Avant-garde Poetry Research Articles

Poetry and the Inapprehensible: A Genealogy

Abstract: Through close readings of William Langland, John Keats, Anne Carson, and Ben Lerner, this essay describes an enigmatic effect in and of English literature. Proposing Christian apophaticism as both source and analogue of literary styles, the essay introduces the concept of "apophatic effects," references to a literary realm not merely virtual but definitively inaccessible to perception. The imaginative leap that modern scholars value in English literature, epitomized by Keats's speaker's reflections on the urn, is a form of theological thinking that has forgotten where it came from. The essay touches on the relationship between literature and theology, the formation of the discipline of English, the definition of lyric, and Keats's influence on contemporary North American avant-garde poetry.

КАК НАСВИСТЕТЬ ТО, ЧТО НЕЛЬЗЯ ВЫСКАЗАТЬ

Art languages are not easy to study because, even if their syntax can be analyzed, their semantics poses a difficult problem. Natural descriptive language with its semantics as a reference to external objectivity does not work as a model for this area because, firstly, in this case the specificity of art as such is lost, and secondly, such a model is not applicable to music, surrealist painting, and avant-garde poetry. Understanding artistic symbols as directly referring to human emotions also cannot form the basis of a semantic theory of art since the connection between expressive means and emotions may turn out to be natural and not conventional, which contradicts the very idea of a sign-symbol. The right path can be indicated by the concept of exemplification, proposed by Nelson Goodman. Within this concept, some object that has some natural commonality with the signified — for example, color — is in a relationship of back reference with a term or concept that semantically refers to this object. However, such a semantic solution does not seem sufficient in the case of such «non-objective» arts as music since it does not answer the question about the nature of the signified itself. As a possible solution, the concept of «showing» is proposed, which, as an alternative to «saying», was put forward by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Saying and showing are seen there as mutually exclusive: what is shown in the signs of language cannot be expressed through language. In addition to the logical form, the object of showing can be the «limit of the world», understood by Wittgenstein as a synonym for the «metaphysical subject». What is common in showing the logical form and the limit of the world is the «method of projection». Thus, a musical phrase as an example within the relation of exemplification indicates a way of projecting the world that shifts its limit and accordingly changes the «experiencing of the world as a whole».

The Avant-Garde as Ecopoetics: Experimental Landscapes of Filipinx Diasporic Poetry

ABSTRACT The avant-garde is a socially grounded world-making practice, an aesthetic tradition envisioning collectively produced futures. By examining the modernist verses of José García Villa, this article locates Filipinx avant-garde poetry as an ecopoetic site, where nature, the environment, and human actors produce collective-making and consciousness-building exercises. Villa’s poetry does not only connote the bizarreness of being Filipinx American in the early twentieth century, but also illustrates how invoking queerness conjures new worlds outside our precarious moment. Filipinx avant-garde poetry demonstrates why the ecopoetic should not only seek to protect what is scarce but envision what lies beyond our present.

The New American Poetry , Personism, and the Cold War

Abstract: Stephan Delbos's deeply researched historical analysis provides new insight into American avant-garde poetry and art after World War II when, in its aftermath and the ensuing Cold War, certain poets and artists set American poetics on a new course. Delbos evaluates this movement from the perspective of recent Anglophone poetry whose concerns for identity and biography have left it oblivious to what was a fierce contest over a half century ago. Yet the famous anthology, The New American Poetry, 1945–1960 , has changed the terms of American poetry even into the present. The poets and editors involved in that bygone struggle were not immune to the Cold War's effects both at home and abroad; in fact both the avant-garde poetry and the contemporaneous avant-garde art, in being appropriated for the global struggle, also directly or indirectly reflected that struggle in the work.

Autotematyzm out of the blue. Kilka uwag o poezji Julii Hartwig na marginesie wiersza Reprymenda

The article discusses different variants of metareflection in Julia Hartwig’s poetry, situating them against the background of a comprehensive concept of the poet’s work. The analysis of her poem Reprymenda [Reprimand] gives rise to a proposal of authotematism specific to Hartwig’s poetry, here called ‘out of the blue’ autothematism and contrasted with the concept of avant-garde poetry. This metapoetic formula is then extended to other texts in the volume Jasne niejasne [Bright Unclear], in which the mimetic aspect of literature in particular is problematised and the ethical dimension of Hartwig’s oeuvre is highlighted.

Disputation on the Five Paradoxes of “ToiletPoetry” with a Prologue and an Epilogue

Among the works of Taras Kermauner, probably the biggest expert on Slovenian drama and its first theoretician, one can also find a single dramatic experiment: a courtroom debate on the value of avant-garde poetry, based on the case of the accusation against the poet Tomaž Šalamun. While Kermauner develops the genre of judicial disputation in a theatrically fitting and interesting way, he undermines the disputation with an anticlimactic, anti-dramatic conclusion that postpones the decision on the matter to another space-time. A closer examination of the text reveals several conceptual inconsistencies that can be better understood as paradoxes. Thus, the five points that might be defined as paradoxical could be traced in the text itself concerning substantive categories such as the essence of art, the meaning of a nation for art, art and Marxism, and life as the supreme aesthetic category, while the last paradox is a more formal one, since the courtroom debate, with its conclusion, does not reach any point whatsoever. Regardless of the sufficiently clear and pointed presentation of the positions of the two protagonists, the Prosecutor and the Defender, Kermauner decides, rather than escalating the conflict to a (theatrical) climax, to dilute the disputation based on the inclusion of the audience and the conclusion that the latter, in its role as jury, cannot decide for either side. The (dis)solution of the dilemma of the (national, artistic) quality of avant-garde poetry is thus left – despite the fireworks of Kermauner’s theatrical courtroom debate – to the future and literary theory.

Disputation on the Five Paradoxes of “ToiletPoetry” with a Prologue and an Epilogue

Among the works of Taras Kermauner, probably the biggest expert on Slovenian drama and its first theoretician, one can also find a single dramatic experiment: a courtroom debate on the value of avant-garde poetry, based on the case of the accusation against the poet Tomaž Šalamun. While Kermauner develops the genre of judicial disputation in a theatrically fitting and interesting way, he undermines the disputation with an anticlimactic, anti-dramatic conclusion that postpones the decision on the matter to another space-time. A closer examination of the text reveals several conceptual inconsistencies that can be better understood as paradoxes. Thus, the five points that might be defined as paradoxical could be traced in the text itself concerning substantive categories such as the essence of art, the meaning of a nation for art, art and Marxism, and life as the supreme aesthetic category, while the last paradox is a more formal one, since the courtroom debate, with its conclusion, does not reach any point whatsoever. Regardless of the sufficiently clear and pointed presentation of the positions of the two protagonists, the Prosecutor and the Defender, Kermauner decides, rather than escalating the conflict to a (theatrical) climax, to dilute the disputation based on the inclusion of the audience and the conclusion that the latter, in its role as jury, cannot decide for either side. The (dis)solution of the dilemma of the (national, artistic) quality of avant-garde poetry is thus left – despite the fireworks of Kermauner’s theatrical courtroom debate – to the future and literary theory.

Disputation on the Five Paradoxes of “ToiletPoetry” with a Prologue and an Epilogue

Among the works of Taras Kermauner, probably the biggest expert on Slovenian drama and its first theoretician, one can also find a single dramatic experiment: a courtroom debate on the value of avant-garde poetry, based on the case of the accusation against the poet Tomaž Šalamun. While Kermauner develops the genre of judicial disputation in a theatrically fitting and interesting way, he undermines the disputation with an anticlimactic, anti-dramatic conclusion that postpones the decision on the matter to another space-time. A closer examination of the text reveals several conceptual inconsistencies that can be better understood as paradoxes. Thus, the five points that might be defined as paradoxical could be traced in the text itself concerning substantive categories such as the essence of art, the meaning of a nation for art, art and Marxism, and life as the supreme aesthetic category, while the last paradox is a more formal one, since the courtroom debate, with its conclusion, does not reach any point whatsoever. Regardless of the sufficiently clear and pointed presentation of the positions of the two protagonists, the Prosecutor and the Defender, Kermauner decides, rather than escalating the conflict to a (theatrical) climax, to dilute the disputation based on the inclusion of the audience and the conclusion that the latter, in its role as jury, cannot decide for either side. The (dis)solution of the dilemma of the (national, artistic) quality of avant-garde poetry is thus left – despite the fireworks of Kermauner’s theatrical courtroom debate – to the future and literary theory.

Disputation on the Five Paradoxes of “Toilet Poetry” with a Prologue and an Epilogue

Among the works of Taras Kermauner, probably the biggest expert on Slovenian drama and its first theoretician, one can also find a single dramatic experiment: a courtroom debate on the value of avant-garde poetry, based on the case of the accusation against the poet Tomaž Šalamun. While Kermauner develops the genre of judicial disputation in a theatrically fitting and interesting way, he undermines the disputation with an anticlimactic, anti-dramatic conclusion that postpones the decision on the matter to another space-time. A closer examination of the text reveals several conceptual inconsistencies that can be better understood as paradoxes. Thus, the five points that might be defined as paradoxical could be traced in the text itself concerning substantive categories such as the essence of art, the meaning of a nation for art, art and Marxism, and life as the supreme aesthetic category, while the last paradox is a more formal one, since the courtroom debate, with its conclusion, does not reach any point whatsoever. Regardless of the sufficiently clear and pointed presentation of the positions of the two protagonists, the Prosecutor and the Defender, Kermauner decides, rather than escalating the conflict to a (theatrical) climax, to dilute the disputation based on the inclusion of the audience and the conclusion that the latter, in its role as jury, cannot decide for either side. The (dis)solution of the dilemma of the (national, artistic) quality of avant-garde poetry is thus left – despite the fireworks of Kermauner’s theatrical courtroom debate – to the future and literary theory.

Living Life as a Text/tile: Animating Asian Americanist Reading Practices

ABSTRACT This is an experimental work based loosely around my stop-motion animation, “Scare Quotes.” It asks – what is it like to live life as a textile? By imagining the self as a textile in my visual practice and writing, I consider Ornamentalism as an embodied reading and creative practice. I perform constructions of Asian femininity to critique their role in the avant-garde poetry of Gertrude Stein and Susan Howe. By stitching together the work of Lisa Lowe, Anne Cheng, and Mel Chen in this performance, I envision Asian Americanist critique as poetry and as a mode of living and feeling.

Studying Welty: A Visual Response

Studying Welty:A Visual Response Kain Kibodeaux (bio) In creating this word cloud, I asked myself two essential questions: what does a word cloud—generally and specifically to Welty—aim to accomplish and what does it, as a newfound, fast medium, do differently than other infographics and visual representations? To answer the first question, I believe that a word cloud allows the user or artist to convey nuanced and complex ideas in a small, organized fashion; however, and possibly more importantly, a word cloud simultaneously functions by allowing those ideas to coexist, communicate, and interact with one another. A word cloud forces the viewer to question the relationship between the various words and terms more effectively than other forms of visual representation. For artists such as Welty, the interconnectedness of their themes and ideas is vital. Welty's art is highly intertextual, genre-bending, and thematically intricate; to understand and appreciate her work, it is not enough to recognize each individual moving part but rather how those parts work, as a collective, to complement and bring awareness to each other and put forth a message. For example, female art and southern tradition coexist within the word cloud to accentuate Welty's observations on the South's restriction of female creatives, such as in a character like Miss Eckhart in "June Recital," a figure contained and scorned by her Morgana community. While the themes possess meaning separately, when in tandem, they posit a critique that, in some sense, transcends what the words can accomplish independently, a critique that frames the South's confinement of feminine art through more than just gender but also class and race. [End Page 141] Click for larger view View full resolution Secondly, to me, no other visual representation quite mimics Welty's literary process in the way the word cloud does. In reading her work, albeit a limited selection to date, I find there to be a chaotic orderliness, a phrase that highlights Welty's utilization of postmodern intertextuality, alongside surrealism, to create a discordant narrative that functions as a microcosm for the complexity of real-life socioeconomic inequality and discourse. For example, in "Sir Rabbit," the narrative unfolds along a dream-like hunting ground where Welty imbues King MacLain with aspects of African folklore (the trickster figure), Greek mythology (the Leda and the Swan myth), and southern tradition. To make the story even more complex, Welty employs comedy, nursery rhyme, and therianthropes. As these various elements cohabit the same short story, they converse with one another not [End Page 142] dissimilarly to those of the word cloud. Among all the chaos and conversation, Welty creates a cohesive work that levies a substantial critique against White, patriarchal society and society's complicity in continuing harmful myths and traditions, while also providing disenfranchised groups with the language to retell their own experiences. Of course, when I allude to surrealism, I am not necessarily referring to just the traditional tenets of bizarre juxtaposition, irrationality, and dream-like iconography of the early modern French movement, although they certainly find their way into Welty's writing, but more so, to what I believe we have come to accept as the focality of the artistic movement in modern times: an adamant refusal to accept life in its current state, a rejection of what was and is in favor of what could and ought to be. And, I think that is what I find so inspiring and fascinating about Welty and her work. [End Page 143] Kain Kibodeaux University of West Georgia1 Kain Kibodeaux KAIN KIBODEAUX is a first-year graduate student specializing in creative writing at the University of West Georgia. His academic interests include Southern American Literature, avant-garde poetry, and the creative essay. He plans to attend a PhD program upon graduation and/or teach secondary or tertiary education. Footnotes 1. Kain Kibodeaux is a graduate student who specializes in creative writing at the University of West Georgia. While he has studied Welty's fiction in Dr. Harrison's classes, he was asked to create a visual for the Eudora Welty Review website as part of his work as a GRA that led to this reflection. Copyright © 2023...

Intimate Editing: The Textual Poetics of Susan Howe's Collage Poems

AbstractSusan Howe's recent collage poems—an intricate, sui generis form—are the flowering of her editorial theory, which I describe as “intimate editing.” I challenge scholarly assumptions that sideline Howe's engagement with the field of textual criticism from accounts of her poetry by showing how her unique approach to texts puts avant-garde poetry and textual editing into conversation, introducing reciprocal possibilities for both. Poems can model new forms of editing, and editorial debates can expand the reach and resonance of innovative poetry. Drawing on The Birth-mark, Howe's collection of creative-critical essays that probe the motivations and ethos of textual criticism, I show how intimate editing expands the typical, often rigid, values of traditional editing and contributes to growing discussions about what a feminist textual criticism might look like. Then I discuss the collage poems, particularly those in Concordance, as whimsical manifestations of Howe's textual approach.

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.

Daniel Eltringham. Poetry & Commons: Postwar and Romantic Lyric in Times of Enclosure

In January 2023, the UK High Court ruled in favour of the wealthy owners of a large area of Dartmoor National Park who sought to overturn an assumed right to overnight wild camping under a bylaw in the Dartmoor Commons Act 1985. Provoking public outrage, much media attention and a protest attended by an estimated 3000 people, the ruling represented a symbolic moment in complex histories of land access and usage. Dartmoor had been, until now, the only remaining place in England that allowed overnight camping without the landowner’s permission. Such events highlight the timeliness of Daniel Eltringham’s Poetry & Commons: Postwar and Romantic Lyric in Times of Enclosure. As Eltringham eloquently argues, and as the Dartmoor case exemplifies, processes of enclosure continue apace into the twenty-first century, and the potent imaginary of the commons as a space for practices of resistance may be more relevant than ever. Furthermore, poetry engages with these issues in vital ways. By putting into dialogue Romantic-era poetry and British avant-garde poetry since the 1960s, Eltringham traces how and why post-war poetics returns to figures of the commons and practices of commoning in the context of interconnected forms of market-driven neoliberalism and ecological crisis.

Концепт МИР в языке авангардной поэзии и советской агитации

Концепт МИР в языке авангардной поэзии и советской агитации

МЕНА ИМЕН: ХЛЕБНИКОВ, АСЕЕВ И БИБЛЕР

The philosopher V.S. Bibler, relying on Khlebnikov, elaborated on the duality of verbal semantics: indication of formal action and performative production of action. The poetic etymology helped to distinguish the unchanging core of the indication of the properties of the thing and the changeable elements of performativity. But such a specific understanding of the social performativity of the verb was developed not so much by Khlebnikov as by Nikolai Aseev in his doctrine of the change of names, which gives examples that coincide with those of Bibler. Bibler places Aseev and other futurists in the shadow of Pasternak because of the extension of the doctrine of double action to the history of thought, making a number of hypotheses about the specifics of the development of twentieth-century Russian thought. We may speak of the poetic history of thought as an invention of Biebler. Bibler’s idea is prolific for philological analysis because it permits us, along with the syntagmaticity of the utterance, to single out the paradigmaticity of performative techniques, which facilitates a consistent analysis of both the Russian avant-garde poetry and the later poetry.

“World Literature” between Transcultural Poetics and Colonial Politics: Yang Chichang, Le Moulin, and Surrealism in Taiwan

This article investigates the artistic and political significance of the Le Moulin poetry society (Fengche shishe) to both Taiwan literature and world literature. Founded in 1933 in occupied Taiwan, the group consisted of Taiwanese and Japanese poets united by their aim to adopt the surrealist poetics that circulated from France via Japan. Although revisionist efforts have been made in the past two decades to integrate Le Moulin into Taiwan’s literary history, existing scholarship has largely adopted postcolonial and Sinophone frameworks. Huang Yali’s 2016 documentary, however, propounds the possibility of considering Le Moulin as world literature in Kuei-fen Chiu’s dual definition — participating in the formation of a world community of cross-cultural exchanges and opening up new literary worlds through aesthetic experimentation. This article expands Chiu’s model by contending that the Le Moulin poets’ subjugation by colonial politics and their controversial articulations of so-called “colonized mentality” were integral parts of their participation in and identification with world literature. This investigation of their political awareness and efforts to participate in the surrealist movement reveals how they unceasingly crusaded for the survival of a “world of literature” against external forces that sought to eliminate literature’s expressive potential in response to its time. Although their unilateral transculturation of French surrealism does not fit with David Damrosch’s model of translation and global circulation, Le Moulin’s contribution to the continuation and maintenance of surrealism and avant-garde poetry prompts us to reconsider and recognize the merits of works of world literature that have so far been marginalized.

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.

A Poetics of Thingification: Dawn Lundy Martin and the Black Took Collective

Abstract In the last two decades, African American poets working in innovative and avant-garde forms have produced poetry focused upon the theme of racial objectification. Individual and collaborative projects by Dawn Lundy Martin, Duriel E. Harris, and Ronaldo V. Wilson, who write and perform together as the Black Took Collective, practice what this article calls a poetics of thingification: a poetry that draws attention to language's capacity for reification in general and for racial objectification in particular. Drawing upon thing theory and recent scholarship on race and avant-garde poetry, this article focuses on Dawn Lundy Martin's poetics in order to demonstrate how poets combine innovative techniques with racial stereotypes to scrutinize hegemonic expectations at the level of poetic form, especially within the tradition of African American poetry. Rather than adopting the humanizing rhetoric and lyrical modes of conventional African American poetry, these poets use the trope of the objectified Black body to deconstruct linguistic processes of racial reification from within.

“Muses Beyond the Seas”: Spanish and Latin American Women Poets as Figures of the Transnational Avant-Garde (1920–1936)

The early twentieth century saw the emergence of an avant-garde culture, which marked a turning point in the literary history of Spain. Until recently, the dominant approach to Spanish avant-garde poetry has been a generational one. Critics have mainly focused on male poets identified with the Generation of 1927, which has been seen as a predominantly Spanish phenomenon. This study takes a different approach by questioning Spain’s exclusion from studies of the transnational avant-garde. By looking at literary circles and avant-garde magazines, this article provides an insight into the transnational exchanges between Spanish and Latin American women poets, who shared an aesthetic approach and engaged with avant-garde themes. It also examines the correspondence between Carmen Conde and Ernestina de Champourcín and highlights their connections to Alfonsina Storni, Gabriela Mistral, Juana de Ibarbourou, and Delmira Agustini. A study of the transatlantic connections among these women poets aims to offer a better understanding of the influences on their work, the impact they exerted beyond national borders, and the mediating role they played across cultural and geographical boundaries.