Transferral of Poetic Frontiers: Renovation and Innovation

Abstract

By RAINER SCHULTE Much has been said about the isolation of American writers, their insularity. Their access to foreign literatures has often been quite restricted, and, at the same time, their language background rarely has allowed them to participate in reading original texts from other countries. Even if a writer does read a language other than his or her own, however, then that knowledge would still not guarantee a familiarity with the multitude of international literary creations that have become part of literary reality in the last few decades. Literature has become an international affair; quite a few writers outside the United States are aware of the internationality of literature, perhaps to a greater extent than contemporary American writers. Statistics concerning translations into various languages seem to support this assumption. It is estimated that about fifteen hundred translations of literary works from other languages are published in English every year. If one compares this figure to works translated into French and German, the discrepancy becomes immediately apparent. About seven to eight thousand books are translated yearly into German, and about six thousand into French. Understandably, such an imbalance causes problems of a different nature: many of the up-and-coming contemporary writers in Germany, especially those who have difficulties finding publishers for their own works, facetiously proclaim that they should get their own works translated into English first so that the retranslation into German would guarantee them a publisher. The isolation of the American writer led to a great deal of experimentation in the sixties and early seventies. It is clear that any artistic activity cannot be separated from the notion of experimentation. However, one might distinguish two kinds of experimentation. First, there is experimentation that in the true sense of the word moves at the forefront of new artistic developments which are connected to or emanate from a strong authentic individual or group voice of artists at a particular time in history. These are artists who by the absolute necessity of their inner vision need to move in a particular innovative direction. Authenticity should be seen as an integrating force: the artist interacting with the objects he or she comes in contact with, the artist constantly involved in a process of internalization. Objects are used as a vehicle to give flesh to the artist's perceptions and insights in order to create a sensory experience for the artist and the audience. Objects are not put into mechanical categories that are separated from and independent of the artist's perspective, and objects are not reduced to signs of meaning that serve to transmit information. Objects and their qualities become the springboard for the artist's imagination to make the nature of his or her insights transparent. The artist hears himor herself interacting with the objects of the world. The second kind of experimentation is the kind that pursues the novel for the sake of its newness. Anything that is different and therefore novel is immediately recognized and even accepted as a statement of artistic creation. In the sixties, we needed the spirit of experimentation, but in many cases that spirit of experimentation was carried to the extreme of novelty for its own sake, divorced from any other notions of artistic merit or authenticity. As soon as something was labeled or artistic, it immediately fell outside the realm of critical or scholarly scrutiny. Works purporting to be art were constructed at random out of bricks, stones, pieces of wood, words, and fragments of words in order to elevate that randomness to the level of artistic expression and creation. Poets did not remain unaffected by this tendency. They began a massive deconstruction of the poem and its established forms, though not a type of deconstruction that could serve to introduce the necessary discontinuity for new poetic directions to emerge, but rather as an end in itself without any esthetic goal. As in other art areas, everything became possible and was accepted. As soon as the labels poetic or creative were attached to the poem, then no critical judgment or evaluation could appropriately be applied. The poem fell outside the critical canon and almost became a sacred cow. Naturally, both public and poets became confused in that process of nonevaluation, and the lack of commonly held critical standards certainly had a major effect on the public's assessment of the usefulness and value of art in general, especially poetry. Poetry is not as visible as the dance or the theatre performance. It initiates a more private and personal