I'd never heard of the poet Peter mentions, so I found my way to his blog,
read a (frankly, rather trite) poem about football, failed to discover any
Martians or Martianism, but did come across a passage from a Michael
Donaghy interview which suggests that there are all sorts of phantoms
floating around the putative divide. I don't find this any more helpful
than frustratingly vague accounts of a supposed 'mainstream':
"But look at those sexy words used all too frequently to describe
contemporary art and literature, 'experimental' and 'revolutionary'. The
first is a metaphor filched from science - experimental art doesn't have a
control group, doesn't collate and publish its findings. And
'revolutionary' properly describes a brick thrown at a police cordon, not
a poem in Parataxis. Among the most cherished illusions of the avant-garde
is the idea that bourgeois art consoles, pleases and mollifies with
received notions of beauty, whereas avant-garde art shocks and challenges
and doesn't seek to please. I'm always dismayed by this kind of
self-delusion. The audience for avant-garde art is a middle-class audience
that pays to be shocked, bored or insulted, much in the same way that
Mistress Wanda's clients pay to be horsewhipped. It's an audience that
knows what it wants and is comfortable with its rituals and cliches.
Whether it's a urinal on a pedestal in 1910 or a poem composed entirely of
semi-colons in 1997 ('everything changes but the avant-garde', said
Auden), the audience expects to retreat from a direct and complex
experience of the craftsmanship, to ideas about art.
The most common of these ideas can be phrased as 'Justify your instinctive
reaction that this is not a work of art.' In other words, the burden of
proof is placed with the audience, where in former ages it belonged to the
artist. Whatever the quality of your work, if it strikes the critical
powers-that-be as 'anti-poetic', it is de facto worth talking about. Fine.
I enjoy avant-garde work from Duchamp to Damien Hirst, to poets like Clark
Coolidge, but let's not delude ourselves with the naive and sentimental
notion that such art is 'progressive'. I'm angry about that pretence.
Capitalism long ago defeated the avant-garde by accepting it as another
style. Yet artists continue to present themselves as an offence to the
establishment even as they accept fat cheques from the Saatchi Gallery or
attend academic conferences on 'oppositional' poetries."
From www.benwilkinson.org
On 8/27/15 8:00 AM, "British & Irish poets on behalf of Peter Riley"
<[log in to unmask] on behalf of [log in to unmask]>
wrote:
>Don't get the dreads, Tim, the dog may catch them. I wasn't expecting
>you to answer all those questions,, just to consider they may be more
>interesting than senses of usurpation (which I've knows myself quite
>well in my time and there is, somewhere, some kind of justification,
>or used to be). (The king supreme of the brand of resentment involved
>is Anthony Barnett). (Listening to a young poet called Ben Wilkinson
>recently I had to conclude that Martianism is not dead).
>P
>
>On 27 Aug 2015, at 14:07, Tim Allen wrote:
>
>Good lord Jamie, too much for this lovely day. The bits I feel I can
>respond to I will in separate posts if I can (but it might be
>tomorrow), but some of below I just don't know enough about to be able
>to judge its relevance. Also had a reply from Peter where the prospect
>of trying to answer fills me with dread. Hi Peter. So patience. I'd
>love it if some folk out there could chip in and help but I think the
>list's ten million lurkers are all on holiday.
>
>Cheers
>
>Tim
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