Samperi: "ape Buddha" ("Song Book");

16. number your symbols: eight is for birds, for example;

17. You and I are chief religio-poetic signifiers, yes, as meaning they refer to the You that I essentially am;

18. the soul's limping body ("Of Light");

19. lights and shadows blossom or spring like memory, a fluttering;

20. "whenever it is possible to integrate two separate elements into a single larger element by imagining them as sharing a common participant, the reader will do so" (Ron Silliman)
                                             OR
"If a work is primarily addressed to God, then it follows that the audience isn't essential—in fact, a period that places the movement in the audience whose referential is the standard that impedes draws to itself a principle whose point is finally to exclude totally: therefore, it is right to say that no identification can be telically intended when a work is so primarily addressed." (poet Frank Samperi).

I like how 'telos' tragically cancels the Silliman reader here;

21. to know is to know "angelically" ("Morning and Evening"), every time;

22. the sentence is a Prefiguration, & not the other way round ("Morning and Evening"), sometimes street-dependent (as in the case of a man), sometimes river-dependent (as in the case of an angel);

23. beyond the freight yard is death, & dead leaves;

24. every flame is dying to drop like snow: a kind of buried memory at work. Anything as vital as this will have to await John Martone;

25. memory as a falling of birds ("Branches")—ah!;

26. between every light & shadow a boy falls, the place marked by flowers;

27. see dying as an image of moon-lit hands ("Ferns");

28. some men go about their business, some go to their sorrow ("Morning and Evening");

29. a "new heaven and a new earth": imagine that ("Crystals")!

30. memoria: che miseria!

31. the poet (after Samperi) learns to scan noise;

32. "Neither to sow nor to reap—" ("Morning and Evening")

33. Sunset Debris, for all its questioning, never gives us rows of drunken, feculent images;

34. can the author of Ketjak ever "see beyond" the drunks lying on the street, which means "to gather them up and feed them"? ("Morning and Evening");

35. only in poet Samperi's work do you know where commentary ends & poetry begins.

Some further reflections on 'globalization': and how the avant-garde's been hit particularly hard

Revolutionary creativity does not shock or entertain the bourgeoisie, it destroys them.(from above poster)

There is a kind of collusion between capital and the avant-garde. (Jean-François Lyotard)

But the most typical artworks of so-called postmodernism - installations, pastiche, "language" poetry - when stripped of their critical theory scaffolding aren't all that different from those produced a hundred years ago. They have merely shifted out of the various facets of Modernism - irony - into a dominant mode. (Eliot Weinberger)

Yes, artists are free: they are free to exchange and exchange whatever, but only there where exchange takes place, in the market. They are also free to do whatever, but the violence of this freedom is no longer that of revolution, it is merely that of economic competition. (Thierry de Duve)

I've said in a recent post that Silliman's praises of Christian Bök’s Xenotext project disclose an avant-garde in crisis mode. It's time to be more specific. Capitalism and fringe art cultures are no longer (as they used to be) mutually hostile ideologies since the materials, methodology & presentation of work have been assimilated to the complex networks of global capital. And if they're not, the avant-garde longer have a right to that title. In my view, the complete homogenization of global capital characterizes artistic newness as much as it does the fashion industry & social media. In fact, the latter have taken almost the same trajectories as the experimentalist poetries, and it's worth looking at the reasons why.

I wouldn't say exactly, as Lyotard has, that capital and art conspire to say (and do) the same thing. It's just that traditional cultures have now been underwritten by global capitalism. Barriers and identities that served once to keep arts separate from competing disciplines have collapsed but if they've done so it hasn't been due to the success of any strong-armed postmodernist theory.Time was when a John Cage could decry the selling of Duchamp's ready-mades as a gross concession to vulgar bourgeois taste. I suppose there was a sense in Cage's day that art and business were borders becoming increasingly porous. In the face of globalization significant differences like these, however, fade into nothingness: ironically, Derridean differánce has turned into radical sameness. Now writing class instructors can pretend to be biogeneticists and L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E theorists, neon sign artists without really upsetting any established order of things.  
 
I can now safely equate the avant-garde with any successfully retailed market commodity, such as fashion and social media. Far from destroying the bourgeoisie, it works in their favour. Rob Horning's written an interesting blog article entitled "The Accidental Bricoleurs" that's brought home to me the saleability of avant-garde work in a particularly interesting way. In his N+1 piece he describes the  "protocols of new capitalism—flexibility, globalization, technology-enabled logistical micromanaging, consumer co-creation" as the standard-bearers of the retail world. Trendy clothing stores like Zara and Forever 2 offer fake outlets for personal creativity, & don't just sell newness but, as he says, allow congeries of buyers to "become involuntary bricoleurs", cultural memes of the day literally transformed into fashion accessories. 'Bricoleurs' and 'memes' are his own words.

The language of art & fashion are practically indistinguishable. The illusion of both individualism & choice don't try to disguise, as they used to, the real retail market forces that underlie their success: both buyer and store actually revel in them & have become one and the same "replicable" entity. Horning calls the new product lines 'post-brands' in probably the same spirit in which Silliman, wishing to get beyond a hopelessly outdated term like 'avant-garde', calls the newer experimentalists the 'post-avant''. In this "spectacle of pure novelty" fashion is like a L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E theory that's become handily manipulable. Horning:

If fashion functions like a language, then the fast-fashion firms are mainly interested controlling the underlying system and leave the meaning of the “words” to interchangeable designers and individual consumers. As long as customers are willing to speak fast fashion’s language, the companies aren’t particular about the specifics of the vocabulary. They are concerned only with the rate and volume of change.

As in fashion so in social media companies like Facebook. It's almost commonplace to decry the unscrupulous way they filch personal data and then repackage them as newer venues for personal expression, with users captured in what blog theorist Jodi Dean calls "circuits of desire". The free availability of "design ideology" (Facebook software itself) gives users a false sense of empowerment & creativity. An abject conformism to what Horning calls "well-worked surfaces" (interesting expression!) is mistaken for individualism. Like today's revolutionary artists social media designers bank on the illusoriness of originality &, of course, stand to profit greatly by it. "Social media," like contemporary avant-gardist productions," encourage us to appropriate whatever we want and claim it as our own without feeling derivative or slavishly imitative."

Art-makers have become enslaved to their 'brands' (flarf, conceptualist, L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E, mash-up, etc.) as much as users of social media and "fast fashion". Art's just one among a whole array of 'things' in a neoliberal world of global capitalism that exploits for profit "well-worked surfaces" of tradition, materials and technique. The very tradition of art's been turned into a sort of pastime by academics and writing class instructors. How things have changed over the past century! An avant-garde poster (such as the above) once dared to advertise the "revolutionary creativity" of art (and art-makers) bent on destroying the bourgeoisie "in the streets and everywhere". A nasty & generally disreputable bunch the first literary revolutionaries were, living on the fringes & giving the world art intended to maim. Radical Catalan artist Joan Miró sought to "assassinate paintings" of his rival Picasso while bad-mannered Rimbaud writing during the Russian Revolution— a thug, drug addict & scoundrel by most accounts—offended every aesthetic taste imaginable. And then there's William S. Burroughs who treated the world as so many cut ups, & even appeared in his own movies with "orgasm gun".

 Burroughs with gun

Now look at the contemporary avant-garde. Mostly cozy, well-heeled academics (like Charles Bernstein, Rae Armantrout ) who get top billing at poetry events and have become mainstream to the teeth: the successful venture capitalists of verse. Clamoring for top literary prizes and recognition is what drives them. The advertisement for the recent text art festival in Bury, England, for example, while boasting it's going to be one that "specialises in experiments, in new experiences, in performances and exhibitions that mix artforms in ground-breaking combinations", actually appeared more like a catalogue of the rehashed signifiers and techniques of old. The Bury festival was anything but "new". Silliman's own neon art display paid tribute (if anything in art could) to a universal & homogeneous global capitalist order now put to artistic uses. The radicals of old have become literary 'fat cats' emboldened enough to advertise their wares in big bright lights.

The insanity of the avant-garde today: or why "Christian Bök gives great simulacra"

Art should hit, slap in the face, go straight through all interference, and not question. It should present itself as an object of desire, a tangible commodity, and not see itself as a prototype. It should be instantly ready for consumption. (Geert Lovink)

...works that we appreciate and would classify as avant-garde constitute negotiated and compromised artistic expressions that avoid extreme theoretical positions in favor of a self-conscious critical acknowledgment of the world of commercial technoscience. (Raphael Sassower and Louis Cicotello)

Is it the “necropastoral” minnesinger or the “flarf” honker who most succinctly fits the anti-humanism-contaminated-with-bestiality prong? Is it the power-accommodating conceptualist “typist” or the mock-geneticist encoder of bacterial DNA whom “we” ought crown with virtuous alienation’s unsign’d “writerly” hat, or bat? Is the post-takeover lockdown of “J2” the prime contemporary example of cynicism and “mimetic camouflage,” or is it the Poetry Foundation’s move to become a kind of literary Disney World?) (John Latta)

Silliman's recent reflections on Christian Bök’s Xenotext poetry experiment add to my suspicion that the repetitiveness of contemporary avant-garde creation is a type of clinical insanity that results (as Einstein famously quipped) from doing the same thing over & over and yet expecting a different result each time. Bök’s genetically modified poem is one case only of a fairly typical tendency in popular contemporary 'writing class' avant-gardism to imitate, appropriate or take directly from the labour & resources of outside disciplines. (I suspect the active participation of any bona fide biogeneticists in Xenotext may be attributable solely to a Canada Council grant). How else, in the case of Xenotext, do you expect to implant a lyrical poem into the genome of a bacterium called Deinococcus radiodurans and hope for an immortal poetry attributable to one person?

I don't, of course, really think Bök et al are clinically nuts any more than that a poem can be chemically reconfigured to tell its host genome to reproduce itself ad infinitum. But why does he talk this way, lost in a language of unmastered notions? (He's recently said in Silliman's blog that"I am now the first poet in literary history to have engineered a microbe to write poetry...")  Well, because he can and the conditions for an egregious poetry of spectacle are just right these days. Silliman in his post on Bök has sagaciously asked the one question that puts paid to the validity of any type of Xenotext project aimed at taking minimalism to its extremist form: how do we know? How do we know, in fact, whether it hasn't been done before, here or in distant galaxies? "Yet the very god-like scale," as Silliman says," that Bök proposes in the project seems to me to invoke the likelihood that this has, seriously, been done before elsewhere." Meant more as flattery than damaging criticism Silliman's comment does unearth the essential will-to-copy that's at the heart of contemporary avant-garde work. Internet researcher & academic Geert Lovink, however, doesn't mince his words, saying that "The will to subordinate to science is nothing more than a helpless adolescent gesture of powerlessness and victimhood."

Everything about the avant-garde (or post-avant) has been done before: Silliman's right. Contemporary 'futurists', 'fluxists' or crude Schwitters imitators bank on the illusion of originality: again Silliman, "Christian Bök gives great simulacra." He pretty much reiterates the quintessential showmanship quality of the author of Eunoia in his Monday, May 09 blog post. Constraint-based work like this is a "pseudo-event" in the sense first espoused by Daniel J. Boorstin: the same cookie-cutter mould repeatedly pressed on fresh dough. The first avant-gardists (Schwitters, Arp, Ball, Tzara, etc), on the other hand, were to a man a fringe presence, living in very trying socio-economic conditions, even imprisoned or otherwise openly reviled for their work. The Russian avant-gardists are an even better case in point. A far cry from the current fashionable 'academic' playground radical poetries have become where Dr.Bök can hold his writing students hostage to his ideas & books. A far cry from the neon sign art that even the author of the Alphabet, perhaps realizing that the young don't read thick books anymore, has recently dabbled in.

Ron Silliman at the Text Festival in Bury

There's nothing at stake anymore for the contemporary experimentalist, neither resources nor reputation nor even the very materials of life: and work that always resorts, in the end, to wholesale mimicry & appropriation even disrespects its forebears. But, as I've said, the conditions for art by imitation are optimal, and have a lot to do with the forces of globalization. In fact, the fashionable 'otherness' of traditional avant-gardism has been expropriated by global capital, making the notion itself obsolete. Even Silliman's acknowledges the outdatedness of the notion of the avant-garde, opting for something that takes it beyond the indebtedness to past models in which it's mired. His recent neon art, Bök's poem in a genome & Geof Huth's 'pwoermd' as art forms have all been ironically expropriated by a global capital dynamics as hungry as post-avants for garish display & marketability. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri say in their celebrated Empire, "it is thus no longer possible to identify a sign, a subject, a value or a practice that is 'outside'" (385). And one of the outsiders devoured by the totality of global capitalism is, of course, the avant-garde.

And so what about the claim (or suspicion) that contemporary experimentalists—and the names for what they do are legion: mash up, conceptual, slam, flarf, fluxus, codework, L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E, text, appropriation, cleave, etc.—are insane? Well, it's more a ruse than anything else & as far as posturing goes, it's a pretty lame one. Again, it's insane to think Christian Bök is the "first poet in literary history to have engineered a microbe to write poetry". (Of course, the claim's not even factually true: biogeneticist Craig Venter has already performed a similar type of genome trick when he "inscribed a passage from James Joyce into the genome of a synthetic microbe.") But the pseudo-scientism of a writing class instructor has been permanently assimilated to a new unitary dictatorship of capital & its global networks so that the avant-gardists have nowhere to go but backwards. And so the crazy repetitiveness. Moving forward in the traditional sense only makes the merger with capitalism more secure. The avant-garde is in crisis mode. Bök's Xenotext is probably the best example there is of how science,the subjectivities of art and language experimentation have all turned into so many garish displays of a cultural consumerism that academia promotes and government bureaucracies fund. Of how predictably mainstream they've all have become.

If the avant-garde is in crisis, do I have an alternative vision of artistic work with the potential to be foreward-looking again & significantly alter the conditions of life itself? Yes. I've lately rethought poetry, and its cultural signifiers, even going so far as to equate the avant-garde with social-political activism of the Muhammad Bouazizi type. In other words, I'm beginning to see poetry (the act of'making') in a purely material way as activity affecting the commons and every aspect of life in a globalized world. I reserve the avant-garde for activity that sometimes must amount to acts of self-immolation or imprisonment or execution by fascist firing squads. A radical form of "self-valorization" never amounting to theory alone and silly academic games. An other- rather than ego-centric Art. I've become virulently anti-avant in the Sillimanesque sense, tired of the academicization of something that ought to mean 'life-and-death' to us. Now, of course, in comfortable North America the very ideal of poetry I'm suggesting is almost inconceivable. And that's precisely the problem.

An invitation by Canadian poet Tom Konyves to consider Vidpo. And so I did.



Ron Silliman, Tom Konyves and Geof Huth

I was pleasantly surprised not too long ago to receive an email from Canadian videopoet Tom Konyves, Visual Poetry, screenwriting, journalism teacher at the University of the Fraser Valley in Abbotsford, British Columbia, who asked me if I'd ever considered videopoetry. I wondered if the email wasn't a sort of 'mass letter' sent to many Silliman readers at once, more self-promotion than a personal invitation. I thought I'd heard the name before and when he told me he'd met American poets Ron Silliman and Geof Huth at a poetry conference in Manchester, England, last year I instantly recalled an article Silliman had written on videopoetry in his Tuesday, May 12 2009 blog post ,one that's very supportive of Konyves and his work in general though he seems to feel also that the form hasn't fully found its stride yet, still waiting (as Silliman puts it) for its Baudelaire.

The article came with a very arresting picture of the three of them, the caption reading "Langpo, vidpo, vispo: RS, Tom Konyves, Geof Huth". Konyves, not knowing perhaps that Silliman has given his readers til the end of October to retrieve comments from his site, said it was a shame I couldn't now follow the discussion that had followed the article, a place where a lively exchange of viewpoints about vidpo was certain to be found. "After meeting Silliman and Huth in Manchester last year, he wrote a brief piece on my "mission"; interestingly, now that the comments have been removed, so has an exchange you would have enjoyed."So off to the comments stream I've gone to examine some pretty invaluable commentary by Konyves (and other readers) on the art form for which he is becoming known. I will return the courtesy of his invitation (whatever the intention) by considering the Vidpo genre here.

The theory (extracted from Silliman's article, & Konyves's own formulations of it in the comments stream and at http://discussion.movingpoems.com/tag/tom-konyves and http://www.vehiculepoets.com/videopoem.htm) can be stated fairly unambiguously. In reply mostly to objections from readers of Silliman's May 12th blog post that it's really a type of music video or just another fanciful poetry genre of no interest to anyone except creative writing students, Konyve gives in a May 15, 2009 response the following very useful characterization of videopoetry:

Music videos are commercials, aimed at promoting the song, the artist. (Mind you, my Buenos Aires poet friends would create playlists of music videos to dance to.)
 
Videopoetry is a genre of poetry. It is the inextricable, integrated blending of text, image and sound that produces a "poetic experience". This poetic experience emerges when the viewer's engagement with the work leads to an awareness of the "inner meaning" of the work - what Geof Huth calls the 'poem identity'. (If the imagery in a videopoem illustrates the text, it is no longer a videopoem.)

What differentiates videopoems from experimental (non-narrative) films is that videopoetry is based on the considered, sometimes curious juxtaposition of language (spoken or visual text) with images and sound. It is the text that drives the work; its presence is the essential link between the identifiable parts (edits or scenes). It is also the source of inspiration for the work.

It is true that many narrative and non-narrative films are often called "poetic" for no other reason than a lack of adequate descriptors to identify and give closure to feelings/perceptions of a "higher order". Andre Breton called poetry what all the other arts aspire to.

In a June 12, 2009 discussion at Silliman's blog with skeptics and detractors, he provided both a history and defense of the "innovation of videopoetry", even aligning it with other cognate forms like the "videohaiku":

To my knowledge, the "vigorous period of experimentation" began in the mid-70s, sputtered in the '80s, established itself as a viable form in the '90's and, with the distribution afforded by the web, has produced a body of work whose categories and features are now discernible and a valid field of study. The 'doing' - as in "definition comes AFTER the doing" - has been done. But, how well? That's a different discussion.

"Visually compelling and sophisticated poetry films may not constitute a new literary hybrid unless they rest on good literature." - Completely false. The innovation of videopoetry has been one of introducing the "poetic integration" of visual, textual and sound elements to create a unique entity whose "poetic quality" does not reside in the visualization (illustration) of 'good literature' but in the curious, non-illustrative juxtaposition of text with image. When successful, these works produce the effect of a poem, whose elements are incomplete until integrated into the finished work. It is in the process of blending text, image and sound that a transformation takes place, a transformation of not-necessarily-poetic texts into poetic elements.

Of "videohaiku": a few months ago, I came across the work of Eric Cassar. In his short (30 sec or less) videopoems, the introductory thought, thesis, or observation of the haiku – often the function of the first 12 syllables or two lines of the traditional western written haiku – is presented as a brief video image that is subsequently "tagged" with a verbal poetic comment. He has made a number of these, establishing a videopoetry-equivalent of a haiku.

And in response to a charge of artistic frivolousness & of novelty-pandering, videopoetry being just one more among a growing number of course offerings:

"and I am sure there are 10,000 vidpo courses as we speak being in or being added into every "hep" university on the planet" - I would be very surprised if 999 other courses exist. I only know of one.

It's in his own more deliberate (and reflective) pieces on the form that Konyves offers the most detailed rationale and artistic methodology. It's a genre at least 30 years old, as he says in his Moving Poems forum discussion, the product of continuous research, collaboration and related work in the visual and production fields. Liberated from the printed page, videopoetry (or film poems) is an artform "displayed on a screen, distinguished by its time-based, poetic juxtaposition of text with images and sound." Silliman in his own article seems not to have completely appreciated its split from the printed page, making almost snide references to the multimedia "gumbo" of its present state, as though any new artform that wasn't primarily reducible to poetry innovations (of his choosing) were necessarily ill-conceived or hopelessly amorphous: and offers to give it some solidity by emphasizing  its reliance on vispo, visual and concrete poetry, and the influence of a bit of langpo, New York school, Burroughs and even flarf and conceptual poetics. In fact, the only videopoem, worthy of the name, is Frank Film by Americans Frank and Caroline Mouris.

Konyves is eager to distance the videopoem from cinematic technique purely & perhaps this Sillimanesque chauvinism (a type of objection he's encountered already in the comments stream); he emphasizes, in fact, that it's not a matter of visualization only but a "juxtaposition of text with image":  not to be seen in terms of edits and scenes per se, the videopoem combines its elements always with a view to creating a unique "poetic experience". That "poetic experience" phrase seems to be key. As he says, "The poetry is the RESULT of the juxtaposed, blended use of text with imagery and sound."The videopoem relies on the creative juxtaposition of image & sound elements, in loose or more formal arrangements, in the same way the poem on the page emerges from the sum of its sound & sense techniques.

"Juxtaposition" and "judicious blending" are other terms Konyves uses to describe that vital fusion. Even the rhythms result from the creative editing of parts.T.S. Eliot might have said of the textuality of a videopoem (used in Konyves' unique sense) that it represents "a more finely perfected medium" than poetry on the page: perhaps (to extend the famous analogy further) image & sound are the elements of a catalyst for artistic creation. It's likely that for Konyves (as for Eliot) the catalyst is, of course, the poet. Konyves's own "Poem for the Rivers Project" created with his son serves as a good illustration of this vital textual confluence.  Perhaps the poem and videopoem difference (especially in the world of Web 2.0) is an illusion only, ingeniously contrived by its practitioners via the essential interconnectedness & fluidity of its multimedia boundaries.Within the framework of the primacy of the notion of videopoetry as text, Konyves offers 5 principal types according to the way the artist configures textual elements: kinetic text, visual text, sound text, performance and cin(e)poetry."

                                               Poem for the Rivers Project

In his email Konyves had also mentioned an "Anthology of Videopoems" and referred me to the "Vehicule Poets" site where excerpts from an article originally published in "Slope", entitled "Notes for an Introduction to an Anthology of Videopoems" appear. A source for more interesting discussion of its scope and potential for growth as literary genre. It's particularly intriguing to consider the metamorphosis of the filmmaker's art (Konyves' métier) into a new hybrid form, just as concrete and visual poets revolutionized the traditional page, & see now, more than ever, Internet technologies in a partnership with film to produce a radically democratized artform along the lines of avant-garde poetry. Perhaps if Silliman had read the "Slope" article he'd have recognized even better examples of early types of the visionary "poet/filmmaker" such as Marcel Duchamp (Anemic Cinema), Richard Kostelanetz (Video Strings), Augusto de Campos (Cordeiro), bp Nichol (First Screening) and Colin Morton (Primiti Too Ta). A more representative group of pioneer artists than the one or two names he gave.

I hope I've adequately repaid the courtesy of Tom Konyves' invitation to considerVidpo. My discussion of it has been necessarily sketchy, references & illustrations coming from only a few online sites. What are my own views on it? I can't say I'm qualified enough to critique something that I'm only half acquainted with, having written only poetry, & that of a principally traditional type. The language and methodology of Vidpo do seem a little vague in places (particularly where does that significant fusion of text and image & sound occur?) but that may be due to my own relative ignorance of film theory & practice. I can be, at least, grateful to Tom Konyves for the opportunity to learn something new. And I certainly have.

Ron Silliman and the victory of the closed comments stream: a reply

 Ron Silliman, young poet-radical

Ron Silliman in his Thursday, October 14th blog post (2010) has claimed to have lost no significant readership as a result of his decision in late July (2010) to shut down the comments stream: in fact, his famous  "Silliman's site" is poised to welcome its "3 millionth visitor", clear proof that disgruntled free speech advocates (like me) have not stopped visiting. And I haven't because I am, after all, a Silliman reader.The most influential contemporary American poet and theorist is brazenly crowing victory (at least here), even going so far as to momentarily "open up the stream" (but without accepting new comments) so that contributors to his blog can retrieve old posts out of the archives. It's as though Silliman's blog were an extended manor, and to relieve some of the growing frustrations among the peasantry the most prosperous of the gentleman-poets is opening his doors to them, just this once (after the manner of the medieval 'Lord of Misrule' ritual), for a day or two of permissible conviviality and even laughter at his expense. Perfectly harmless fun until, of course, the doors shut tight and workers are returned to their lives of quiet anonymity.

This momentary relaxing of the restrictions on free speech is interesting posturing on his part. (It reminds me of the "mutuality of the oppressed" idea developed by Marxist critic Raymond Williams). And all this after a post on the demise of the bound book and large "brick & mortar bookshops", & a good inquiry into the causes of a shrinking reader-to-title ratio. Besides the obvious condescending tone of the piece, it's also  incredible to me how unaware Silliman is of the inconsistencies (and incongruities) between his own theory & practice. He condemns himself (as they say) out of his own mouth. To begin with, he praises the democratizing effect of blogging, saying it's been "a means of communicating with one another without the funneling process of the academy", and is changing the nature of poetry itself, presumably for the better, and yet he's resorted himself to a similar academic type of vetting whose outcome is to turn the clock back on literary development. That's an inconsistency on an obvious general level.

As for the particulars, Silliman also doesn't recognize in his description of the e-book the same post-avant impetus of most of his own poetry theory.If he had, he couldn't have possibly envisaged a case for any sort of freedom of speech restriction. He gives a respectful nod to the advent of Internet publishing, rightly anticipating a new regime of writers no longer subject to the restraints of distribution, warehousing, & pricing. He's right as far as that goes: "E-publishing changes, or will eventually, the entire dynamics of the enterprise of reading & writing", and presumably because of the different ways a networked world frees us from the slavery of "industrial" and academic publishing. Silliman almost charts for us the course a poetry can take once it's been made fully accessible online.

The real task facing poets, beyond the blank page or screen we confront every day, will be in defining how best to set up the networks so that our writing is able to reach the people who will be most apt to find it useful, challenging, even thrilling. This would be an excellent moment for poets not to be like so many tic birds atop the rough dry skin of the industrial publishing rhino. Poetry has been ill-served by 99.9% of all brick-&-mortar bookshops, and virtually all trade publishers. With a handful of exceptions, its treatment within the academic publishing universe has not been much better.

Sagacious analysis, to be sure, from the poet of the quotidian (after Frank O'Hara) who's made it his mission to stand language & poetry conventions on their head, and who sees in this new interchange between the old "book community" and an emerging e-literacy a kind of transforming energy that's very reminiscent of the New American  poetries in which he played such a vital role. Substitute Internet technology for the New Sentence credo of "open-endedness" & "word play" & "the torquing of poetic form" and you have the same post-avant celebration of newness. And how do we reconcile that to the characterizing of free speech at his blog as an "open sewer"?

The disdain for radicalness (of which he once formed part) unrestrained by conventions of old guard literacy, unafraid to offer wildly differing ways to read & write poetry is, to me, still shocking. The distinguished Language theorist, the pariah to every form of "anti-modernist poetics" that he's disdainfully dubbed Quietism, is sounding to me like a mean-spirited academic advisor, editor & critic, ready to cut comments down to a shape & size more to his own liking. The former Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere to whom established & fledgling poets turn for support has turned mainstream, the doors to his house of poetry permanently closed. Silliman gave to one of his sections in the essay "Z-SITED PATH", a clarion call if ever there was one for a new poetry, the subtitle "Why the MLA Can't Read". The last few sentences in the article are worth copying out in full:

From Gertrude Stein to the present, poets have increasingly emphasized that meaning in poetry falls on the side of the signifier—and that it is not deferred to any hierarchic abstraction such as character, plot or argument. It is only through the signifier that the cultural limits of the self, the subject, become visible. It is there, and there only, that direct perception takes place in a poem. This above all else is what still separates the tradition of poets who move into the new form from the rest. More than any other critical text I can think of, Ahearn's book demonstrates just how the hidden agendas of academic training, bureaucratizing meaning into a fetish of the signified, rob intelligent people of the ability to read. (The New Sentence, 146 Emphases mine).

Ron Silliman has joined the ranks of the Barry Ahearns, "bureaucratizing meaning into a fetish of the signified" when he decided to label a category of free speech as an "open sewer". I'll go a step further and say, with deep regret, that Ron Silliman has taught us now how not to read anymore.

Ron Silliman and the diminishment of free speech

I don't think anything could've prepared me for what I saw in Silliman's Saturday, July 31, 2010 post: the chief American spokesperson for post-avant poetry, writer, critic and blogger whose roots go back to what was probably the most turbulent, anti-authoritarian and iconoclastic era in American literary history, & perhaps one of the few today to have significantly lived the Allen anthology, San Francisco renaissance and  Black Mountain movements (or certainly ingested enough of them to form his own equally vital "New Sentence" credo), rightfully enjoying his place as heir to Duncan, Spicer, Creeley: Ron Silliman, the name with which an extremely influential Language Poetry's become virtually synonymous today & whose blog is among the most respected and widely followed for both the quality of his posts and the lively debate that oftentimes center round them, is declaring, astonishingly enough, (and even at the end of a post in which he chronicles a forty-five year history of anti-avant garde literature & its sometimes hostile reactions from the public) that he will turn the "comments stream off altogether" at his own blog and hand-pick only a few of the more intelligently-and discretely-written comments (he'll receive by email only) to appear there from time to time.

 Ron Silliman has, in a word, opted for Internet censorship, radically curtailing the reader's right to offer intelligent, constructive criticism because of some anti- Massey comments at his blog that have dampened the spirits of this young poet and even been the cause of self-righteous indignation by blogger Jessica Smith. See her own anti-Silliman rant there. Apparently the more obnoxious comments of some Silliman readers (to be easily discarded, after all) have made the influential experimentalist poet a little queasy: a little down in the mouth, perhaps, about the virtues of freedom of speech in general. Instead of decrying the mistreatment of the younger poets, Silliman might have given them the benefit of some older-poet wisdom, & suggested ways for them to cope with the unavoidable hostile criticisms the particularly sensitive may have to endure. He's chosen to block the channels of open expression in the hope of patching up some potential bad feelings.This sort of coddling and sheltering gesture may have also, of course, made the Masseys out there feel a little embarrassed, a little patronized.

I can scarcely believe it & cannot help the feelings of condemnation. Did not America's greatest public intellectual Noam Chomsky write the introduction to a book written by a Holocaust-denier, Robert Faurisson, though Chomsky finds the man's viewpoint an abhorrent one, and says so? I sometimes wonder if Silliman's poetry doesn't come with a politics of its own. His may be the usual suspect "liberal-tolerant" reaction to tough criticism (or to even competing poetries) we find these days in blog discussions, the position of those who ludicrously want to both set poetic agendas for bold experimentalism of their own and yet decide on the terms of its own proper reception by the public it's bound to incite: to be both post avant and Emily Post. Only so much and no more to be heard from us. He condemns criticism that aims at putting down poets (as if it's never been done before) and yet doesn't see the uninintentional effect his censorship may have on those same poets who send him work precisely in order to get the exposure their work will most assuredly get there.


Here is the entire rationale in Silliman's own words.

I don’t mind debate, even vigorous debate, over fundamental issues. But it does seem clear to me that some people make a point of verbally attacking writers I praise on this blog simply because I’ve praised them. Reading that responses to a positive review on my blog seriously discouraged Jessica Smith about poetry & writing is as depressing a consequence as I can imagine. I want to apologize to her for not doing a better job policing the comments stream, and I want to apologize to Joseph Massey more recently for the same. And to Barbara Jane Reyes and any other poets who feel they may have been unfairly treated in the comments stream.

I have of course read some comments that suggest that poets who feel bruised by such behavior need not to be so fragile. But I think everyone has every right to feel exactly what they feel, and that participating in poetry doesn’t have to mean submitting oneself to hazing by yahoos

Recognizing this leaves me with few options. I could shut up, although I actually don’t think that’s the goal of most of the comment harpies. I think I give them a venue that their own blogs may not, and that this is really what much of this is about. I could reject a lot more comments than I do, not simply those that characterize someone as a “Jewette” or “French cunt.”¹ Which is one more bit of labor for which I don’t have the time or energy. Or I could turn off the comments stream altogether, which is the option I’m taking.

You can still write to me – the address is in the left-hand column – and once in rare while I might republish a note if it seems worthwhile, but I will ask your permission first. If you respond to something here in your own blog, I may well link it to in one of my weekly roundups – I’ve been doing that for years. But I’ve also ignored a lot if I thought they were just being stupid or name calling. That seems like a good thing to continue. And so I shall.

I'd like to offer a set of more specific comments by way of reaction to this incredible diminishment of free speech online:

(a) Silliman may be kowtowing to a younger readership than he's been accustomed to (namely, the no-nonsense, seasoned appraisals by his older readers), hoping for a kind of legacy-building in this self-demeaning way. After all, there are tens of thousands of them publishing, marketing and recreating themselves everywhere, and creative writing programs (& academic book markets) have never been more plentiful;

(b) I'd like to ask,What's happened to the "problematic relationship" to mainstream cultural expression of which tough honest criticism is a necessary part? Of course, I'm not referring to overtly sexist, racist and homophobic comments but to well articulated criticism based on a reasonable level of expertise and interest. Since when did the avant-garde/post avant care what anyone thought about their work anyways? I'd also recommend (to both Silliman & his sensitive young poets) that they read "In Praise of Tough Criticism" by Jeffrey R. DiLeo  (an article I discovered a little while ago at David Kosub's "Speaking of Poems" blog), making the transition from academic writing to poetry on their own. DiLeo's concluding comments are particularly appropriate here;

We need to grow thicker critical skin. Why? Because critical behavior that always results in a chorus of affirmation is nothing more than conformity; because allowing views to persist that need to be challenged is nothing less than critical mediocrity; and because failure to tell our colleagues what we truly think about their work is simple dishonesty. A reshaped critical culture will help build a more robust, honest, and transparent academy

(c) we may have here a classic example of the autre temps, autres moeurs principle, and by that I mean the depressing way in which erstwhile risk-taking 'radical'-poets (poetries) have become mainstream, almost to the point of becoming academically elitist or (what's worse!) slavishly bourgeois, even afraid to hurt the public's feelings. Americans Silliman and Bernstein and Canada's Frank Davey and Michael Ondaatje come to mind ;

(d) poetry is a "zero-game" (after Žižek), at best: against every literary novelty or acclaim there will always arise an equally strong exertion of force (in the form of disapprobation and unkind criticism) to render the work a type of creative nullity that no amount of literary correctness or defense can fix. Writers live in a black hole that's condemned to be endlessly filled in: for every positive there's bound to be a negative, and on it goes. Trying to right the supposed wrongs of unkind criticism by cutting off the means of making criticisms of any type is an illusion. I wonder 'what' Silliman (who's made it his business to tear down the idols all his life) is hoping to fix by banishing real free speech from his blog. The inconsistency between temperament and practice is astonishing. And I'm sorry to say this glaring discrepancy has caused me to see the man & his poetries a little differently now; and

(e) why does Silliman gives us the Ezra Pound picture at the head of  his fateful Saturday, July 31, 2010 post, Pound the madman, anti-Semite & fascist sympathizer, polygamist and most ruthless iconoclast of them all? Would he have been able to take some bruising from this critic?  America's most respected post-avant can't see the devastating irony in the fact that Pound lived in the black hole that is Poetry, and he apparently can't.

"Close writing': or some transcendental properties of the poetry blog

"La poésie est science, déconstruction des évidences mortes...celle du coeur, de l'âme de la patrie et de l'homme." ("Les Dix Propositions", La Presse 4 April 1970, cited in Caroline Bayard's The New Poetics in Canada and Quebec: From Concretism to Post-Modernism )

But communication would be impossible if it should have to begin in the ego, a free subject, to whom every other would be only a limitation that invites war, domination, precaution and information. To communicate is indeed to open oneself, but the openness is not complete if it is on the watch for recognition. It is complete not in opening to the spectacle of or the recognition of the other, but in becoming a responsibility for him (sic). (Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being: Or Beyond Essence )

One of the most urgent tasks for contemporary thought is, without doubt, to redefine the concept of the transcendental in terms of its relation with language...[H]ere "transcendental" must instead indicate an experience which is undergone within language. (Giorgio Agamben, cited in The Fire: Collected Essays of Robin Blaser)

Blogs? If it's neo-Formalist discourse you want, marked by very well-informed and astute commentary, there's Curtis Faville's Compass Rose, or if you'd like to see perhaps Canada's most prolific avant-gardist at work, Clifford Duffy, visit his radio deleuze, a singularly dadaist site with spectacular graphics & audio- and visual- montages for the works of a single author.

 Or if a more openly (& brazenly) non- or counter-or anti-syntactic visual poetry is your thing, see dbqp: visualizing poetics, both cutting-edge & multi-composite to the teeth, or if you subscribe rather to the grand ol' narratives of current LANGUAGE poetics, Ron Silliman's Blog and Charles Bernstein's WEB LOG are for you. A style for just about everyone. Serialist, collage or 'old school' representationalist; minimal, concretist or 'New Sentence'. But what have genres and poetic manifesto really amounted to these days? What have they really to do with the blog? And where's the room for development and responsible critique in the Internet's crowded synchrony?

 As if the bewildering array of styles weren't enough, there's the very important question of writing that goes on in (and for) them. I don't mean writing in the technical sense that servers, website and design & editing features act as its primary means of production. Search technology is not the same as academic research. And nor is it writing in the traditional chirographic sense for it's impossible to write for the blog; a deep abiding sense of whatever it is literacy means has been usurped by that grotesquerie of indelible Internet ink and e-readership, always radically mixed-mode, ethereal and impolitic. I'm looking at writing as the most critical project imaginable.

 It's sort of Lacan's point about the text writing the reader except that there's no real writing going on at all. With nothing to experiment on anymore, we're not the tabula rasa of old. Texts without borders cannot be useful analogues anymore for Lacanian or Kristevian subconscious undercurrents since 'digital only' takes up virtually no space or soul at all. Writing for the blog is as counter-intuitive a notion as driving for the road. So what exactly is it? 

The phonetic alphabet gives sounds a shape and textual 'look' on the page that are instantly transmissible: messages codified, stored and easy to be registered made writing about look unconfoundingly natural. Books, headings, table of contents, citations, etc are the traditional paraphernalia of intelligibility and loci for discussion. In phonetic writing the Word has a mind of its own, wound tight and ready to mean anything under the right conditions. But those typographical spaces (even in the best avant-garde work), the domain or extract of the roving "thinking eye" (as Silliman puts it) have been transgressed for good. Read good visual/concrete poetry today, such as you see in Geof Huth's dbqp: visualizing poetics, and try telling the artifact from the separate visual-syntactic& hypergraphical elements from which it arises. The poem is the "writing eye" that stares back at you, authorial intention and design reduced to subsets of its own easily reproducible technics.


The weblog's become the deconstructed site everyone's been hankering after for the past three decades: the Internet's delivered the goods, handily removing all the typographical, semantic, and authorial barriers that ever stood in the way between you and the signifiant. Not pre- or anti- but perhaps simulverbal communication; a simultaneity of act and product desperate enough for attention to pierce through the babble of multiple sites.The life-world, 'old school' aesthetics, and real author-reader symbiosis have been sacrificed to an impersonal but ubiquitous binary beast. As requested. It's not, in Iser's way of speaking, "an aesthetic object that will reveal the thought system of the social world" (The Act of Reading, 101): the Internet's too asocial, too voluptuously self-absorbed for that.

The problem is that to step beyond some threshold of minimal reading competency is to sense not a text (the d'hors text paradigm permanently displaced by a stiff-necked regimen of 'on/off' coding) but an ominous graphomania. The reader doesn't, in radio deleuze, for example, read poststructuralist deleuze at all; s/he wades rather into the intercellular deep of Clifford Duffy's dream, waging the same anti-Language war. It's interesting that in two of the blogs listed above (Duffy's and Bernstein's) reader comments are not allowed, perhaps as a way of averting the visitor to the very real danger of being trapped not in cyberspace but headspace where there's only room for one. Writing is the only enter- and exit- strategy we have and yet here it cannot really be about anything nor intended for any particular audience nor even designed to give a point of view. Cannot be a writing at all that's unconfoundingly tied (as it once hoped to be) to signs, referents or whatnot.

And so what's all the fuss about close 'reading', close 'listening' then? After a while Bernstein's Pennsound becomes a bore, poets droning on about reading; Silliman's "Alphabet", just downright self-mystifying. If Walter J. Ong's thesis about orality irretrievably assimilated to technical literacy (in Orality and Literacy) has any merit, it's because we sense that after writing there's no going back to a privileged preverbal place. Orality isn't an option (for all of the resemblances of e-reading to preliterate ages). Poetries that have been wound this tight can do nothing but put on displays of themselves, glaringly technical and scenographic: they are a sadly atrophied version of an old school artes virorum. 

 And by writing I don't mean écriture (or what Canadian theorist Caroline Bayard calls écouture in the case of radical performance): it's old hat by now and we've gone beyond that. I mean with all this promiscuous heterogeneity in the blogosphere, who needs to bother about codes and hidden discourses anymore? They're all around you. Most internet sites are pretty up-front about those sorts of things: ironic and playful, allegorical and irreverent to the teeth. So how useful will it be for writing to do duty for anything that's pretty much unraveled itself to this extent, bare textual presences audited, texted and 'tweeted' ad nauseum?

 I mean if poetry can be envisaged (as in Christian Bök's Xenotext Experiment ) literally "subsist[ing], like a harmless parasite, inside the cell of another life-form", what's the point of it all?  I fear that poetry sites whose signature layouts, content and textual panache are signs of a blogging self really have nothing to say. With authorial comes scriptural death. But we write !And if authors & their sites become morose or stupidly overconfident (and surprisingly most of them do at times, as I've discovered), how can a reader be expected to fill in those empty "ciphers" robbed of aesthetic content, and avoid the fall at the same time into kitschy discourse? The blog is testimony, if ever there was one, to the hegelian "dark night in which all cows are black", the deadpan face of the Internet's empty Absolute. To communicate through the blog seems to me about as absurd as Bök's hope to encode poetry for posterity. Gone is the notion of an "implied reader"who as part of textual structure (Iser) engages in ongoing discussion about literary meaning,

Death of the author: no kidding!Everything's dead except the will to admit it's finally died & like concerned artists perhaps prevent cases of this kind of self-immolation from recurring. Adorno's point about the death of poetry post-Auschwitz is well taken. It's perhaps in that sense that Canada's bp Nichol and bill bissett talked about the logotherapy of poetry. Perhaps writing is essentially therapy but I think they got it the other way around: poetry causes the therapy. Its healing properties have evaporated; and if we allow the Word into our souls it won't hover above vocables like Spirit (as bill bissett & Ron Silliman hope it will) but just stare back at us (like an unblinking Masonic eye), incapable of changing anything, empty pre-emptive bluster at best. The concretists, dadaists, surrealists, etc wanted to smash language & scatter the bits over the white screen: well, they've got it now. "La désintegration du langage est accomplie." (Raoul Duguay)

The result is weblogs have also grown a curiously thick skin to compensate for this spirit deficit. How? When spelling changes into graphics, representation into hypertext, and linear thinking into 'clouds' ("ephemeral electromagnetic traces"), the type of traditional literacy the blog tried to rely on, scoping out the world for meaning, turns into a pod that's hard to penetrate. Far from the playful & ironic creatures we thought the Internet would make us, we've actually turned out to be ornery monads (not nomads)who live under retractable roofs, looking out at the world through a single glazed Eye. We prefer depth but like sea otters sleep tied to seaweed,  bobbing near the shoreline.Spending too much time in any one blog gives the living sensorium a distinctly oneiric rather than fleshy feel for the world, the other, self. Reader-response is what blogs do but only unintentionally, and only if the tides sway them close enough to dry land.

 Consequently I've never really encountered anything as 'unwriterly' as the poet's weblog: in fact, I've never encountered anything as 'unwriterly' as e-writing itself or the blogger. But the urge to write persists despite the poststructuralist gutting of language, with opinions stubbornly locked into place, countless counter-discourses on the ready. I can think of only one way out of this impasse (or  'aporia'), however. And that's through what I call 'close' writing, one modeled on the Levinasian conception of "responsibility for the other" ( in Otherwise Than Being ) but I will have to be content with only a general outline for now. There's a lot at stake.

I define 'close writing' as a type of  'close watching' (not reading) to avoid the fatal deflection off text (dévier de text) in which the glaring You switches place with content and observer and observed invariably collapse into each other's arms. Reflection is neither participatory nor autonomous enough a description for the type of essential role-reversal that must take place for e-communication to thrive. I suggest we use "transcendence" instead of reflection or authorial intention or referentiality. Preferring to drop the baggage of poststructuralist experimentation altogether & begin to view writing as rather an ontological leap into text, since without the linguistic innards to keep it going  it can be nothing but that. Communication with the other (that the weblog primarily showcases)  is transcendent and as such always inherently dangerous, risky (Levinas). We're ultimately responsible for the blog "spectacle" we've created.

Denuded poststructuralist language cannot read the labile, processual world fully without also unwittingly becoming the carrier of every type of intolerable dogmatism. Perhaps bissett and Silliman have been inching in their works, maybe without meaning to be, towards just this sense of the 'transcendental' to keep the reader from being swallowed whole. I think, for example, of Silliman's description of the prose poem in The New Sentence as a"discontinuous-but-eternal presentness" (180-81), a language of teleology in-laying phrases like "upward falling", "integrate up"into a discussion of contemporary literary theory . The blog as the site of the encapsulation of thought and creativity may have to come in for a virtual ethics, e-writers having to become linguistics watchdogs at the same time. In a future blog article I'd like to show how this innate self-regulating impulse of writers to become responsible for each other's writings actually works, using the weblogs cited at the beginning.

Postmodernism, in language and poetry: what, where &, more particularly, how

Ron Silliman reading from "The Alphabet"

The subject is poetic innovation; the title by which it's become known is LANGUAGE. One chapter from Ron Silliman's The New Sentence, entitled "The New Sentence", ought to be enough for our appreciation of poetic innovation and, more specifically, the sentence-LANGUAGE nexus which his celebrated treatise describes. But it isn't. He said in a previous chapter entitled "Of Theory, To Practice" that "The goal of poetry can never be the proof of theory, although it is inevitably a test of the poet's beliefs." (59) Really? Isn't it just the purpose of  theory to justify a poetics? A "poet's prose", as he says in "Towards Prose"? So which is it: "goal of poetry" or "the poet's beliefs"? It's in those troubling waters of poetry per se and how it works that Silliman's dropped his own 'new sentence'.

Between what poetry is and the how of its meaning & beliefs, is just where that intermediary 'sentence' solution of Silliman's lies, the kernel of a more satisfying prose poem that he says has already been around, at least since Stein and Williams, and just needs the benefit of a little theory ( provided, as Silliman admits, by Barthes, Bemevoste & Vološinov). But Silliman seems to spend most of his creative energies in delineating a concept's ancestry rather than in justifying its radical newness. When Hugo Ball, for example, coined the phrase "new sentence" to refer to the super-charged ("transrational") vocables of language, the product had the immediacy of a sound poetry. To know it is to hear it or at least see the distinctive visual reconfigurations on a page's neutral surface as concrete poetry. But Silliman has the unenviable task of restricting the "poet's prose" to an examination of its visual (linguistic) properties only, giving a very different "feel" to poetry reading, and it's not the first time it's been done either. I think his efforts to do so make him Chomskyan (or Platonist) outright. But more of that later.Theorists as important (and refreshingly honest) as Silliman purposely give themselves away and leave it to us to connect the dots.

Let's ask instead of what poetry is, what is the sentence, since the two seem interchangeable at interesting levels of coherence, and see if we can get from where Silliman says it is, i.e. in prose poetry of the right kind, to how it got there in the first place.The offering of the 'sentence', the most oddly problematized 'syntagm' of all, is the latest accession to the postmodern debate. Well, what do we make of that? When I see the discussion in "The New Sentence" skirt gingerly round some pretty sophisticated linguistic theory, I eagerly await the arrival of the classical 'straw man', and I get one: naturally some ill-conceived view of the sentence (even that of Saussure, of all people) made either to conform to (or change places with) Silliman's own.

The sentence that won't work is just the ordinary one of propositions, carrier of common language (after Ayer, Quine); what's needed is a sentence loaded with the potential for self-critique (after Wittgenstein) or the most wildly implausible but workable rearrangement of its parts (after Stein). But where this comes from requires a rather clever trope of "ground and figure" that Canadian critic Brian Fawcett says is a rhetorical posturing, wherever it's found in contemporary discourse, that amounts to making any viewpoint "suspended above an abyss." Silliman's discourse is the same: with just a little archaeological work we discover in language itself that essential impulse to shake off messiness ( its potential for fragmentariness) and rise to a new position over all language. Why hasn't Silliman acknowledged here Derrida's admonition not to see language as anything but a harbinger of death, the "abyss"? The hope for the Language poet is that the  postmodern poem can't just mean anything, after all.

Derridean binary-bashing doesn't seem to be to Silliman's liking (not if all he's got is the mundane prose/poetry type) so he's opted for what I think is an argumentum ad origines, claiming "that the sentence [read the stuff of poetry] as distinct from the utterance of speech, is a unit of prose" (73), a type of prosody now wonderfully attuned to its own inner grammatical dynamisms. So it seems what the 'new sentence' is is a product of the places it's already been, first seen embryonically in the proto-models of Baudelaire, Mallarmé. Now that traditional poetry seems to have run its course, as the New Critics have talked about it, it's best to examine what's been overlooked most of all in the search for the origins of poetry: namely, language itself (whether prosodic or poetic), with its rich thick mantle layer of sentences and the heady atmospheres of expression once they've been charged with larger stylistic intentions. That's what poetry is, LANGUAGE, staring right in front of you, and why it sings by means of the 'new sentence'.

To the question 'What is poetry' his reply 'The Sentence, stupid!' is very direct but also very problematical, as it should be. In a poetic manifesto whose title's too tantalizingly close to The New Organon not to be seen for the paradigm maker it is & the discourse never far from polemic for its own pleasurable sake, Silliman's exposition turns into rarefied fun: in fact, poetry is envisaged as a Pure Land "of the one great sentence" (Barthes, cited in article) in which the pent up forces of "once-exteriorized poetic forms" (87) get released & rise above themselves in obedience to higher lexical principles, and poet Ron Silliman as its contemporary avatar. In the article "Controlling Interests" he's even referred to the new sentence's "discontinuous-but-eternal presentness" (180-81). Nothing's been this deliciously mystified since Artaud & Barthes. What's at stake is the essential commensurability of both writing and reading, for

...here is an important insight, which is that the modes of integration which carry words into phrases and phrases into sentences are not fundamentally different from those by which an individual sentence integrates itself into a larger work. This not only gives us a good reason for demanding a theory of sentences, but also suggests that such a theory would lead us toward a new mode of analysis of literary products themselves.

The hooting and shrieking marketplace of prose is seen as a type of poetry, chthonic but rhythmically alive, impelled to the surface by its own latent energies. If language is made to look down deep into the nature of human commerce from the perspective of god-spectators at a Sophoclean tragedy rather than at surface level, it discovers new ways of saying the same old things.

The "upward falling" language in Silliman's essay is also very telling.The  sentence, "the hinge unit of any literary product" (78), and origin and telos of  language is where things "integrate up" (87) or "the syllogistic move above the sentence level to an exterior reference is possible"(84) or"The deemphasis on the materiality of the text in this manner is an example of prose shaping poetic form"(82), or "Exterior formal devices, such as rhyme and linebreak, diminish, and the structural units become the sentence and paragraph" (79), etc. What are all these but descriptors for the sentence, or "the one great sentence", or the Sentence of a radically new contextualized prose poem that's been around at least since Williams and Stein?

And at some significant level are these not also Chomskyan "kernels" or innate phrase structures (lying deep in all language) capable of generating an infinite array of possible sentences for the "poet's prose"? A field of pressurized sites resulting in"sly and carefully-honed incommensurabilities". (89) Eliminate a linebreak, for instance, or stop making words rhyme where we'd expect them to, i.e. stop writing poems, and watch a whole new network of interrelated and purposefully ambiguous senses arise.(89) Don't write poems, in short: write 'sentences' instead. Look at the particularly Chomskyan way in which Silliman unpacks the potential grammaticalities of Perelman's sentences (88-89) or the linguistic contortions of a Jack Spicer reading (in a chapter entitled "Sentences"): he might as well have been talking about d-structure and s-structure.What we want in the prose poem is where we get it in practice, courtesy of the "new sentence". The ideal and real poem in language: both essentially there for the viewing.

This continual torquing of sentences is a traditional quality of poetry, but in poetry it is most often accomplished by linebreaks, or by devices such as rhyme. Here poetic form has moved into the interiors of prose. (89)

So Saussure's wrong; the sentence is a bona fide part of langue because "Grammar has become...prosody". (88) What looks like parole, the speech of common discourse, never remains in prose poetry just below but also above the level of the sentence (Again, note the "ground and figure" trope). A prose poetry that retains its delicious ambiguity can at the same time move like a syllogism, antedating and moving beyond itself. Wonderful versatility (and wonderful realignment with the ordinary language philosophers). And like a Platonist Silliman doesn't discard the material world but rather incorporates it into a new Organon, seeing it as the catalyst for a whole new body of poetical work, and giving to the act of reading a conceptual rigor peculiar just to itself. "Imagine what the major poems of literary history would look like if each sentence was identical to a line".(90) Silliman is not just poet but linguist, ontologist and perhaps even cultural archaeologist (after Foucault).

Below are Silliman's celebrated characterizations of the "new sentence" that he enjoins us to look for in poetry.

1) The paragraph organizes the sentences;

2) The paragraph is a unity of quantity, not logic or argument;

3) Sentence length is a unit of measure;

4) Sentence structure is altered for torque, or increased polysemy/ambiguity;

5) Syllogistic movement is: (a) limited; (b) controlled;

6) Primary syllogistic movement is between the preceding and following sentences;

7) Secondary syllogistic movement is toward the paragraph as a whole, or the total work;

8) The limiting of syllogistic movement keeps the reader's attention at or very close to the level of language, that is, most often at the sentence level or below.

Below are mine (just to the extent that each is a statement of where I think the 'new sentence' as literary theory ought to belong).

1)The 'new sentence' accedes respectfully to classicism in thought (as per the suggestive title of Silliman's article);
2) The 'new sentence' theorist accedes gracefully but unwillingly to ordinary language philosophy;
3) 'New sentence' theory combined with a Silliman reading gets us closer to where the ideal postmodern 'site' is (see 'YouTube' above);
4) The verse line (in a true prose poem) hasn't been so much dematerialized as deterritorialized (after Deleuze);
5) 'Syllogistic movement' is the grossest misappropriation of poetic movment imaginable;
6) Restoring the lost ideal of the torqued line to poetic discourse owes a great deal to Plato, Chomsky & Hugo Ball;
7) The verse line (in a poet's prose) is not a quantity but quality of the "one great sentence" or Sentence;
8) Nothing reveals more the classicist temper in 'new sentence' theory than a Silliman reading (see 'YouTube' above).