In response to Alison's remark, what does poetry have to lose by intermingling with the other arts?
There's a house in Philadelphia called Isaiah's House which is basically a rundown house in the downtown area which has been turned into a work of art by the artist Isaiah who lives there. He uses all sorts of found and broken objects but it is all given a kind of sense by the words which are embedded shards of glass, splinters of mirror, embedded in the walls "ART IS THE REAL CENTER OF THE WORLD," and, of course, that cohesion can only be given by language being at the center of all that rubble and recovery, all that mural and found object.
Which also reminds me of the Stein quote AND THEN THERE IS USING EVERYTHING which I've heard is engraved on the new English department building at Brown.
Though I'm arriving at this conversation late, I notice that "avant-garde" is used as if it were a noun, which has been noted, has only that O.E.D. meaning of the vanguard of an army.
But I think the way in which the term might still be interesting is if it were an adjective. Sometimes I think of particular works as avant-garde, as if they were at the front of something, though not necessarily an army, and adjectivally the word can be used to refer to the singular poet or work, whereas the noun always implies a force of more than one. For instance, I think the work of C.D. Wright is somewhat avant-garde, with its elliptical narrative, its juxtapositions of jargon, a work which is part hill music though often questioned as if it were somehow connected to language poetry. Or maybe the obsolete term, avant-guard which means only "and,"
and this and that and everything,
Best,
Rebecca
Rebecca Seiferle
www.thedrunkenboat.com
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