"The Avant-Garde Tradition"

This is one of my favorite phrases. Who coined it? Ron Silliman? Marjorie Perloff? Anyway, I trust s/he had tongue at least partially in cheek. But I think both would agree that some versions of the "Old" avant-garde are still alive, if not well. Which I guess is not avant or arriere, but more like being a subculture, like the Rainbow Nation or Society for Creative Anachronism. Which is fine with me, as long as you don't really think it's 1967 or 1215.

Three addenda to the list in the previous post:
- self-image as intellectually/ethically superior (if not salvific) remnant community (read: classing off)
- heroically nihilistic irony; deadly serious levity
- you gotta have the right clothes.

Of course, this is the worst of the self-conscious worst. There are some young'uns doing unconventional work with a self-deprecating humor about it. Or who don't worry about being original or unique when they write or paint (I can't help but like Brenda Coultas). But, paradoxically, it does seem as though being avant is "in" - that is, it is indeed becoming institutionalized, which is what always happens. It's not a matter simply of the "poets of quietude" defecting (or passing), but of younger poets choosing to specialize as Experimentalist.

Then there is the inevitable populist backlash; if you don't believe me, come to Kansas. [for an account of the previous cycle, in the early part of the last century, see Poetry and the Public]

BTW, it's "soi-disant," Joe, NOT "soi-dit" (tho personally, I like that version better).

And, yes, the implication is indeed that I am a capitalist running-dog. Anyone who owns their own home (read: mortgage), and is not about to be foreclosed upon, is now officially a capitalist running-dog - at least until the economy starts looking up.

"The Avant-Garde Is Neither"

Is it just my imagination, or is the soi-dit avant-garde of today replicating all the cliches?

- artist as heroic, suffering outsider
- military metaphors
- epater les bourgeois (Fr., "freak the squares")
- fetishization of the new
- imagining they're doing something new
- liberal artistic use of bodily fluids
- apolitical politics (a.k.a., "speaking out")
- political metaphors
- anti-academism (Lat., "too cool for school" - advanced degrees notwithstanding)
- creeping academization & institutionalization (in it, but not of it, of course)
- radical formal claims
- drawing within the old generic lines anyway

Or, said another way, how elderly am I, really? I'm not avant or arriere, I just run alongside, nipping everyone's heels. And chasing my tail. And occasionally licking my balls. Being invisible has its advantages.

Speaking of Texas . . .

. . . isn't it about time the Canadians launched a giant banana into orbit above it?

Non blogito ergo nil?

That's pig Latin for "if you don't update your blog for over a week, to you begin to become insubstantial?" That is, if "blogito ergo sum," as I have elsewhere proposed in these pages, then, if you begin a blog but don't maintain it, do you lose whatever ontological credit you have accrued? No - that's far too Catholic. Really, it's more that the simulacrum "Joseph Harrington" is losing its hyperreality. Or some such. In any event, I can't help but notice that I can see right through myself. And probably so can you.

Lest We Regret . . .

Memorial Day got me to thinking. I recently spent the night across the street from the 4000th American service member killed in the Iraq War (remember him?)*. He was a kid from Mission, Texas, in the lower Rio Grande Valley, one of the poorest areas of the US. He is buried in the large and finely-manicured Lower Rio Grande Valley Veteran’s Cemetery. This is a new cemetery, until recently one of the last remaining tracks of thorn-scrub and live-oak forest along the Rio Grande. But now the sprinklers spit constantly over the graves of the fallen (or soon-to-be fallen).

It seems to me that The Grave of the 4000th Fatality should replace The Tomb of the Unknown. This newer burial captures it all. The US won’t - or can’t - provide jobs or housing for poor people, so it sends them off to be killed in foreign wars (cynics would add “for oil”). The US won’t preserve endangered ecosystems, but it will plow them under so that the poor dead people will have a place to be buried - a place which will then be turfed and watered until the Rio Grande runs out (the river that became the US-Mexico border after a big war back in 1848 - the place where a big wall is being built this month to keep out all the brown people on the other side).

Add a “0” to the number of fatalities and you’ll get something close to the number of horribly maimed service members (remember them?). Add a “0” to that, and you’ll be closer to the number of dead Iraqi people.

I heard a story about a gravedigger at a military cemetery. He found relief from PTSD by digging graves for his fallen comrades. If you were to speak to the family of the latest entered service member, what would you say? He responded: I’d tell them, Don’t worry, I’ll take care of him now.

* More accurately, one of fatalities numbers 3,997 - 4,000 - 4 soldiers were exploded at the same time.

Back from Jungles of South Texas

South Texas is still there, but drier than ever. And they're about to build a wall through it. Not only will this make "America" look a lot like Berlin, but it will also greatly add to the incomes of coyotes and drogeros (and cut off some of the best wildlife habitat in the USA - without giving it back to Mexico).

All of which left me wishing for a bunny photo from the west coast of Canada, which is what this is.

And Now, For a Brief Interlude

What with grading and all, I'm going to take the next week off from this blog. I mean, it's just too stressful. So between May 6 and 17, I will cease to exist. Over and out for now.

The Aesthetics of Abjection

When Ms. Hathaway spies “Perfesser” Bodine hitting his head with a board, he says, with genuine dismay, “We artists have to suffer for our art, and I haven’t done my sufferin today!” He would not look at the milk scum but, during the performance, ate (or drank) it and thereby produced involuntary dis-gust on the part of the onlookers: not de gustibus but ex gustibus; not economics but economimesis. Having never brushed his teeth, he complained that Society scorned “its” poets, allowing their teeth to fall out. You don’t know what it’s like to be down and out in Paris and London and New York and San Francisco if you haven’t, like St. Francis or the Buddha, voluntarily set aside suburban parents in Omaha or nouveau riche in Beverly Hills to eat ramens among roaches, when young (the “you,” not the roaches). Yo, so how can you call yourself a 'sthete? For this reason, even while dribbling subjectivity across the page, Jethro nailed his palms, yelling, “Ecce Corpus! Et tu corpus? Eat your coprus. Hey! Over here! I fall upon the nails of life, I BLEED, already!” Thereupon he ripped up his diploma into equal and equivalent democratic bits to paste together a collage that was “down” with “The People,” to “stick it” to “The Man,” whom, one suspects, was Fr. Drysdale, sub specie aeternitatis. Or he became a fry-cook or a street-car conductor. But anyway, people, the least you can do is to LOOK, even if you don’t buy nothin. 


Poem a Day? . . . Why Bother?

Here are some comments from a poet friend who gave me permission to "publish this as [I] desire." Since I have nothing to say, why not! Here 'tis:

"...writing a poem a day in april seems somehow, to me, using time and space for words best left unsaid. maybe too, that is why my 'collected' poems would be somewhat slim. So fewer good and fewer bad poems for the world to ignore.

"Lang po discussions, unless you are academically attached i.e. a phd or something...are to me a dead end and same for flarf which will be the lang po of the 2020's in academia. there is no other 'school' today to kick around...is there...vispo or graffitipo or school of quietudepo or poetrymagpo are equally invisible."

[full disclosure: I have in fact been writing a poem each day this month (some of which have appeared in these e-pages), and I too think it's pretty silly. But a fun game. So let a thousand flowers gustibus! Oh - and I realized that, for the rest of my life, I never will know what it's like not to have a Ph.D., which is kinda scary.]

Still Alive

I haven't written anything on this blog lately, but that doesn't necessarily mean I'm dead. I am recovering from stomach flu, however, which is the next best thing. I was at least going to show you another one of my canadian rabbits before I crawl back into bed, but Bloogle won't allow it today, for some reason. So how about a found poem instead?

“We sight cast to tailing reds
a 25-inch west-side

caught on a popper. Waters
support double digit days,

vast unpressured flats,
thick seagrass meadows.”