In response:
Well, I think Language poetry, and other poetries that weighted linguistic
experimentation heavier than expression, were driven by several things in their
historical moment.
1. Lowell et al, all those confessional guys and gals, the suicide crew,
Berryman, Plath, had just cut a swath and dropped into it. There was something
deathly about reading one's own entrails and young poets perhaps didn't want to
repeat that particular experiment.
2. The banality of self-expression that derives from the fact that we all wanna
express the same stuff can be crazy-making for writers and readers alike. Go to
any poetry slam.
3. The centrality of the individual to artmaking was an artifact of the romantic
modernist myth, a myth that had been both politically manipulated and narratively
manipulated to produce an ideologically obscene picture of the Artiste (see 50s
movies about The Artist, and for their aftermath see current portrayals of
Artists in comic strips, cartoons, ads, genre fiction, etc etc all universally
hateful)
4. The linguistic turn in both philosophy and anthropology (that is, the advent
of Saussurean ideas in almost any field involving human production of ideas or
artifacts) meant that there was a kind of surreptitious hunt for the ghost in the
machine of language--Who was language, you might say. So the use of language in
ways designed to beguile out of its functioning its spirit, its laws, its own
"personality" seemed imperative, more important than any single voice.
So there were reasons. But maybe it is possible now to return to individual
voices without immediately being laden down with the baggage aforementioned.
Maybe. But still, the tyranny of narrative tends to pull any specificity out into
the sea of story, and in a culture like this one, where that sea is pretty much
turning into the Sea of Received Virtual Information, Bouvard and Pecuchet
hosting 60 Minutes, ya gotta hold on hard to the huckleberries to keep your _own_
breath in your body.
Ok, I like both kinds of poetry.
I've been sanding away at a dozen things based on Norse myth, hardly Fluxus
poetry, but as disobedience is a Flux principle, perhaps I could send them to
Roger if he promises to tell me if they are or are not tinged with fluxy
energies.
AK
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> In a message dated 04/22/2000 1:12:44 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
>
> << George Free wrote:
>
> > >If production was involved, it should be of the non-expressive,
> > >non-intentional sort -- a la Cage, Mac Low etc.
> >
> > Anyone read the "Gematria" stuff that Jerome Rothenberg did? It's
> > Flux-related, as it's process-oriented, nonexpressive (that is,
> > expresses the language as a thing in itself, not the persona of the
> > writer).
>
> AK >>
>
> Of course, I'm not a Fluxus poet, and I rather like seeing the persona of the
> writer expressed. I don't fully understand the other position, but I see
> capitalism as one big effort to wipe out the human voice and eccentric (read
> non-commodified) persona and replace it with manufactured voices or, worse,
> no voice except the "voice" of the commodity. When I think of all the
> beautiful voices of the poets I've read in my life, I shiver to think of a
> world where this kind of poetry did not exist, where poetry becomes only a
> trick of language and not an expression of human experience or vision.
>
> What is the prejudice against expression? Perhaps someone can explain.
>
> I know people fear sentimental manipulation (which I consider poetic
> obesity), just as I fear the poem devoid of the human touch (which I consider
> poetic anorexia). Personally, I love the persona. Besides, underneath the
> poem, or beside it, over it or through it, is indeed the persona that created
> it . . . and isn't literature (and art) in general just an excuse to reveal
> one's psychic guts and vision to a reader (futile as that desire might be)?
> Even the desire to hide the persona reveals such. Of course, this is a big
> world and there's always room for both. But personaly speaking . . .
>
> BP
