>And like Henry
>>and Michael have been saying (if they'll forgive my rather loose
>>and hopefully correct paraphrase) you can't have an
>>avant garde 'tradition' because the two things are
>>opposing, indeed they are in direct conflict.
>>
>
>
>Actually, Henry and Michael are wrong for the most part. Individuals or
groups who define themselves as "non-mainstream," a term at least as
problematic as avant-garde but in practical terms pretty much synonymous,
almost always make a point of defining the tradition they see themselves
descended from. The mainstream is thus seen as as an illegitimate growth.
So in the US while we all tend to claim descent from Whitman and Dickenson
and to a less unanimous extent from Williams (and before them to Blake,
Chaucer, Shakespeare, and all the standard authors), non-mainstreamers have
in general scant interest in Lowell, Plath, Ransom or Berryman, while
acknowledging the paternity/maternity of Olson, Creeley, Niedecker, Oppen,
etc. Very few of us in any camp see ourselves as orphans or parricides.
We're all more likely to coopt ancestors than to kill them off. I would
imagine the same is true in Britain.
>
>Mark
Mark
I'm glad you raised this, though I certainly never meant to claim that such
"traditions" weren't perceived. Indeed, these traditions seem to me very
interesting and powerful cultural artefacts in their own right.
I'm fascinated by the nuances of your list. It bears a general resemblance
to the redskins/palefaces lists of a few decades back (I thought those terms
rather offensive, though); but of course there is change, too. I thought you
might predictably have mentioned Pound, Zukofsky, Stein... Ashbery and the
NY school were once thought of as the obvious antidote to Lowell, but is
this no longer the case?...
I guess everyone makes personal lists. They do exert a normative pressure on
other people, but is that their main purpose? Do we make a list in order to
provide touchstones for ourselves, or to make our own poems easier for
others to approach (i.e. this is what I like to read, so now you have an
idea about what kind of linguistic artefact I make)? Or is a list a sort of
compressed critical history - if so, it asserts a non-subjective
interpretation of the past, which is where I begin to feel wary; I'm just
not sure if anyone is inward with enough poetry to usefully propose that
interpretation.
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