avantgarde=fascist

*
a couple quotes:

from the TLS, 07/98/11, page 9, Tim Blanning reviewing an anthology of European Romanticism notes that many Romantics sought

'an alliance that was populist . . . . for cultural value in any society was not to be found among the classically educated elites, with their sophisticated but artificial culture, but with the common people. . . . The Hungarian poet Sandor Petofi proclaimed: "folk poetry is indeed the true poetry. Let us set about making it supreme!" He was writing in 1847, the year before a wave of revolution swept across Continental Europe and gave retrospective piquancy to his further observation that "if the people rules in poetry, the day cannot be far off when it will rule in politics too." '

and:

from Laurie Smith's essay, "Subduing the reader," in Magma magazine—

(http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/record.asp?id=14974)

:— the last sentence from its penultimate paragraph:

"We need always to be alert to writers who claim that good poetry must be difficult, accessible only to the educated few, and see this claim for what it is - fascist."


///

I AM NEW YORK CITY by Jayne Cortez:

*
I'm posting this great poem by Jayne Cortez as a jpeg

because I can't figure how to type it into this blogger page and keep

her indentations—

please click on the image to see it larger and then click the magnifying-glass tab to see it in closeup,

to read it—

This poem appeared in the "International Women's Issue" in the magazine Mundus Artium, Vol. VII, 1974,

and was reprinted in the same magazine's omnibus anthology (Vol XII and XIII, 1980/81),

from which I've scanned it.

Jahan Ramazani didn't consult me about which poems to include in his Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry,

nor did Helen Vendler ask me to offer suggestions for her Harvard Book of Contemporary American Poetry,

and Michael Waters hasn't sought my advice about his anthology Contemporary American Poetry,

not to mention every other editor of anthologies that cover this period of USAPO—

but if any of them had,

I would have recommended this poem by Jayne Cortez.

(Or maybe not. The thought is moot, a fantasy of the moment.)

///

reprint from May 20, 2009:

*
The elitist avanthack clique on the UCal Poetry list

must be feeling sad today, following

announcements that the U of C press is suspending its stupifyingly mediocre

program of poetry publishing—

due to financial pressures.

Despite its books being shoved for wildly-inflated prices into higher-ed libraries across the country,

I can just imagine how poorly this series of unreadable obscurantics

has sold over the years—

the only "market" for the boring twaddle UCal publishes is a marginal subgroup of

avantgardistes, and librarians too dumb or indifferent to know what a waste

of money these volumes are—

UCal could have tried to find and promote poets the public might actually

want to read, poets in the tradition of Billy Collins and Jane Hirshfield and

Mary Oliver and Sharon Olds, poets whose books might have sold enough copies to break

even, to justify its budget—

Or, why not seek out those California poets now writing in the style and manner

of the great parlando populists Ferlinghetti and Bukowski?—

Are there NO Californian poets striving to carry on the native legacy of those two luminaries,

whose works have been appreciated by a widespread audience, by a public that will indeed buy and enjoy poetry which is directed to and meant for a larger readership,

not for a privatized snob coterie of gradschoolist initiates—

If UCal had found and promoted even one current poet in the popular mode of Ferlinghetti and Bukowski,

even that one poet—him or her—might have saved its ass.

It didn't have to publish nothing but a numbbunch of generic avantclucks.

And if money is the problem, if UCal doesn't have the cash to carry a series which is in the red, a financial drain/disaster,

if it can't rig up some tax scam to write-off its losses,

why doesn't it just move to a POD model, which would cost practically nothing?

It could still publish and promote those avanthick tomes (and offer free pdf downloads of them)—

there's no law says it has to stick to ye old archaic deadtree traditional "trade publishing" practices—
///

p.s.

Thinking of Ferlinghetti, a poet I have read with admiration
since my teens,

it occurs to me that some of the foreign poets he published early
on in the Pocket Poets series from his press City Lights—

particularly Prevert (whom he translated so brilliantly and with such affinity),

and Parra, and Enzensberger,

populist parlando poets like these 3—antipoets, to use Parra's phrase—

how his poetry, Ferlinghetti's, has much more in common with their work

than it does with most of the USA poets he published and promoted—

Duncan, Ginsberg, Levertov et al—

I don't doubt Ferlinghetti admired them, but

his own verse is closer in its predilections

to Prevert's and Parra's

than to theirs,

isn't it?

///

good poets are worthless or Elizabeth Bishop is worth a Hiroshima so to speak

*
I'm collating/editing/revising for book publication a selection of my prose—here's another piece from it:


*
GOOD POETS ARE WORTHLESS OR ELIZABETH BISHOP IS WORTH A HIROSHIMA SO TO SPEAK

*
Interesting article in the May 14 2007 issue of The New Yorker: "Crash Course," by Elizabeth Kolbert, concerning CERN and its efforts to build a supercollider . . .

*
two paragraphs from page 74:

Particle physicists come in two distinct varieties, which, rather like matter and antimatter, are very much intertwined and, at the same time, agonistic. Experimentalists build machines. Theorists sit around and think. "I am happy to eat Chinese dinners with theorists," the Nobel Prize-winning experimentalist Samuel C. C. Tang once reportedly said. "But to spend your life doing what they tell you is a waste of time."

"If I occasionally neglect to cite a theorist, it's not because I've forgotten," Leon Lederman, another Nobel-winning experimentalist, writes in his chronicle of the search for the Higgs [particle]. "It's probably because I hate him."

*
Is there an analagous split in poetry, "two distinct varieties"?

I think the Langpo or Post-Avant would say, if I understand them correctly, and I'm not sure I do,

that no poetic activity can occur in a theory-free state,

and that those poets who try to proceed as if it were otherwise are deluding themselves,

no matter how loudly they assert the process is essentially an empirical experience . . .

But are there poets who have tried to follow the intricate measures of Harold Bloom's six-step recipe for the Great Modern Poem, the Great Post-Wordsworthian Poem ("the High Romantic crisis-poem model of six revisionary ratios"):—

especially since Ashbery's masterpiece Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror seems to have been (coincidentally?) baked to those specifications . . .

or is Nobelist Tang right: "to spend your life doing what [the theorists] tell you is a waste of time" . . .

*
If Nobelist-by-rights Ashbery neglects to cite Bloom, is it probably because he hates him?

*
To quote from page 76 of Kolbert's article (I've slightly altered some of the preliminary text):

Asked to explain how their work, supported by public funds, contributes to the public good, particle physicists often cite [the words of Robert Wilson, in his testimony before a Congressional Committee in 1969] . . . a Senator wanted to know the rationale behind a $250 Million government expenditure for a new collider:
Did it have anything to do with promoting "the security of the country"?
Wilson: No sir, I don't believe so.
Senator: Nothing at all?
Wilson: Nothing at all.
Senator: It has no value in that respect?
Wilson: It only has to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture. . . . It has to do with are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things we really venerate in our country and are patriotic about. . . . It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending.

*
Three things strike me about his last answer there, which I've quoted verbatim as the New Yorker prints it:

First, the way Wilson takes the Senator's use of the word "respect" and shifts its meaning . . .

Second, [given this nation's] celebrations and glorifications of War, the irony of his saying that painters sculptors poets are among "all the things we really venerate in our country and are patriotic about."

Third, his use of modifiers here: "good painters, good sculptors, great poets."

*
Why GOOD painters, GOOD sculptors, but not GOOD poets?

I don't think the distinction Robert Wilson offers here is wrong.

Intentionally or not, whether he knows it or not, he is being rather scientifically or at least historically correct in his assessment of relative value:

good painters and good sculptors are respected and venerated, but not good poets . . .

only great poets (like Ashbery) make our country "worth defending."

Elizabeth Bishop is worth a Hiroshima, so to speak.

*
The works of good painters and sculptors can increase in value posthumously: if you've ever seen the Antiques Roadshow, you know that even artists who were "regional" or ignored during their lifetimes can generate higher market prices eventually.

The work of art, the object produced by a deceased artist can still function as merchandise . . . and therefore can survive.

But the work of a good poet?

Prior to the current two-volume Norton Modern/Contemporary,

the one-volume edition (termed simply Modern) contained poems by James Stephens: he's no longer in this Now Norton,

which does "rescue" theoretically, for the moment, a few obscurantes, specialcases

whose refurbished verse has displaced Stephens and others . . . :

or for a dollar from usedbook venues you can obtain Oscar Williams' anthologies of "Modern Poetry":

they're filled with good poets whom no-one reads anymore,

whose efforts may perhaps never be resurrected by the Antique Po-Show . . .

*
But surely the harsh truth is that Wilson and Harold Bloom are right: only GREAT poets count. The good ones are worthless.

///

from my forthcoming book of prose:

*
I'm putting together for publication a collection of my prose writings, tentatively titled "Where Modern Poetry Began and Other Conjectures." Here's a piece from it:

*
NO COMMENT

We poets of the USA should be grateful for all the support we receive from our state institutions.

Take just the CIA: not only do they found and fund magazines like the Paris Review for us,

but they also take on the dangerous task of going into foreign countries and eliminating our potential competitors . . .

For example: How many young Chilean poets were murdered or suicided or impoverished or exiled by the CIA-installed Pinochet regime?

Who remembers today the chagrin and embarrassment

that North American USA poets suffered in the past when we compared our poetry

to that of the great Chilean poets like Neruda and Parra,

how solipsistically small and provincial and futile our poems seemed when set next to theirs . . .

but now, in the succeeding decades, hasn't that situation improved thanks to the CIA's intervention?

It's not just in Chile, of course.

Imagine how many other South American poets have been killed or otherwise quashed and quelled by CIA-funded activities.

Not to mention Africa, Asia et al.

Yes: All those poets who might have produced better poems than us, whose poems might have put ours to shame, we don't have to worry about them now, do we,

because they've all been offed for us by the CIA.

We should bow our heads every day in the direction of the CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia, and say a silent thanks for their benefactions.

We have been blessed. We are the Langley Poets.

*
Yes, every USA poet owes part of our endowment to the CIA. Whether the Paris Review has published us or not,

we've all benefited from the CIA's worldwide pogroms. Indeed—

Just as USA business cartels pay the CIA's mercenaries to assassinate and undermine and destroy their foreign competitors,

so the Academy of American Poets has commissioned similar sorties from Langley:—

"There's this poet in Sierra Leone, and . . . she writes sort of Tony Hoagland, only political, and ten times better . . . can't you do something, you know, the usual, make it look like an accident . . . prison maybe . . . okay, that's great . . . Tony can breathe easier thanks to you . . . ah if the Tonys only knew all the things you do for them, and for all our poets . . . thanks so much . . . yes, the Charles Wright first edition is in the mail to you, I had him inscribe it as always . . . no, no, thank YOU, Director Bush-Plimpton!" . . .

*
(My understanding of the CIA is amateurish, based on novels and movies.

For example "The Good Shepherd" (2006) presents a film historical version of one Company hierarch,

who first appears as a poetry student at Yale before his recruitment into espionage.

Some of the poetry students at Yale became CIA, and some of them became poets: the question remains whether some of them became both.

Maybe that should be present-tense: become. What kind of Skull-and-Bones blood-oath do they make you swear to get your Yale Younger Poet badge—

There's a secret society someone should investigate.

I pledge allegiance to Louise Gluck and the [CLASSIFIED] for which she stands.)

*
So I have this paranoic-critical vision of the CIA as being upperclass Ivyleague on its higher levels at least (not all that different from Po-Biz, when you come to think of it),

arrogant rich snobs with anglo-names . . . it's not much like that in reality, I suppose, but this is my fantasy,

my fictional version—

So, above, when I have the CIA's "asset" at the Academy of American Poets phone Langley to request a termination-with-extreme-prejudice on an alien po-threat to Tony the Hoag,

I imagine them coalescing with Director Bush-Plimpton, head of the CIA's Cultural Affairs Division,

And the latter being "repaid" with an addition to his collection of Charles Wright books.

Why Wright? Is that fair?—

After all, Bush-Plimpton's Virginia estate is probably larger than Charles Wright's manse . . . I don't doubt his income is higher than Wright's . . . plutocrat/poetcrat—

but despite their payscale diffs and divides,

I picture B-P as honoring the capitalist merit-system of Success that spiritually unites the two of them,

and I can see him acquiesce with nods and doffs of admiration at the bravura displays of Wright's tradecraft,

the skillful delays and declensions of that author's elegantly tepid variations:

how a diaristic prose is made to seem almost poetic by the strategic use of inflated introversions and drop-lines;

and how Wright has distinguished himself by singlehandedly elevating the Allusion to an entelechy:

how he has raised Namedropping to a modality.

And especially since Bush-Plimpton himself, in his day to day occupation

of masterminding coups and kickbacks and assassinations in the cultural camps of the world,

he too must shoulder the task of creating Phantom Identities:

no wonder he appreciates the poet's flair for it.

And all of Wright's bucolic backyard musings on the Big Questions of Nature and Fate and Art,

they echo his, B-P's,

as he too, like the poet, lounges in the garden behind his mansion

and gazes out over the vales and values of his desmesne and lets the second vodka turn his thoughts into blink-eyed chin-scratching damps and ramp-ups

not dissimilar to Wright's ponderistic longueurs . . .

Remember that B-P's scion at the Agency, James Jesus Angleton, was a reverent disciple of Ezra Pound (I assume Angleton ran the Op that saved Pound from a treason trial) . . .

Bush-Plimpton following JJA's lead favors the non-Leftist poets (or the non-political poets, the apolitical poets).

///

ipso

*

I have a choice: when I look at the walls and walls full of anthologies which present selections of contemporary USA poetry (USAPO for short),

when I think of the hundreds of USAPO anthologies published over the past 30 or so years,

and when I reflect that my verse appears in almost none of them,

I have a choice:

A, I can say all those editors excluded my work because I have been (and continue to be) blacklisted by the USAPO-Biz power centers—

or

B, I can say that all those editors excluded my work because it is unworthy of being anthologized—

so which do I choose to say to myself:

A or B?

If it's A, I'm a paranoid;

if it's B, I'm a failure:

B means my poetry is worthless, my lifetime of effort has been in vain, and indeed I should stop trying to write, stop publishing my junkverse, I should go away somewhere and shoot myself or at least cease and desist from ever showing my wretchwords in any venue,

including my blogs . . .

So either I'm crazy, or I'm a failure.


///