l will start next one.
Subject: Anything avant-garde whatever that is.
Deadline: two weeks
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l will start next one.
Subject: Anything avant-garde whatever that is.
Deadline: two weeks
I'm extending the deadline! Anyone want to try an avant-garde poem?
I am trying to come up with a definition of what is avant-garde. At the moment anything goes.
So what does it mean to be in the advance guard? And are poems there at all?Quote:
Originally Posted by YesNo
I don't know, but I suspect that what is avant-garde is determined by the consumers of the art, not the producers who can only offer something for sale or consumption, but cannot force consumption.
Therefore, what is avant-garde would be what is consumed by the wealthier group of consumers. I suppose these consumers could be called the "bourgeoisie", or the "rich" or the "stinking rich". The producers are the "workers" or members of the "masses".
Poems that are avant-garde, if this theory is correct, would be poems that could get published in the most prestigious publications, such as, Poetry, The New Yorker, etc.
Others may have different ideas about what avant-garde means. I would accept any poem for this thread.
Quote:
Originally Posted by YesNo
So we should regard this as practice, so we will be able to sell poetry to the New Yorker? That would be worthwhile, if they actually did buy. I better look at the New Yorker to see what they publish.
But you would accept lumpen proletariat poetry?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avant-gardeQuote:
Originally Posted by YesNo
I'd think it must be experimental, innovative, boundary-pushing. I'd say that it's antithetical to being consumed by the bourgeoisie. I have no idea what contemporary avant-garde poetry would be, though. Symbolists, imagists and other ists were avant-garde in their time of course.
Avant-Garde poetry is extinct now according to this article (good article though) and was replaced with "Language Poetry" but, sounds like the closest thing we have to Avant-Garde poetry or "Language Poetry" is Cacian's style!…and she's very much alive and well! The author of this article apparently didn't know about our Cacian! So, c'mon Cacian and enter this contest!
http://litrefsarticles.blogspot.com/...ge-poetry.html
@PeterL: Lumpen proletariat poetry, whatever that is, works for me. Yes, I think we should aim our practice in these threads so that we are able to sell to places like the New Yorker or Poetry, not that I have ever submitted to any of these places. With current technology, whatever we write here can be turned into at least a self-published ebook.
@North Star: There is a tension between the artist as the producer and the artist's client who consumes the work. I think that tension is what underlies the concept of avant-garde which is an attempt to emphasize the artist as superior in some way over the client (reader, purchaser), but I really don't know.
@Melanie: I agree with you about cacian's style. I hope she submits something. Your link made me think that if everything is avant-garde and the avant-garde casts aside the present then the avant-garde is what needs to be cast aside.
The avant-garde poetry movement, per se, was in the 50's and early 60's, but…if someone comes up with something new and innovative today then I would think avant-garde is alive. David Lehman's book, "The Last Avant-Garde" is a story of the "last authentic avant-garde movement that we've had in American Poetry". It focuses on the avant-garde poets, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler. They got their inspiration from Abstract Expressionist painters like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.
I extracted a few excerpts below from the Introduction that I thought would help us understand how the avant-garde poets approached their poetry. This Intro, in it's entirety, gives a much better understanding of Avant-Garde poetry…http://jacketmagazine.com/05/tlag-intro.html
"The [avant-garde] poets liked hoaxes and spoofs, parodies and strange juxtapositions, pseudotranslations and collages. On the ground that the rules of all verse forms are at base arbitrary, they created ad hoc forms (requiring, say, an anagram or the name of a river in every line) and unconventional self-assignments (“translate a poem from a language you do not understand; do not use a glossary or dictionary”). They adapted the Cubist collage and the Surrealist “exquisite corpse” (a one-line poem composed by a group of poets, each of whom contributes a word without knowing what the others have written <<<Hey, we could set up an avant-garde game in our own poetry-games-forum that does this!). Apollinaire’s café poems, “Les Fenętres” and “Lundi rue Christine,” taught them that a poem could originate in snatches of overheard conversations. You could cull lines at random from books. Or you could scramble the lines in an already written poem to produce a disjunctive jolt. Many works would be improved if you simply deleted every second word. Poems didn’t have to make sense in a conventional way; they could discover their sense as they went along. The logic of a dream or a word game was as valid as that of empirical science as a means of arriving at poetic knowledge."
"They learned from Pollack and Kooning that "it was okay for a poem to chronicle the history of its own making — that the mind of the poet, rather than the world, could be the true subject of the poem — and that it was possible for a poem to be (or to perform) a statement without making a statement. From the painters, too, they understood that acceptance was not necessarily a blessing, nor rejection a curse. They were ironists, not ecelesiasts. They favored wit, humor, and the advanced irony of the blague (that is, the insolent jest or prank) in ways more suggestive of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg."
"Freely experimental and fiercely intellectual, the [avant-garde] poets were at the same time resolutely anti-academic and anti-establishment even as they began to win acceptance in establishment circles."
"all this activity was predicated on the idea that poetry could be reinvented from top to toe. Everything was up for grabs." "They understood, too, that a poem no less than a picture could be “a hoard of destructions,” in Picasso’s phrase. And so they favored avant-garde methods of composition that inverted the received order of things. The aim was the liberation of the imagination, and any and all means to this end were valid."
I'll try to find Ashbery's "Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror". The link you cited, Melanie, mentioned it won the Pulitzer, National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Prize in 1976.
Since they were winning prizes, they must have had consumers. Otherwise, they would not be known today.
Here is a link to at least part of that text: http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/self-...convex-mirror/
This poem, "Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror" is far more sane and understandable than I was expecting for avant-garde poetry, although I know he's a heavy in the world of poetic avant-garde. I really like it. He's beautifully describing Parmigiano's painting first and then Francesco's portrait as more of a "soul" than just a face, and distorted in the convex glass. I like it but it just seems like free verse to me instead of avant-garde…unless free verse was new and experimental in the 50s and early sixties, then that would make it avant-garde I suppose. Also, the fact that the subject is more about what the reflection is saying about Francesco's soul rather than what the world thinks. In the 50's that may have been new.
Thanks for posting the link.
I haven't finished it, but for the most part it makes sense. I don't expect avant-garde poetry to enough sense for me to agree or disagree with what is being said. I plan to listen to the whole of it later today.
One feature of the avant-garde appears to be similar to what marketers might do: they criticize what is already available for the customer as a way of promoting their own product as better. They brush aside current poetry to make way for their own, however, their poetry is itself current.
maybe avant garde is whatever comes out of our mouth??
it is without thinking but more sync?
Cacian wins! :)
LOL well what else could be said ? :DQuote:
Originally Posted by Pompey Bum
I mean it would ungarded of me to say any different
unless there is something else
like
before one in on garde
one could be off garde ??