Looking again at your post, Tim, in case I was myself not hearing what you
were saying only confirmed my feeling that you were picking a phantom quarrel
with me. From the quotation from mine you gave you had lopped off 1) the most
crucial point – perhaps just because you agree or for brevity, but the effect is
to decontextualize the subsequent arguments. It might have helped make clear,
for example, that I was not saying that ‘disruption of grammar’ was ever ‘a
requirement of being labelled avant-garde’.
Only with your response to 4) ‘The stylistic experiments of a
century ago are no longer avant-garde...’ do I have some sympathy with what
looks like exasperation on your part. It’s a gratuitous jibe not relevant here.
Though elsewhere it may be worth saying! – I’ve read various clueless
commentators who speak about cut-and-paste and about calligrammesque
compositions as though they’re guarantors of radical formal experiment. Happy to
drop that one.
Jamie,
I am aware that the the things you say below were said in a degree of anger and
you qualified some of them since, but nevertheless they call for a response.
The 'disruption of grammar' thing is a huge red herring and was never a
requirement of being labelled avant garde. With regard to that and the political
thing even among the Language poets, whose theory talked about that stuff,
disruption of grammar was only carried out by some and when that happened it had
its poetic uses and aims etc. In some of the Language poets there is no
disruption of grammar whatsoever. The same applies to British poets. In practise
one of the most frequent causes of disruption of grammar was down to the
collaging techniques and chance procedures employed by some poets, but again,
that was only a part of what was going on. It is true that many of the poets
(perhaps a majority) connected with the later avant gardes on both sides of the
Atlantic were left-wing and therefore saw their poetry as partaking partly on a
political level, but I very much doubt if many of them saw their poetry in such
crude terms, whatever methods they were using.
Yes disruption of text is easy to do in the mechanical sense. That's a
given. So what? What happens next? If nothing happens then any fool knows it's a
fake or a gesture.
The 'stylistic experiments' thing is, for me, meaningless. An empty
argument that has nothing to do with what goes on. Can't be bothered explaining
further, sorry.
The status of the avant-garde (or whatever term you want to use) in the
Universities is a thorny topic, I admit, and it's one that I've given my
pennyworth of questions to before. It gets even more thorny if you try to
compare it with the mainstream (or whatever term you want to use) status there -
I haven't got the data for such a comparison, let alone make any judgment on
their relative intellectual prestige. What I do know is that the poetry I have
always liked has found strong support from a handful of university departments,
without which the picture would be different.
Enough.
Tim A,
.
On 8 Aug 2015, at 11:43, Jamie McKendrick wrote:
2) I'm aware that contemporary avant-garde orthodoxy equates disruption
of grammar, for example, with resistance to the political status quo, but just
a glance at the politics of practitioners, as you'll know, from Marinetti
onwards would paint a very different picture. Even if all of that were in the
past, there's still no sensible reason to make the equation.
3) anyone with fridge magnets or schoolroom cut-and-paste can be
disruptive to linguistic norms. It's so simple to do, and so quiescent in its
effects, that it seems to me gullible to believe it threatens any dominant
political 'discourse'.
4) the stylistic experiments of the avant-garde of a century ago are no
longer avant-garde but retrograde in stylistic terms.
5) contemporary avant-garde poets have had places in universities for a
long time - you could almost claim they have established that as their base -
and I'm not just talking about Cambridge or Essex. I'd say they generally have
far more intellectual prestige in universities here and in the States than any
other poetic grouping. Why then would they change the stylistics features that
helped them achieve that grey eminence? Far more likely to persist!
6) this relates to 1) which obviously needs developing. Most poets who
have any memorable quality at all will be extending even challenging stylistic
norms, so the idea of tribalising this obvious fact is merely a distraction in
understanding the singularity of those challenges.
7) I'm coming to detest the whole idea of these three tribes, and believe
it really has nothing to with poetry.
That should do for now!
