By Sophie Seita
Reviewed by Jim Burns
There is a problem here in that we are faced with the difficulty of
defining the avant-garde. Sophie Seita offers the following
suggestion: “The word
avant-garde is popularly understood to refer to an individual or
group with an anti-establishment attitude, producing stylistically
innovative work, often with political aims in mind, sometimes
articulated aggressively against previous generations or against
tradition more broadly”.
She further says that, if this is the definition most people are
likely to accept, it has “led to a seemingly coherent set of
now-canonical and historical avant-garde movements with key players,
clear manifestos, and an identifiable style”.
Which seems to be true enough. There are books providing
detailed accounts of all the “isms” that are an essential part of
any history of the avant-garde. And there is what some might see as
the irony of those anti-tradition individuals and groups now being
part of the canon and often almost-revered by would-be
experimentalists.
Seita quotes Ben Hickman, who stated “an avant-garde in a university
is a contradiction in terms”, though it’s not something that she
herself would agree with. And the subversive thought occurs to me
that what we find in universities is not so much an avant-garde, but
often a mannered mode of writing (I’m thinking of poetry, in
particular) that seeks to separate itself from the kind of work that
most people prefer to read. Seita asserts: “Thanks also to the New
Critics’ appraisal of difficult modernist poetry, and its
incorporation into university syllabi, our own appreciation of the
‘difficult’ as critics and poets has reinforced a striking
difference from so-called mainstream and more-accessible writing”. I
think it was Norman Holmes Pearson who claimed that an academic
career studying and teaching modernist poetry had equipped him for
work as a cryptoanalyst when he was recruited for the
There are some other anti-avant-garde comments from a poet and
publisher, Richard Owens, who declares that “what publicly announces
itself as avant-garde through market and state-funded megaphones
scarcely ever is. Their daring lies in doing what others have done
with the blessings of the market” and “any identification with an
avant-garde or commitment to innovation paves the way to a promising
career in the culture industry”.
The literary avant-garde often made its first claims to originality
in the pages of little magazines. Seita says that “Definitions of
the little magazine have been debated as hotly as those of the
avant-garde, and these definitions resemble one another in telling
ways”. She quotes Elliott Anderson and Mary Kinzle as asserting in
their The Little Magazine in
America: A Modern Documentary History (Pushcart Press, 1978)
that little magazines “generally put experiment before ease”. I’m
not sure that this is always the case, though looking at
However, leaving aside the question of the general run of little
magazines, we can discern that Seita’s main concern is fixedly with
what she sees as the current avant-garde. I’m tempted to play
devil’s advocate and wonder whether or not there is an avant-garde
anymore? Some people would incline to the view that there isn’t. And
it’s often hard to single out what is avant-garde about much of the
work that lays claim to being in that category. Most conceptual art
simply stems from a few provocative acts many years ago. Marcel
Duchamp has a lot to answer for. Before him, they were painting
copies of the Mona Lisa, with
a pipe in her mouth, back in
There are some interesting comments relating to conceptual art:
“Lucy Lippard, one of the earliest scholars and curators of
conceptual art, defined it as ‘work in which the idea is paramount
and the material form is secondary, lightweight, ephemeral, cheap,
unpretentious, and or ‘dematerialised’. The dematerialised art
object was often supplemented or replaced by a text that outlined
the purpose of the object, or, in the absence of an object, of the
project, and labelled it as art”. I’m slightly puzzled by the
purpose of such an exercise which seems to relieve the artist of
having to actually create anything worthwhile in terms of an art
object.
Talking about art thus takes the place of producing it, which some
might say makes it ideal for a university. Other might want to see
it as a recipe for pretentiousness, and a refuge for those lacking
the skills to paint a picture or shape a sculpture. Conceptual is
usually a term applied to the visual arts, but if extended to poetry
or the novel could eliminate the need to write anything once the
thought about it has occurred. Félix Fénéon may have got it right in
the early-1900s with his novels in three lines, though an extremist
might want to dispense of the three lines as well.
Seita does appear to accept that from around the 1970s, “you notice
a distinct trend: the little magazine has become a
critical-theoretical apparatus”. She discusses the “Language Poets”
and their magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, and states that: “Although the
definition of Language writing continues to be disputed, the group’s
early critics generally agreed that it rejected the ‘expressive
self’ of the so-called romantic lyric and marked a ‘shift of
emphasis away from subjectivity’ “. There was no longer “the cry of
the heart” but instead “the play of the mind”.
It’s frankly not easy to get away from the “academicisation” of
Language writing as critics applied theory to it. And the question
might arise, was it almost a creation of academic critics who
ensured its success with reviews in influential magazines and
newspapers, and publication in trend-setting anthologies?
In fact, it could be suggested that Sophie Seita is
contributing to the “academicisation” with her book, which it can’t
be denied has been written for specialists in the universities and
colleges. A general reader who likes to read poetry for pleasure
(“How quaint”, the professors and poets may say, as they play with
their minds, though that can also be a pleasure) will find it
sometimes hard to get to grips with the academic nature of the
prose.
It’s difficult to know how much of the poetry that seemed to come
under the term, “Language writing”, if only because of where it was
published, did actually meet the criteria that was established for
it. Seita points out that there was a “more-divided and diverse
network than is acknowledged in canonical accounts”. She is of the
opinion that “Most critical studies of Language writing tend to
focus on a narrow range of authors”, and a limited number of
magazines. In contrast to this, Seita ranges around the avant-garde
little magazine network, and while doing so concludes that the work
in them can include poems that don’t necessarily conform if strict
guidelines are applied. I suspect it has always been the same for
any movement that, in retrospect, is seen as avant-garde. A glance
at the 1932 Objectivist
Anthology will come up with a few names that no longer find a
place in later accounts of the group. Robert McAlmon is one example
I can immediately bring to mind.
As the title of Seita’a book indicates, the emphasis in publishing
by so-called avant-garde poets has moved away from print to the
Internet. There are now numerous publications which exist solely
on-line. But Seita’s concerns rest with what she considers represent
an avant-garde. And it’s true that Internet outlets provide places
to experiment with typography and the like to usefully supplement
the texts of the poems. Publishing in this way also emphasises what
became obvious during the so-called “mimeograph revolution” of the
1960s - it’s possible to produce a magazine without having to
conform to commercial requirements. In addition, being on-line can
help to avoid the distribution problems faced by little print
magazines. Gone are the days of weary editors calling at scattered
bookshops with copies of their magazines, an experience I
encountered when editing a couple of little magazines in the 1960s
and 1970s. I hasten to add that I never thought of myself as
avant-garde, either as editor or poet, though as a critic I don’t
think I was unsympathetic when I wrote about poets who were seen as
practitioners of what was then often referred to as avant-garde
work. I did object to what I felt was almost-wilful obscurity.
I suppose the only difficulty is that, as happened in the 1960s when
everyone and his brother who had access to a mimeograph machine
(duplicators, as they were referred to in
Provisional Avant-Gardes
is a stimulating book in some ways, despite its insistence that an
avant-garde of major significance still exists. And there is the
worrying evidence that its academicisation has led to a situation
where so many poets are located in universities and other places of
higher education, and as a consequence feel the need to accord to
the ideas and opinions of those establishments. One has the
impression that if a poet who favoured the “cry of the heart”, as
opposed to the “play of the mind”, turned up on campus he or she
might well have a hard time of it, and almost certainly wouldn’t be
taken seriously.
I could be wrong, and it needs to be noted that Seita is largely
writing about the situation in the
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