In an article from Magma magazine, the poet Matthew Caley puts the case quite clearly and simply for an innovative language-based poetry in Britain:
Whilst it might be supposed that this technique forestalls 'meaning', words continue to be signifiers of meaning[s] even when they are taken out of their original contexts or syntactically shuffled. I found the poem actually picked up bits of news from the contemporary media, fragments of personal life, and arguments from my reading at the time — like static, building them into pertinent inter-relation.
You might want to compare it with the mainstream poet David Constantine's Aspects of the Contemporary (i): What good does it do?, a companion piece beginning Poetry is alive and well in Britain. Much of what is said here I find unexceptionable – it is the lack of any real clarity or distinctions, a desperate desire to be in the middle, (not too innovative, not too experimental) that exposes the vacuity of a "mainstream" that has genuinely nothing to say about poetry.
Will Rowe, poet and Professor of Poetics at Birkbeck, makes a strong defence of the vanguardist tendency, attacking the pusillanimity and deadness of the mainstream, through Poetry: The Basics by Jeffrey Wainwright. Stating a series of propositions about the two tendencies, rather than historicising, but doing so quite clearly & with many quotations:
If poetry 'replicates' experience, then why bother with the experience of poetry? It's just cultural capital, to be managed and accumulated. Desire: 'an art that can not be made use of, least of all by the people who are "cultured"' (Tom Raworth, 'Notebook').
The trouble with creating a transferable model called regular metrical poetry is the diminishment both of the now of reading and of the past. Regular rhythm gives exactly that completeness, like a memory preserved in a drawer, which the early poems of Raworth, Harwood, and others renounced for the sake of truth. The issue is rhythm, where poetry touches the outside, and not metre as mark of what's special about poetry. To widen the hypothesis: what was done to the poetry of the 70s and 80s was a sealing off of 'that which capitalism, or indeed any established society, hates to need – the vitality of original information' (Jeff Nuttall, Art and the Degradation of Awareness). This keeps the question alive.
The poet and academic Ian Davidson's new book has its first chapter ("Aesthetics of Space: Cubism to Language Poetry") freely available as a taster – and tasty it is, with a very clear introduction to the poetics of both the Classic avant-garde (eg dada – major influence on Bob Cobbing, and thus many "London" poets) and the American Language poets.
Andrew Duncan is actually talking about his translations of German language poetry (and its problems), but makes this interesting comment on the British avant-garde and its social in-groupness:
This bandwidth is worth dwelling on – because I think it also points to the defining qualities of a sector of British poetry which has no name. This sector would include Chide's Alphabet, certainly. It is separate by default – because the most accessible poetry outlets simply ban that kind of poetry. This means that outlets which don't ban it tend to become specialised – they collect so much of the "extreme" poetry that they reject the "centrist" poetry. If I read only such poetry, it may be because of an emotional polarisation, a kind of group identification. You can identify with a football team while recognizing that the other team is playing aesthetically better football. This identification is buried a long way back in my life, 20 years, 25 years – so it's hard for me to be sure that it exists. If you follow an aesthetic pattern for 20 years, it carves itself so deeply into your brain that it becomes like a building – like an institution. The set of these institutions constitutes the city we live in, the aesthetic landscape into which poetry is published. They are simultaneously "the landscape" and "purely internal"; rigid, and the product of arbitrary choice. Explaining the "layout" of poetry in a given country tends to drift over into describing the history of poetry – because these formations are tenacious. However, the existence of reflexive poetry in, so far as I know, all European countries, tells us that its motivation is not historical but structural. The brain's constant move from being free to being programmed is central to poetry – because in modern times poetry is associated with the experience of freedom. (This may not have been so in the historic past.) The reflexive style is a challenging task for readers who are super-skilled at reading – hyperliterate. So it is prestigious but not likely to sell in big quantities. The lack of commercial penetration also means that this more specialised poetry is less easy to find for the foreign observer. You have to wade through a lot of conventional poetry before discovering the experimental stuff. There is another effect – which is that you need a very deep command of a language to understand the more ambitious poetry; and in fact that up till that point the more formal poetry will seem bewildering, undermotivated, and slight.
Though ostensibly about the American poetic movement, Love has a British focus, and his comments relate to some of the practices of the British avant-garde also ("linguistically innovative poetry").
Andrew Duncan, hoping that it will become a fetish book, one of the die-for possessions which set starry-eyed youth in Pudsey, Motherwell, and West Penwith on the path to la gaya scienza, reviews this anthology, taking up information theory concepts of chaos to fine and stirring purpose. It's not easy reading, and it quotes from the poets and discusses general theory rather than giving closer analyses; but it provides a rigorous argument for the writing, even if:
Your response, reader, may be "f&&k me! what are they talking about?" Rest assured that I do know. It's my trade. (Or do I?) It is fair to say that these passages show a rapid cutting technique; the selective quoting understates the overall diversity (or incoherence) of the poems; the unpredictable quality of the verse movement defies rational expectations and so is analogous to chaos as a concept in physics. The passages in question offer the following problems: the poet's personality, normally deduced from the coherent flow of the text, as the gradient which drew it, is missing; there is a lack of connection and of explanation; objects are presented from their least familiar angle; there is a shortage of affect and identification is difficult; they do not offer a moral picture, in which people are seen to be good or bad. My review will be based around these topics.
There is no New Right in poetry. But the idea of experimental poetry was marginalised, repressed, and very thoroughly hidden under lies by a wave of people who didn't wait for funding from American foundations linked to the military-industrial complex. This wave of cultural conservatism, which has shown some signs of breaking up during the past five years, was distinguished for its belief that it was Left and populist, and so wasn't cultural conservatism even if it did roll back the rules and artistic theory to the 1950s. This devastated and parasitical growth is registered as the real history by other anthologies. The past as damage, more or less. Would it be a good idea to mediate the ideas of radical poetry to a new and young audience, who have been lied to all their lives about the history of poetry in Britain?
In the second part, Duncan takes off on estrangement ("ostranenie" is the Russian Formalist term) and deals with (psycho-) political implications of the poetry:
A feature of the 1960s was the death of genre: the rules linking ideas on a larger scale than the line were simply abolished, and the new poet had an empty space for building designs in. We have a lack of names for the designs of poems; critics feel a huge relief when they manage to identify a modern poem with one of the traditional genres, but the point is that awareness of design was very weakly developed until recently, and poets were recycling forms derived, often, from the Hellenistic and pre-Christian past, without thinking them through. At present, conventional junctures stick out like sore thumbs. Overall design is the most interesting aspect of the poem; an easy way out is to make the personality the source of all decisions, so that the poem simply presents the self, and has only to copy from nature. This, as a way of utilising an empty stage, is despair. The abolition of genre causes the reader problems: if you don't know how the parts are going to fit together, how do you know what to notice? People get angry because they have binding expectations and the poet doesn't fulfil them. I think you just get used to this; anyway, very similar severings of rules have been felt in cinema, pop music, painting, etc. In the suspension of logical associations, poets are judged by the speed and style of their irrational montages, of which there are a thousand kinds. Maybe I should sit around and think of names for them all. Arguably, every modern poem belongs to a different genre, because its high-level structure is unique.
If the past is damage and knowledge is the shape of the past, then one wishes to lose knowledge because its structure is damage. Writing through experimental rules offers severance from experience. This conflicts with the precept of making the personality the centre of poetry: target number one, perhaps, of thirty years of radical poetry. The exemplification of a timeless truth is replaced by the hypothesis: the poet devises a possibility and writes exemplifications of that, perhaps enabling us to think about the nature of language or of social conditioning by doing so. The hypothesis is a form of ostranenie. The experiment is like play, which is also a form of free activity governed by rules; we repeat play acts until they lose their fascination, and that is probably also the regime for experiments. They belong to the primary level of art by this playful quality, and, because they produce objects which are strange, perplexing, free, inconstant, they ask for participation. Art which isn't experimenting with the world is a dreary proposition.
The mainstream approach is to take feelings, and awareness generally, as sacrosanct, merely unquestionable: a great swathe of the radical and experimental wing is pursuing a project of criticizing the immediate data of awareness, so as to find out the truth, and so become less selfish and more authentic in behaviour towards others. If one concedes that inner awareness is complex, oscillating, easily influenced, and partly contradictory, it is hard to see where the consistency of mainstream verse comes from: one must suspect that it is reached merely by following rules, and these rules are specified by the market for the poetic product. However, if one believes that there is a reason set above these turbulent data, which speaks through them and can criticize and reject them, one has a complex flow of information, laminated, qualified, reversing itself, which can fill complex poems. Behind Mellors' comment [which Duncan has just rephrased] lies a theory, expounded notably by Andrew Crozier, that the poem as domestic anecdote is the source of the huge tedium which surrounds us; the theory is too simple, but the ennui is real. Writing poetry is different from being a radio personality.
Based on a close reading of the First Generation New York poet Koch's poem, "The Brassiere Factory", Watkin, a poet and academic, establishes a lot that is more generally relevant about Koch's still quite unrecuperated poetic procedures:
I want to use the trope of the poem as a machine that is used by Koch himself. The reasoning behind this trope is simple. First, a machine is a repetitive engine and much of Koch's poetry operates along similar lines. Second, language as a machine is central to the poststructural theory that informs this essay. Third, modern linguistics has made the study of poetic language much more mechanistic. Finally, to make poetry into a machine is to undermine two central tenets of the ontology of western poetry since Romanticism: that it is a mode of subjective expression, and that it somehow represents something real. In contrast, if poems are machines then subjectivity is irrelevant and a qualitative reproduction is negated in favour of quantitative production.
A careful reading of this casual reminiscence reveals, therefore, three clear features of the avant-garde in Koch's poetry: rejectionism; the technical side of found objects, chance encounters and semi-automatic writing (he finally writes the poem immediately based on a strange phrase from his unconscious); and the removal of the gap between art and life. There is also a fourth, critical aspect which is crucial to Koch's work, evidenced by his mockery of deep-themes-one cannot help but see the comic consonance between the physical restraint of totalitarian ideologies and that of bra straps-and of the Wordsworthian ideal of recollection in tranquillity. It is fantastically silly but under the carefully paced surface, reminiscent of stand-up comedy, there is a real commitment, on Koch's part, to the radical tenets of the avant-garde.
Wherein Peter Riley talks of many things, including his own writing, and issues concerning both lyric and pastoral poetry, modes both central to contemporary British writing, but also subject, necessarily, to severe questioning. Many good and enlightening things are said by him.
The post-avant is a term you may encounter and may well tremble at! I'd get it from Peter Bürger's excellent Theory of the Avant-garde (Theory & History of Literature). The American poet and scholar Reginald Shepherd, whose recent death is very tragic, has a good account on his blog of the term's use in the USA. Fight your way through some long sections on concepts of groups or schools in literature, and there is some clear explanarion.
Post-avant writers tend to eschew the standard and standardized autobiographical or pseudo-autobiographical anecdote which predominates in what's called (usually pejoratively) "mainstream" poetry. Indeed, they frequently problematize and question the notions of self and of personal experience. But they don't just discard the self as some kind of ideological illusion. As well, they tend to avoid or at least seriously complicate narrative, often breaking story down into its component parts. They incorporate fracture and disjunction without enthroning it as a ruling principle (poet Cynthia Cruz calls much of this work "the broken lyric"). They are interested in exploring, interrogating, and sometimes exploding language, identity, and society, without giving up on the pleasures, challenges, and resources of the traditional lyric. Their work combines the lyric's creative impulse with the critical project of Language poetry, engaging the dialectic of what critic Charles Altieri calls lyricism and lucidity and what, earlier, W.H. Auden called enchantment and disenchantment without settling on one side or the other.
