Poetry: Approaching the Avant-Garde

Splash! Fall 2010 Andres Sanchez

Class Description:

“Foreigners, because they never have enough words to express their ideas, often invent remarkable new modes of expression. Poets are all foreigners.”-Denis Diderot

Poetry extends beyond sonnets, iambic pentameter, rhymed couplets, and everything else we are taught about poetry. Those elements barely scratch the surface of the endless abyss that is poetry. We want to try and get a hold of what we don’t already know about poetry, expanding our definitions of poetry, and hopefully gain an appreciation for the poetic practices of the avant-garde. We want to discuss what it means to be avant-garde, looking at formal and experimental poetry. We will take a close look at the experimental forms of sound, conceptual, and non-intentional poetry. And, at the end of the class, we will write our own avant-garde poems, and hold a mini-performance!

Formal and Avant-Garde Poetry (10:10 am-10:30 am)

We will discuss the differences and similarities between formal poetry and avant-garde poetry. We will look at classic examples of formal poetry, including one of William Shakespeare’s sonnets and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”. We will then look at avant- garde poetry, that being David Antin’s “what it means to be avant-garde.”

Reading: 1) William Shakespeare “Sonnet 18 [Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day]” 2) Edgar Allan Poe “The Raven” 3) David Antin “what it means to be avant-garde” pages 41-42, 60-61

Sound Poetry (10:30 am-10:50 am)

We will discuss how is fueled by vocal performance and human speech instead of images and conventional aspects of formal poetry. We will listen to works by famous sound poets Christian Bök and Tracie Morris.

Reading/Listening: 1) Christian Bök “Mushroom Clouds” 2) Christian Bök “Motorized Razors” 3) Tracie Morris “Project Princess”

Conceptual Poetry (10:50 am-11:10 am)

We will discuss how conceptual poetry takes found texts and creates an axis of organization for a sea of information. We will look at works by the famous conceptual poet .

Reading: 1) Kenneth Goldsmith Soliloquy, page 108-109 2) Kenneth Goldsmith, “ Conceptual writing obstinately makes no claims on originality. On the contrary, it employs intentionally self and ego effacing tactics using uncreativity, unoriginality, illegibility, , plagiarism, fraud, theft, and falsification as its precepts; information management, word processing, databasing, and extreme process as its methodologies; and boredom, valuelessness, and nutritionlessness as its ethos. Language as material, language as process, language as something to be shoveled into a machine and spread across pages, only to be discarded and recycled once again. Language as junk, language as detritus. Nutritionless language, meaningless language, unloved language, entartete sprache, everyday speech, illegibility, unreadability, machinistic repetition. Obsessive archiving & cataloging, the debased language of media & advertising; language more concerned with quantity than quality. How much did you say that paragraph weighed?” 3) Christian Bök, “Recent trends in technologies of communication (such as digitized sampling and networked exchange) have already begun to subvert the romantic bastions of "creativity" and "authorship," calling into question the propriety of copyright through strategies of plagiaristic appropriation, computerized reduplication, and programmatic collaboration. Such developments have caused poets to theorize an innovative aesthetics of "conceptual literature" that has begun to question, if not to abandon, the lyrical mandate of originality in order to explore the potentials of the "uncreative" be it automatic, mannerist, aleatoric, or readymade, in its literary practice. Some of the modernist notions of the both accidental and the procedural have begun increasingly to inform the current writing, by poets who find inspiration in the principles of . Such poets have begun to use stolen texts, random words, forced rules, boring ideas, and even cyborg tools, in order to mobilize a variety of anti-expressive, anti-discursive strategies that erase any idiosyncratic demonstration of "lyric style." Such activity has become one of the most radical, if not one of the most popular, limit-cases of the avant-garde at the advent of the millennium.”

Non-Intentional Poetry (11:10 am-11:30 am)

We will discuss non-intentional poetry and how it undermines the very thing that we think poetry stands for. We will look at works by Jackson Mac Low.

Reading: Jackson Mac Low, Asymmetries 1-260

Writing and Performance (11:30 am-11:50 am)

Everyone will compose an avant-garde poem, hopefully in a conceptual, sound, or non- intentional form, and each student will have a chance to perform the piece at the end of the class. Students can, if they choose to, leave their poems with me and I will edit and make suggestions on the piece and the students can pick it up at the end of the day.