Avant-garde Poetics Research Articles

Responding to the Rhythms of Labor: Lola Ridge’s Work Songs in The Ghetto and Other Poems

Although nearly forgotten by the end of the twentieth century, Irish-born poet Lola Ridge is now recognized as a highly influential, socially engaged writer and editor who was active in various Modernist and activist circles in the United States from 1907-1941. This essay discusses the lesser-known poems within the “Labor” section of her 1918 publication, The Ghetto and Other Poems. I suggest that these labor poems draw from and participate in the American traditions of work and sorrow songs, thereby positioning Ridge as an avant-garde poet of the working class, a kind of Modernist troubadour. I read Ridge’s “The Song of Iron” alongside Kane O’Donnell’s 1863 long poem, also titled “The Song of Iron,” drawing intertextual connections between these poems, both of which appropriate hymn-like rhythms that gesture toward the work and sorrow song traditions. I address how Ridge’s engagement with these traditions attempts to “make new” various images, metaphors, and cadences found in O’Donnell’s poem, and I situate Ridge’s “Labor” poems within the context of World War One, conscription, labor radicalization, and the suppression of free speech by the federal government. I offer close readings of select poems to further demonstrate her textual play with antiphony and other communal poetics and themes, all of which model on the page the collective action necessary to challenge the capitalist and imperialist aims of the modern era.

Ramon Llull and the Communicating Vessels Between Catholicism and Occultism in Early Twentieth-Century France

In 1919, the Avant-garde poet Max Jacob translated Ramon Llull’s mystical work, the Llibre d’amic e amat (Book of the Lover and the Beloved). In 1921, another translation appeared, authored by the Hispanist and Catholic activist Marius André. The plural strands of modern literary reception of Llull have only been superficially addressed. At the beginning of the 20th century, both Catholic intellectuals and Occultist circles considered his mystical and evangelical endeavors to have extraordinary imaginative potential. Catholic and conservative spheres were prompted to justify the validity and orthodoxy of Lullian doctrines, and to define him as a model. Simultaneously, pseudo-Lullist sources praising his alchemical adventures and the fanciful plasticity of his symbology were noted by Jacob and the Parisian Surrealist circle. This article analyzes the context of two modern translations of the Llibre d’amic e amat (Book of the Lover and the Beloved), as well as the motivations of their translators, to assess the confluence of interests and themes within these traditions. It thus showcases the interdependency between Christian apologetics, often connected to the Catalan intellectuals who were publishing Llull’s works at the time, and an international current of eclectic pseudo-Lullism, spanning from at least the 17th century, that was still influential in the works of pansophists, alchemical authors and Surrealist writers, and that would inform present-day, creative reception of the philosopher.

In and Out of the Text: Polish 1920s Avant-garde Poetics of Pleasure

“We are related to enjoyment as something which intimately belongs to us, to our corporal existence and inner vitality, yet is separated from and independent from us, and thus can be surprising, bewildering, burdensome, disgusting, overwhelming, terrifying, thrilling, conflicted, uncanny, uncontrollable (and sometimes even pleasurable)” – claims Aaron Schuster (2016: 44). According to the theorist, enjoyment can manifest as its opposite, especially in the context of its representations in literature. In this essay, I would like to look at avant-garde erotic poems from the interwar period that address the fascinating entanglement of the bodily and the textual. The metaphors of reading and writing, lyrical dialogue between some of the poems, metatextual reflections on the nature of erotic poetry, and the problem of embodiment are some of the strategies that Bruno Jasieński (Moja nieśmiertelność [My Immortality], Słowo o słowie [A Word about a Word], Na bis [An Encore]), Tadeusz Peiper (Naga [Naked], Ja, Ty [Me, You]), and Mila Elin (Książka [The Book], Głód [Hunger]) use to discuss the joys and challenges of trying to represent jouissance in the text. The starting point for my reflection is Alenka Zupančič’s diagnosis of a similar type of satisfaction coming from sex and talking about sex and her insights on the procedures of intellectualizing sexuality.

Przewrót w tradycji kulturowej Białoruskiego Stowarzyszenia Literackiego „Białowieża”: innowacyjna i prowokacyjna poezja Wiktara Siamaszki

The poetry of Viktar Siamaška brings a strong and radically new contribution to the literary heritage of the Bielavieža group of Belarusian writers in eastern Poland. His mainly short, even minimalist, verses strike fresh and unconventional notes, rich in wordplay, euphony, anaphora and palindromes in all the themes he tackles, such as family, ageing and death, religion (particularly his Catholic faith), urban and rural life, the latter including many fantastic, personified images; his view of the city is dyspeptic from Moscow to Paris with Miensk in the centre. Musician and journalist as well as avant-garde poet, his five books to date (2010–2023) are both challenging and stimulating. Adventurous in form on the page, their lexical range is broad, not least in the use of non-standard, previously taboo words. A whole study could be made of Siamaška’s fantastic imagery and metaphoric structures, but the present study is devoted only to an overall picture of his poetic achievement to date.

Сюрреализм в высшем смысле. Достоевский на страницах рассказа И. А. Бунина «Телячья головка»

The article considers prose miniature “Calf’s Head” in the perspective of Bunin’s reception of Dostoevsky, intrinsic peculiarity of the poetics of the former. Several episodes of “Crime and Punishment” are attributed as sources of Bunin’s story. The nature of intertextual interaction is perceived as an allusion that “scatters” the source into small fragments and in this respect is close to parodichnost’ illuminated by Yuri Tynyanov, as well as to the “shortened signsindicators”, as Zara Mints has put it, often used by A. Blok. Thus, the article complements the three-part sequence of Bunin’s assimilation of Dostoevsky’s artistic experience (imitation – parody – intertext) proposed by Daniel Riniker. Fragments of “Crime and Punishment”, which formed the basis of the plot of the “Calf's Head”, were two scenes connected by Bunin, and the proportionality of the cast of characters in both scenes supported such an overlap. We mean the depiction of Lizaveta’s murder and Raskolnikov’s dream – a vision in which men kill a horse. The central point of borrowing is the very gesture of dissecting the head and/or visual focus on the mutilated head. Taking into account the context, the paper clarifies the artistic task of Bunin’s intertextual experiment. The story “Idol”, which is adjacent to the “Calf's Head”, is based on the motif of eating raw meat washed down with blood. An allegorical picture provided here correlates with the rhetoric of Bunin’s anti-revolutionary journalism. Thus, if the verbal combinations “to drink blood” and “bloodsucker” are metaphors, then the plot of “Idol” will be a “lively”, “materialized” metaphor showing resemblance to Mayakovsky. Revealing the proximity to the avant-garde poetics, the author’s technique in the “Calf’s Head”, however, is somewhat different. “Want to discover properties of an axe? – you will get an axe”, – the author seems to tell his readers, bringing the lexeme itself to the forefront in the latest edition of the story. And in order to assess as clearly as possible what an axe is, it turned out to be necessary for Bunin to extract the image of this tool not only from the coordinates of rhetoric, where it was a metonymy of social revolt, but also to treat with deliberate neutrality the main literary source, in which the axe was the key component of material imagery. The latter notion is evidenced by an allusive and at the same time seemingly indifferent alternative way of arranging the personages in two intertwined intertexts. In Dostoevsky’s semiosis, the sign was produced out of an axe – a thing, an object stolen in the janitor’s room and hung by the murderer on his left side with a special ribbon. Bunin reverses this semiosis back – in his little oeuvre the abstract concept is being objectified as if striving for his original visual materiality. In his struggle for reality, the exiled author formed his own “realism in the highest sense”, built, however, not on reliable reality, as in Dostoevsky’s aesthetics, but on emptiness, a nonexistent world that has gone to the bottom of memory, i.e., to the same place where the impressions of the literature the author once read were located. The reproduction of this world required the writer to update his poetics radically.

Classicist, the Romantic and an Uncertain Eternity

In the second half of the 20th century, the Young Wave of Polish poets (the avant-garde poets born in the mid-1940s) clashed with Zbigniew Herbert (a member of the wartime generation, born around 1920) over generational differences. This dispute revolved around poetics (“plain speech” versus “classicism”) and subject matter: whether poets should deal with “contemporary times” meaning current events, especially focusing on politics, or whether they should rather invoke topoi of Mediterranean culture in order to view current events in the context of the permanent values of European culture. For Herbert, this was also a question of the writing strategy, as he felt that topicality should not dominate the interpretation of the poem and that poetry should survive past communism. Adam Zagajewski was chosen as a representative of the New Wave because his early clash with Herbert propelled him to the position of an adversary. Sadly, both Harbert and Zagajewski failed in their attempt at an exegi monumentum, as the educa- tion system of today has abandoned the classical tradition and many allusions to it are simply incomprehensible to today’s high school or even college graduates. Knowledge of recent history is not in demand either. Both poetics are unintelligible to a wider audience and in this sense they have failed.

“CHTO ZH! STAKAN DERZHA VINA // VYP’IEM ZA...”: ABOUT DERZHAVIN IN RUSSIAN POETRY

The article deals with mentions of the name of Gavriil Derzhavin in Russian poetry in 1790-2023. In the poems, the singer of Felitsa appears not only as an outstanding original poet, but also as a lover of truth, a statesman, a representative of the Catherine the Great era, and finally, a friend and acquaintance of his peers and the idol of the young Pushkin and Delwig. In later texts, the image of the real Derzhavin, as we know him from sources, including autobiographical Notes, becomes more and more blurred. Some hypostases of Derzhavin attract poets more often (poet and statesman), others are much less common (a friend of some of his contemporaries), some are not mentioned at all (literary theorist or the author of the mentioned Notes). Such a choice also influences the formation of the image of the poet among the general readers (for example, in the 20th century, one of the favorite plots is the description of the meeting between Derzhavin and Pushkin at the Lyceum, which is clearly related to the importance of this episode in Pushkin’s biography, but not in that of “old Derzhavin”), and among other poets. Avant-garde poets represent Derzhavin in their texts in their own way. Very few poets pay attention to the formal features of Derzhavin’s poems. Sometimes voluminous quotes from his work are included in poems by later authors (for example, by K. Ryleev and K. Simonov). A new poem by German Lukomnikov, lines from which are included in the title of this work, is considered separately: Derzhavin’s name is not mentioned in the text, the poet’s unspoken surname is encrypted in a compound rhyme.

The Awakening of Female Vorticism in Jessica Dismorr’s Textual and Visual Representations

Vorticism was a London-based avant-garde movement of art and literature in the early 20th century. Launched by Wyndham Lewis with “The Vorticist Manifesto” in 1914, Vorticism employed the depiction of an image’s movement and exalted the dynamism of the wartime machine age. Inspired by Futurism and Cubism, Vorticism is often considered masculinist, excluding women from the textual and visual canons. The British avant-garde poet and artist Jessica Dismorr (1885-1939) was one of the two female members of Vorticism. She contributed to the movement with her textual and artistic representations from its commencement to its demise; however, she was long overlooked by literary and aesthetic critics. This article, from intertextual, aesthetic and feminist perspectives, investigates how the textual and visual narrators in Dismorr’s prose-poems “June Night” (1915) and “London Notes” (1915) and her painting, Abstract Composition (c.1915) problematize the exclusion of women in London’s male-dominated city and public spaces and argues the relationship between urbanization and “Female Vorticism.”

Intersemiotic Modernism: Matija Ferlin’s Sad Sam Lucky between Poetry and Its Embodiment

Sad Sam Lucky is a solo performance by the choreographer and performer Matija Ferlin, conceived as part of his ongoing non-dance-like and non-theatrelike conceptual project Sad Sam, which started in January 2004 in Amsterdam, where the first part of this pseudo-durational piece was premiered. Ferlin’s performance Sad Sam Lucky is somewhat specific in the author’s oeuvre, mainly because it assays to become a physical response to the work of the Slovenian avant-garde poet Srečko Kosovel (1904—1926), translating it and transposing it at the same time, in-between languages and dialects (Slovenian, Croatian, Istrian, and/or English), and in-between performative regimes (embodied response and a pseudo-recital). Kosovel’s confessional poetry, i.e. profound, contemporary, tense in its stylistic imagery, and, at the same time, almost revolutionary in its ideas, is therefore being performed as a live matter of language, driven by Ferlin’s main idea — not to do theatre, not to do dance, not to translate, but to trans-body Kosovel’s verses, and his melancholic prophecy, thus creating a form of a highly physical, turbulent and emotional homage to this very unique avant-garde author.

Another Avant-Garde: Rethinking Tondar Kia’s Approach to Poetic Expression in a Transnational Context

Abstract This article explores the concept of avant-garde artistic expression and argues that it should be regarded as a transcultural phenomenon that surpasses geographical boundaries. It emphasizes the importance of adopting a transnational perspective to fully grasp the intricate interactions between diverse avant-garde movements across cultures and regions. To illustrate this point, the article focuses on the Iranian avant-garde poet Tondar Kia, challenging the perception that his work is merely a replication of Western movements. Instead, it proposes that a transnational lens enables a more comprehensive understanding of the distinctive contributions made by Iranian avant-garde poets to the global avant-garde movement. The article extensively examines Kia’s work within the local context of Persian literary evolution while also shedding light on the transnational aspects present in his compositions. It highlights Kia’s critique of established aesthetic norms, particularly the notion of organic unity, and explores his innovative approaches to rhythm, tone, and polyphony in Persian poetry.

About the Poetics of Sergey Rafalsky

In the article the author proves that the habit of researching the poetry by Sergey Rafalsky in the traditions of the Prague group «Skete of Poets» needs revising, because the poet emphasized his disagreements with the creative practice of that group and its leader A. Bem repeatedly. The author identifies some features, that indicate how the artistic credo of the «Paris note» influenced the poetics by Rafalsky, and notices the specificity, that allows us to speak about Rafalsky’s succession to G. Ivanov and G. Adamovich. The author analyses the poems, in which Rafalsky demonstrates implicitly his solidarity with the criteria
 of the genuine poetry in G. Adamovich’s comprehension and attempts to reconstruct intonations of conversational natural speech as adequately as possible, with its fragmentariness, understatement and incomplete information. All these
 features were intrinsic to the poets of the «Paris note». The author proves that the poems of Rafalsky’s late period ought to be analysed in the context of the creative quests of the poets of Russian Montparnasse, although the influence of the avantgarde poetics is still strong in them. One of the reasons of such esemblance is an intonation dominant of the poetry of Rafalsky, who makes the most of Lermontov's and Blok's legacy in this aspect. Both of these poets were the gold standard for
 the poets of the «Paris note», as well as G. Ivanov

Chrystal Ann Chemris. The Spanish Baroque and Latin American Literary Modernity: Writing in Constellation

Chrystal Ann Chemris. <i>The Spanish Baroque and Latin American Literary Modernity: Writing in Constellation</i>

The Limits of the Cute: The Persistence of Use in Lorine Niedecker's Poetics

In Our Aesthetic Categories (2012), Sianne Ngai theorizes the "cute," interpreting the turn to the small object in twentieth-century avant-garde poetry as a symptom of late capitalism's hyper-commodification. In response, this essay argues that the cute fails to accurately describe the projects of some avant-garde poets such as Lorine Niedecker. While Ngai's theory presumes a bourgeois subject who projects a sensuous relationship onto objects, obscuring the reality of commodification, Niedecker's poems do not enjoy the luxury of this projection. As a working-class poet, she is aware of objects' impact on her comfort and survival as part of her daily labors. Instead, Niedecker's poems offer a portrait of objects in use, recognizing the poet's reliance on material conditions to live, and further, to create.

A Double Margin

Studying the share of women in the historical avant-garde movements, Susan Rubin Suleiman (1990) supported Marguerite Duras's assessment of the avant-garde women writers as being “doubly intolerable” – since they do not correspond to the usual revolutionary point of view or that of women. Suleiman introduced the concept of the double margin to refer to the problem of critical and historical reception of women’s avant-garde writing. Since the procedures of the double marginalisation of women’s avant-garde poetics can be observed in different cultural contexts and literary fields, in this paper we will analyse the critical and historical reception of women writers on the Croatian and Yugoslav literary scene who contributed to the literary magazine Krugovi (Circles, 1952–1958) in the 1950s. Although this generation of writers interprets the aspiration of poetry towards a “universal language” (A. Rimbaud) following the avant-garde usages of grammar, figures of speech, and a depoeticised vocabulary, the traditional readings of women's poetics are often based on the expression of women’s experience, the mind and body split, and the biographical interpretation. On the other hand, the oeuvres of women from the Krugovi generation call for a revaluation of the relation between their poetic strategies and the possible gender politics of their poetry. Therefore, we will demonstrate the possibilities of this revaluation by turning to poetical choices, treatment of the lyric subject and the genre in the texts of Vesna Krmpotić, Vesna Parun, and Irena Vrkljan.

Introduction

The present situation urgently calls for the multifaceted studies of Russophone literature against war. The authors of the following essays develop their inquiry through the following questions: How does the relationship with the notion of the enemy shape the war poetry of Boris Slutskii and Ian Satunovskii? To what extent can the war poetry of the latter be seen as a matrix of his biographic narrative construction, especially considering that Satunovskii's lyrical subject is shattered, stuttering, de-language/d? How does today's popular poetry of protest differ from today's avant-garde poetics? What are the differences between their means of expression, address, and foci? All of these studies seek to explore the anti-war position in modernist poetry that has been developed through drastically different means, yet the general purpose is aptly formulated by one of our authors as “to bear witness and respond to the ongoing atrocities and destruction.”

현대 미국 아방가르드 시학에 대한 비판적 고찰

This paper provides a critical examination of the twentieth-century poetic avant-garde, a broadly radical and innovative aesthetic practice that constitutes an important contribution to the development of modern and contemporary American poetry. This study was motivated by the recognition that Conceptual poetry, a contemporary culmination of appropriation art, not so much embodies a provocative and progressive subversion of the hegemonic norms and values as represents artistic mediocrity and moral laxity of increasingly reified and alienated avant-garde poetics. Rooted in experimental modernism of the early twentieth century and the New American Poetry of the 1950s/60s, American avant-garde poetry has developed a distinct poetic lineage, offering a powerful corrective to the privileged lyric tradition and simultaneously serving as a critique of culture and ideology. However, I argue that twentieth-century avant-garde poetics has also exposed limits and pitfalls in its formation and promotion of the collectively prescribed aesthetic vision as well as inevitable blind spots and biases particularly concerning the issues of gender and race. Finally, this paper aims at suggesting the need to move beyond the reductive dichotomies between hegemony/revolution, conformity/oppositionality, and tradition/experimentation that have been normalized by the radical rhetoric of the avant-garde and to find “what will suffice,” to borrow Wallace Stevens’ words, in the new era marked by unprecedented existential challenges.

CREATIVE EVOLUTION OF SERGEY RAFALSKY: ON THE ISSUE OF RECEPTION

The article is devoted to the creative genealogy of Sergey Rafalsky, who was one of the most outstanding poets of Russian émigré in Prague. The author proves that, contrary to popular belief, Rafalsky’s poetry is consonant to some tendencies of Russian modernism and its follower, the “Paris note”. In addition to the influence of the soviet avant-garde poets, which were researched in the Russian Prague, the author identifies in poems by Rafalsky some features, that indicate, that he was influenced by A. Blok, S. Esenin, I. Severyanin, G. Ivanov and acmeists.

Specters of Minks: Postcapitalist Elegies and Multispecies Solidarities

While narrative approaches in International Relations (IR) have become increasingly prominent, posthumanist narratives of capitalism remain on the margins. Informed by feminist avant-garde poet Susan Howe and philosopher Jacques Derrida, I develop a ‘drift narrative’ approach to human-mink relations during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, wherein millions of minks in fur farms were infected by the coronavirus and culled. This approach employs the use of postcapitalist elegies constructed in a wildlife refuge located near a mink factory farm. In a context of global mink culls, the wildlife refuge – where minks live freely – proximate to a local industrial mink fur farm – where minks are caged and killed for profit – became the site of (re)writing IR in drift narrative form. This poetic analysis highlights trans-spatial links of animal capital and employs intermixed elegiac images, sound recordings, and textual fragments to help us become attuned to nonhuman dreams, desires, losses, and futures. Grounding persistence for postcapitalist futures within the dreams of the dead, the drift narrative generates a spectral form of global multispecies solidarity. Contributing to the interspecies and narrative turns in IR, as well as multidisciplinary work on multispecies solidarity, the drift narrative offers an aesthetic and ethical critique of past and future animal capital systems that render more-than-human life as killable.

All Things Modernism: An Interview with Jane Goldman

Dr Jane Goldman is Reader in English Literature (Avant-garde Poetics and Creative Writing) at University of Glasgow. She has research interests in Poetry and Poetics, Creative Writing, Ekphrasis, Modernism and Avant-Garde, Queer Theory, Virginia Woolf Studies and Canine Aesthetics and Animality Studies. She is a poet whose poems have appeared in several magazines and has published most recently Sekxphrastiks (Dostoyevsky, 2021). She is also a General Editor of the Cambridge University Press Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf.

EL MOTOR METAFÓRICO EN OTOÑO, ENDECHAS DE JAVIER SOLOGUREN Y EL LEGADO DE STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ

Javier Sologuren is one of the most notable Latin American authors of the 20th century because he renewed Peruvian poetry during the 1950s, he was a well-known literary translator, and he rigorously reflected on the French symbolist and avant-garde poets. He published his collection of poems, Otoño, endechas in 1959 where the influence of Stéphane Mallarmé’s work is observed. The article is based on the proposals of the Cultural Rhetoric of Tomás Albaladejo regarding the use of the category of metaphorical motor. Based on the concept of cultural imaginary by Antonio García Berrio, it is pointed out how the metaphorical motor works in Sologuren’s poetry based on the notion of the instance of enunciation and reception. Sologuren draws on Mallarmé’s poetics and restructures the French writer’s proposals to create a new metaphor. To substantiate his hypothesis, he also addresses the essays of the Peruvian poet where he talks about the peculiarities of Mallarmé and his ties with creators such as Paul Valéry or Guillaume Apollinaire.