EXPERIMENTAL POETRY DAY


Date: Saturday, 6 November 1999

Time: 10 am- 4pm

Location: Battersea Arts Centre
               Lavender Hill
               London SW11

Tube: Clapham Junction

Cost: Waged £10 / Unwaged £5


One-day poetry workshop on 'Experimental Poetry' (apologies for the term -
but it might suggest what you're likely to find on the shelf). Exercises
playing with chance-generated texts; found-source texts; writing iun
response to found material / visual stimuli; site specific writing.

Tutors: Dell Olsen / Robert Hampson

If you are interested, you will need to book in advance (to make sure the
workshop runs) via SPREAD THE WORD on 0171-207-2025 - to whom also for any
queries.

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> ----------
> From: [log in to unmask][SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
> Reply To: [log in to unmask]
> Sent: 12 October 1999 11:01
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Postmodernism
>
> On Mon, 11 Oct 1999 18:24:07 +0100, Tony wrote:
>
> >I agree with whoever said PoPm was a humpty-dumptyish word.
>
> - 'twas I. In practical terms it's perhaps worth reminding ourselves
> what whole classes of anthology-fed students of US poetry have had
> bunched as "postmodern" for them, 'cos even if there's no stable
> definition (this would seem to be a feature of postmodern argument,
> yes?) there has been at least some supermarket-shelf-stacking
> coherence for the term ("Blackburn? you'll find him in the chilled
> pomo cabinet, between Ashbery and Blaser...")
>
> 1. In 1982 "The New American Poetry" became "The Postmoderns: The New
> American Poetry Revised" eds Allen n Butterick. In their preface
> (where they credit Olson as "the first, in his essays and letters, to
> use the term in its present significance") they conclude:
>
> "Post-modernism, then, is more than just the continuation of the
> modernism begun in the 1910s. Its proposals are more widely sweeping
> than those of imagism and that "revolution of the word" beginning the
> early decadees of the twentieth century. Most of all, its chief
> characteristic is its inclusiveness, its quick willingness to take
> advantage of all that had gone before".
>
> 2. 1994: "Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology" ed. Paul
> Hoover: he also tags Olson as first source for the term. He says:
>
> "I have chosen "postmodernism" for the title over "experimental" and
> "avant-garde" because it is the most encompassing term for the variety
> of experimental practice since World War II, one that ranges from the
> oral poetics of Beat and performance poetries to the more "writerly"
> work of the New York School and language poetry ... Despite their
> differences, experimentalists in the postwar period have valued
> writing-as-process over writing-as-product ... Postmodernism decenters
> authority and embraces pluralism."
>
> Don't shout at me! I'm not proposing that we write any of this in
> stone, or even sand, still less that we transport any of it
> uncritically to the UK. But it seems to me that there are common
> elements here: (a) pomo, as its name suggests, is developmental: it
> always has to be seen in terms of something else (something earlier or
> elsewhere). It is always "not" something or "more than" something.
> Oppositional, even - tho that's reading beyond the passages quoted
> above. And (b) because it's developing, linked in some sense to the
> unsatisfactory "experimental" or "avant-garde" words, the definitions
> of it will shift, it will be hard to get a concensus of understanding
> of it. Understandings of it will remain provisional. And (c) the facts
> of its "inclusive" and "plural" nature suggest that fine definition is
> out of the question anyway, it's never going to be other than umbrella
> language.
>
> All this may make it disconcertingly unstable as a term to live
> within, potentially misleading as a fixed term to feed to The Young.
> But there it is: the developmental beat goes on, poets will keep going
> round changing things, and someone's gonna stick tags on them while
> they do it, it's only human. You got a better term to put over those
> shelves? It's at least a semi-serious question, because there are
> poetries stacked there which we can't do without.
>
> OK, so a guy goes into Asda and says, "Can you tell me where you stack
> the provisional developmental umbrellas?" ...
>
> RC
>


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