Contemporary American Poetry and the Pseudo Avant-Garde

Abstract

In hospital photograph of my baby girl, she is squeezing both hands into tiny fists. This startle reflex to a series of flashes is her Futurist salute to publicity. My infant, leader of latest avant-garde. It is hard to take idea of an avant-garde seriously these days. Who would have nerve to represent an art as future when there are evidently infinite futures, when present itself is not identifiable? Few or novelists subscribe to nineteenth century ideas of history and teleology out of which idea of an avant-garde grew. Most tend even to be a little embarrassed by word. Nevertheless, a few relics of avant-garde behavior remain to clutter contemporary world. There is for some desire to identify and distinguish from other a specifically oppositional poetry. Often this means overstating cohesiveness of poetic orthodoxies and their difference from dominant ideologies. Many of Language poets claim to be oppositional but even as I write this I am aware of two books going to press on these poets, both written by academic literary critics and both to be published by university presses. It is acceptable still to equate experimental poetic modes with radical politics, especially now that American literary criticism is much more willing to discuss theoretical and political implications of poems than technique of poems. Here I want to discuss Ron Silliman, one of more interesting poet-critics associated with an experimental and oppositional mode, beside a very different kind of poet, Jim Powell, who is not associated with any group and who so far as I know makes no claims about originality. Most of discussions of Language poetry have been content to discuss in terms presented by themselves. I want to avoid that as much as possible here. Juxtaposing work of Powell and Silliman will allow me to speak to formal issues of some concern to outside of any identifiable camp. That rather diverse group of called Language poets wear some of trappings of an avant-garde movement is well known. Thus it should be no surprise that Ron Silliman's book of critical essays is called The New Sentence -- idea of new being central to avant-garde rhetoric if not always to its practice. Silliman is not unaware of -- he is sometimes even cynical about -- importance of self-promotion and group promotion in today's crowded world. Like Robert Pinsky, whose book The Situation of Poetry was responsible for boosting reputations of Frank Bidart, James McMichael and others, Silliman believes in a group of poets, some of whom are his friends, whose work shares specific formal concerns. Unlike Pinsky, he aligns work of these with a radical political critique, and it is this fact that seems to be making his work of particular interest to many academic literary critics. Silliman's critique is derived from Adorno, Benjamin, Bakhtin, and others now influential as well in academic literary criticism. Surveying contemporary scene, a world weakly ruled by a geriatric set, where tolerance, healthy or repressive, is rule, one cannot help but think that we could use more critics like Silliman and Pinsky who are open and intelligent in their advocacy of poetic models and who don't think that contemporary ends with Donald Allen's The New American Poetry. Now that The New Sentence has gathered some hard to find essays, it is also possible to read Silliman's beside claims of his prose. I think it will be evident that some of Silliman's most basic criticisms of bulk of mainstream contemporary are legitimate, and in fact echoed by very different from Silliman. The target of Silliman's critique is what has come to be called workshop poem -- in his words the loosely written, speech-like free verse dramatic monologue concerning small travails of daily existence . …