RIP David Thomas

 

The band Pere Ubu was unquestionably my introduction to the concept of an avant garde in art or any other form. I was a junior in college when my boss put on the record Dub Housing in the campus record store where I worked.

I knew some of the music of John Coltrane and had occasionally heard what I then thought of as “20th century classical music” that sounded cool and strange, but I had never encountered the concept of “avant garde” in relation to them. I had written papers in high school and college about James Joyce and William Faulkner, but “avant garde” was not a term I saw applied to their work either. I’d never heard of Dada. I knew the word “surreal” as being about weird dreams but not about its connection to the concept of an avant garde.

Listening to Dub Housing, I had one of those epiphanies that are very real sometimes. “I don’t understand music anymore at all,” I said to myself. I was only several years into being aware that there was such a thing as punk music. “What kind of music could this possibly be?”

My response to not understanding the album was to buy it and take it home and soon pick up other albums by the band as well. It turned out that some of my musician friends at college, Andy Rosenau particularly, already knew about the band, but we had never talked about them to that point in my life.

This wasn’t the first time that I had become fascinating by something in literature or music or art that I didn’t understand. But it was a turning point because I became conscious that I was fascinated by literature and music and art that I “didn’t understand.” It was a feeling of being riveted. Why didn’t I understand? Why was it so interesting?

It wasn’t long after that when I came across a copy of the New Directions book Ubu Roi, the play by Alfred Jarry, one of the foundational avant garde texts, as is well known. From then on, I was on my way to a much broader set of interests than I had known about before.

RIP to David Thomas (1953-2025), one of the most unique and powerful musicians of my lifetime.

Nice, the Collected Poems of David Melnick

 

I’m not really writing a review of Nice, the collected poems of David Melnick, because the intro to the book contains all the information anybody would need, including what you need to know about the poems.

The book is a fascinating and tightly constructed package, containing, it seems, all of Melnick’s poetry that’s known to still exist along with a careful scholarly framing that’s full of insight and reminiscence. There’s something satisfying about the completeness of what’s offered between these pages, even as there are ongoing absences of information about some parts of his life and about some of the writing that he must have destroyed. David Melnick didn’t keep a lot of his own poetry, but all of it that got out into the world is essential reading.

What comes across powerfully to me is a sense of astonishment at the consistent distinctiveness of Melnick’s poetry, a play of language and sound that feels sparkling with energy and layered with implication. It’s writing on the absolute fringe of possibility.

Wondermental by Nico Vassilakis

 

Nico Vassilakis is one of those little known U.S. poets who has been doing fascinating work for years. Written poems, visual poems, the areas in-between. He has also done fine editorial work as well. Wondermental, his new book, is one of my favorite works of his that I know of.

The writing is spare and to the point, full of surprising and meaningful shifts. Ideas and images balance and teeter in ways that always draw me in. The casual tone works to hide but then sometimes to highlight the complexity. Vassilakis comes across as an ordinary working guy with a vision for the experimental, which tends to blow apart the (always blatantly false) idea that avant garde explorations can come only from the well-off and the well-credentialed. The poems have awareness of politics and the limits of politics. They show the foibles of people and their daily troubles and contradictions close up. And they are especially attuned (as all his literary art has been) to word work as a physical and not merely intellectual endeavor.

Here’s the opening of “Causality Report:”

Graffiti on silos

Shopping portable radiation
detectors online

I’m getting absorbed

I know it’s related to my outlook

But I don’t have the strength to stop
feeling absorbed

Like many of the poems I’m most interested in, the poems in Wondermental move from thing to thing and place to place, taking in many contexts and situations and rarely focusing a poem on a single topic.

The world of U.S. poetry remains as unattuned as it always has been to what happens beyond the context of its prize winners and New York Times reviews and institutionally prominent figures. Vassilakis has never had a big system of opportunity to push him along. He’s just out there, living and working and managing somehow to make great new writing and art all the time.

Beyond Avant Garde/Mainstream and Back Again

Based partly on the discussions about third-way and hybrid poetics that we had on this blog some weeks back, Michael Theune have been playing around with some ideas for conversing at more length in a public forum on the issues involved. Perhaps a panel at AWP or other conference, perhaps a one-day or even weekend conference if we could find a location and the resources.

Below are the ideas we have at this point for a potential event of this kind. Both of us would appreciate hearing any thoughts you may have. Additions, questions, problems, annoyances, accusations of heedless arrogance or willful ideological bias are all encouraged.

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Recent years in poetry and poetics have seem numerous attempts to break out of, blur, or undermine distinctions between ideas of “mainstream” and “avant garde” poetics, a distinction that from the 1950s well into the 90s often dominated discussions about new directions in contemporary poetry. Yet after as much as fifteen years of attempts to move beyond this often unnecessarily limited distinction, it’s important also to move beyond assertions that the distinction has collapsed or is irrelevant. Instead, it now seems time to evaluate the specific attempts that writers and anthologists have made to create a hybrid poetics. Are we really living in an era when the mainstream/avant garde distinction no longer has value and significant common ground has been found among poetic approaches long considered opposites? Or has this new era simply adjusted, replaced, or perhaps only re-named this older boundary? Do the terms “avant garde” and “mainstream” still have any contemporary value or have they become the marks of a bygone age? If, as Hegel suggested, any synthesis of earlier ideas is always followed by a new antithesis that challenges it, what future poetic ideas will challenge any common ground that actually has been achieved or has been claimed as achieved?

This panel will feature diverse answers to these and related questions that have intrigued writers, editors, and anthologists involved in the issue. Are boundary-crossing, hybrid aesthetics a moderate, moderating force that smooths distinctions in a homogenizing and perhaps bland way, or one that allows for radical conjunctions not dreamed of in earlier generations of the “poetry wars”? Have anthologies promoting the collapse of the mainstream/avant garde distinction created genuine bridges across aesthetics or simply new poetic coteries? Do we now have no camps, new camps, more camps than ever? Have a variety of aesthetics really been included in the hybrid approach or have they instead been offered only token inclusion? Is the attempt to eliminate or downplay coterie inevitably a good idea, or is the often intense argument and difference between coteries a crucial source of vitality in new directions for poetry? What fringes and margins remain, if any? To what extent has the debate been framed too often as simply a problem within American poetry and thus remains wedded to a nationalist vision? What role do poetries in different languages, multiple languages, and translation play in complicating the notions of what it means to cross boundaries, whether aesthetic, linguistic, or cultural? What roles do race, class, or gender issues play in this new environment? When if ever are there reasons to assert the importance of maintaining or recognizing boundaries? What aesthetic, cultural, or ideological boundaries remain most relevant?

But when was it ever Avant Nashville?

Tom Orange is back in the blog saddle again, with a new set of spurs and boots to match, responding in detail to my questions about the contemporary condition of the notion of the avant garde. Well worth reading.

"If Jesus Can Rise Again, Why Not the Avant Garde?"

That subject heading is from a t-shirt made by Les Figues Press.

A lot has been going on in blogland lately, what with conversation happening on Lorraine Graham’s and Simon DeDeo’s blogs about Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young’s recent article on a continuing need to assert the value of feminism, as well as a discussion on the blogs of Stan Apps and Nicholas Manning regarding whether there’s a need to assert the notion of an avant-garde. Both issues, though very different, seem to me connected in the sense that they revolve around the question of whether an assertive and therefore to some inevitable extent divisive rhetoric is necessary, or whether such divisive rhetoric is an outmoded form of discourse, something that we have gone beyond and need to stay beyond in order to continue with the essential task of learning how to get along with each other in a complex and troubled world.

I’m going to focus on the issue of the avant garde here because to me at least the continuing need for outspoken feminism seems more or less obvious, while other people are going to be better than I am at working out what that might look like both theoretically and in local applications. But an avant garde? Do we need that anymore? Stan Apps has been saying that we do, and has been describing his vision of what that might look like.

Now, many of my friends and readers of this blog perhaps remember an earlier era in this problem. It was an era in which it felt important to me and lots of others to critique the limits of a notion of an avant garde and its problematic relation to progress, militarism, and gender, race, and class, not to mention all the limitations of social group formation. Those critiques remain important, but does that really mean that the idea of an avant garde is no longer necessary at all?

Speaking for myself, I’ve never thought so. The goal of critiquing certain problems within the history of the avant garde was, to my mind, not a way of restraining aesthetic excesses but freeing up more possibilities that might challenge settled notions of what literature is and can be. I was hardly interested in a return to safer modes of writing or thinking, but to note how many more unsafe modes of writing and thinking might be possible. My sense has been that the idea of an avant garde can be found in a restless refusal to accept that what literature looks like in the past must determine its limits for the future. To me, the notion of an avant garde is valuable as a kind of impulse that must be put into practice and that can be found in multiple contexts—and not just in those that assert avant garde rhetoric.

That said, the idea that there are limitations to avant garde practice is one that has gone around widely, so much so that many people think that the idea of an avant garde is now a useless notion. In various ways, this dismissal of the idea of an avant garde has the habit in practice of discouraging or even outright ignoring more extreme aesthetic approaches. Of course, the discouragement works differently than the 80s mainstream poetry way of ignoring language poetry entirely and being hostile to any mention of it. The way, now, is to claim that one has been exposed to those ideas and has moved beyond them.

The classic example, to my mind, is Jorie Graham, who has gone on record as claiming to be more radical in her approach to writing than more definitively avant garde writers. But on what grounds does she make this claim? It mainly seems to be that in incorporating certain more supposedly extreme concepts (indeterminacy being the key one perhaps, since it’s often considered the central tenet of avant garde writing by people who don’t really read that writing or know it mainly through reading Marjorie Perloff) and linking them with the high-toned philosphical lyric a la Richard Wilbur or Wallace Stevens, she’s more radically consolidating a new center in poetry than fringey experimenters who are caught up in old school avant garde rhetoric. Get it? Moving to the center is more radical than being on the fringe. And defining a new center, it turns out, is best achieved by incorporating a few avant gestures without letting those gestures so deeply take over the text that the work becomes offensive or incomprehensible to readers of more conventional lyric or narrative verse.

But let’s be fair (not that most of us ever are). It’s not only writers who don’t seem to know what the avant garde was who think that the idea of an avant garde may now be bankrupt. Ron Silliman’s notion of the post avant, which he says quite sincerely that he thinks of as a positive development, clearly contains the implication that the idea of an avant garde has played itself out, and Ron knows as much about what it means to be an avant garde writer as anyone alive. In his formulation of the post avant, remnants of avant garde practice remain a possibility, but its intensity, its severity, its refusals and rejections are no longer tenable.

So what do you think? Is the time of any idea of an avant garde over with? Do we need more insistence on the value of aesthetic extremes? Is it important to remind people that it’s not really possible to reject the avant garde before you understand what it was in the first place? Can avant garde possibilities be found in a Stan Apps-style defining of avant garde practices, or in an impulse to unsettle accepted pieties in numerous contexts that’s both broader but perhaps dangerously general? Both? Is the idea of an avant garde old news, or one that we’ve already gone too far in forgetting? How would we know, right now, avant garde work if we saw it?