"Ashbery is the most famous contemporary gay poet. His
deployment of a
tactic that now looks like a refusal ever to speak
directly or deal
straightforwardly with felt experience has the effect
of trivialising gays,
of insinuating the idea that gays are evasive and
frivolous."
Very interesting. I am familiar with that feeling of
'weariness' that can sometimes overwhelm you reading
Ashes. Sometimes it's like you're feasting on whipped
cream... I think it perhaps is the result of an
aesthetic that was designed as a reaction to the stuff
that was coming out of a particular time and place,
and has now become fetishised, institutionalised,
decontextualised. I see it often in the poets in NZ -
Wystan Curnow, who posts his heartfelt and elegant
post-structuralist fallacies here regularly,is a
classic example - who are under the spell of the
Language group, but do not understand the purpose of
the poetics built by that group. They take the 'forms'
- the empty shells - of the work of people like
Andrews and Silliman, but are blind to the
sociological and political views that underpin them,
justify them. What you end up with is a whole lotta
sub-neo-Symbolist sludge, which makes pretty, prettily
vague poems out of forms designed to bite. One thinks
of the phrase Rosenberg used to describe the sloppy
late Abstract Expressionist work - 'apocalyptic
wallpaper'. I think that the decline of avant-garde
poetics is intimately related to the decline of the
challenge to capitalism in the West which follwed the
massive struggles - and explosion of new ideas in art
and academia - of the late sixties and first half of
the seventies. I think that the apolitical
aestheticism that
postmodernism/poststructuralism/identity 'politics'
and theory legitimise is a response to the
marginalising of academics, intellectuals and artists
in Western society. Someone once called
poststructuralists "the shock troops of
neo-liberalism"...I think one of the key functions of
poststructuralism is to valourise and mystify the
impotence of academics and intellectuals. How else do
you get out of bed in the morning?`
Now class struggle apprears (stress that last word,
it's still too early to be sure) to be on the rise
again, with the anticapitalist movement putting tens
of thousands on the streets in the West and South
America, amongst other parts of the Third World, in
turmoil, it will be intersting to see how pen pushers
et al react. Already, in the last few years, we have
seen dramatic declines in the influence of 1980s Gods
like Derrida and Andrea Dworkin, and a rise, within
academia at least, of interest in more earthy,
pseudo-(often very pseudo-) sociological stuff like,
for instance, postcolonial studies.
But April Galleons as the last good book????
How did you come to pick that one?
It is exceedingly mannered, compared to its successors
Flow Chart and Hotel Lautreamont. I think that Flow
Chart is an amazing book, a real attempt by Ashes to
break out of his solipsism...
Cheers
Scott
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Subject: Re: John Ashbery
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Yes, there is an interesting chapter in Ian Gregson's
book The Male Image
about Lil' Johnny Ashbery and the Noo Yawk Skool camp
male voice. He argues
that what started out as subversive is now ossified,
what started as
polyphony is now monotonous etc. Ian's most
interesting point is that where
Sontag's famous essay on camp originally had it wrong
because it
de-politicised camp, she now appears to be right
because Ashbery's tone is
actually apolitical.
"Ashbery is the most famous contemporary gay poet. His
deployment of a
tactic that now looks like a refusal ever to speak
directly or deal
straightforwardly with felt experience has the effect
of trivialising gays,
of insinuating the idea that gays are evasive and
frivolous."
Be keen to hear what gay listees think of this...
cheers
David
PS: I think Bill's right too although I lost interest
later than April
Galleons.
=====
"Why is it not possible for me to doubt that I have never been on the moon? And how
could I try to doubt it? First and foremost, the supposition that perhaps I have
been there would strike me as idle. Nothing would follow from it, nothing be
explained by it. It would not tie in with anything in my life... Philosophical
problems occur when language goes on holiday. We must not separate ideas from life,
we must not be misled by the appearances of sentences: we must investigate the
application of words in individual language-games" - Ludwig Wittgenstein
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