Note that Pierre is saying that there's more discussion of the quality of l'extreme contemporaine here than in Britain, not that there's a whole lot of it. There isn't. I think a third factor at play is that among practitioners and critics alike there's not much agreement about what constitutes the good and the not so good.
Mark
-----Original Message-----
From: Tim Allen <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Jan 14, 2015 9:33 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Northern
Pierre, Yes, we have to give it a go and make those mistakes, I know I do - some of the judgment mistakes I made in the past were big ones though and it has made me wary. You are probably right that inside critique is more prevalent in the States. As always the differences between Britland and America come into play - the different sizes especially - if I criticise a certain poet's work I am far more likely to bump into them sooner rather than later and this knowledge has an effect.
Of course I recognise what you say in a kind of common-sense way about telling the dross from the rest. For myself I go by instinct - but instinct, apart from the fact that it can be way-off, is a difficult thing to transfer into rational language. It's one of the reasons why I largely gave up reviewing and stopped editing Terrible Work - the language available to me to criticise and/or praise mainstream work was still there but had become a lot harder to do it for the avant work that I really liked - in fact the more I liked it the more difficult I found it explaining why. This is one of the problems in reading reviews or papers written as what I referred to as 'intellectual comment on processes and cultural significance' - I can read every word and agree with it all but it still does nothing to help explain to me why I like it - and the same applies if I dislike it - I might still agree with its explanation of what is going on.
Cheers
Tim
On 14 Jan 2015, at 13:20, Pierre Joris wrote:
Tim,
Yes, you’re right: it is difficult to sort the very current stuff, & so one has to take the risk of making an mistake — or two, or.... But maybe one needn’t anthologize what was published this morning? In that sense 1) the anthology has indeed & inevitably a certain historical retrospective view, even when covering the contemporary (or as Michel Deguy has renamed the a/d, “l’extrême contemporain”) — even one as revolutionary as Donald Allen’s which, coming out in 1960, covered work from 1945 to 1959. And 2) maybe the anthology of what was written this morning is or should remain the little magazine and not a book-form? On the other hand, I do believe that if you have a good historical grasp of a/g & of what Peter called “normative poetical writing", you can usually spot the fakes & the careerist moves — i.e. if you know the work of Duchamp nobody can sell you another piece of porcelain on a plinth as new art, if you know the socio-political context of a given magazine you may be able to immediately recognize the careerist move, etc…
I do agree with you on “a lack of inside criticism and discussion with regard to the quality of the work,” though that maybe more pronounced in the UK than here in the US — I at least feel that the scene here has a fair amount of that, much of it useful, some of it bull, of course. Always thus the matter of separating the dross from the rest… But that’s also the fun of the stuff… walking around, say the Chelsea (NY) art galleries on the monthly Thursday night opening scene, one look from the sidewalk into the gallery most often tells you you don’t want/need to see that stuff —but then, every so often (i.e. not so often) there’s the thing that stops you in your tracks, makes you enter the place & wow! here’s something I didn’t know existed & it’s totally interesting… (so my example is visual arts, but the same holds true of word-art, heard or read).
Pierre