 |
 |
Isn't there supposed to be a playfulness involved in avant garde work? All i am interested in is making the language original, the wordplay different. Chris Hamilton emery on an entry at poets on fire today, stated: http://z11.invisionfree.com/Poets_On_Fire/index.php?showtopic=1478 "British avant-garde sales have dropped from a high in the early millennium of around 200 units first year sales (for most, not all) to around 50 or so, sometimes less. We just presumed that those buying the avant-garde were buying other poets or other poetry or simply buying elsewhere. There used to be a general market for British avant works (never much taste for it in the USA), that's disappeared for us now. It's making it almost impossible, commercially, for us to publish new avant garde talent. Some books have no demand at all now. It's just all dried up for us, really. I guess that happens." ~ When Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara were being berated by audiences in Zurich for their sound poetry, they were in the centre of the artistic storm because they had rejected the forms of the past and were making up their own and the initial reaction by most was, what are theyu doing? No doubt there were many who found their *tone* offensive. What is the internet for? My learning coincided with the rise of the web. It is all i have known and i use it as a blank canvas, a free space to *practice* in the purest sense of rehearsing and as Beckett thought about failing better and Bernstein does, a place *up for grabs* and where i can fail and learn. I have always thought it strange, that some people complain about certain text which appear online that's not to their taste, or find the content's *tone* not to their liking. If you don't like it, scroll past or do not read it. Here we are, physically removed from one another, words in space, no threat and doing zero physical damage and still, still we find offensive stuff that in the grand scheme of humanity, is not even the feather dropping in the Grand Canyon - we the avant garde. We all take ourselves very seriously, when Hamilton Emery's facts suggest, no one else does. Lighten up. And only having practiced online, I have developed a unique practice, surfing round the lamposts on a round and extemporising texts. I see something and react, as I did to Side's Jacket piece, and what I've always found interesting in online poetry circles, is that online discourse is thriving with the younger lot who have no experience of print publishing, and the senior bores fashioned by it, restrict their serious talk to paper. The world's changing, print publishing will soon be the poor relation of the net i think and the net is a place conducive to conversation and diatribe, polemic and a less formal more humanly honest speech..