Ecriture Feminine and Women’s Transgressive Writing

Ecriture Feminine and Women’s Transgressive Writing



A Manifesto, a poem,
a performance piece, and
an academic article 
Three French Theorists walk into a lecture hall..
(Michel Foucault picks things out of the trashbin of literary history.
Voila! Stephen King’s Parking Tickets
Voila! Nietzsche’s Laundry List
Voila! Hemingway’s hunting license
Voila! Shakespeare’s supposed (typed) manuscript of his complete works
Barthes says L’auter est mort! Vive le lecteur! But who is speaking?
Foucault answers What does it matter who is speaking!?

Enter Cixous: Of course it matters, you patriarchal windbags. The author isn’t dead, She’s right here!”
“Why is that men on the left cannot see their own blind spots? You go on all day about the oppressors and post-colonial this and post-structural that but then you deny us our voices when it suits you, when you don’t feel the need for an author.

“Who makes me write, moan, sing, dance? Who gives me the body that is never afraid of fear? Who writes me? . . . When I have finished writing, when we have returned to the air of the song that we are, the body of texts that we will have made for ourselves will become one of its names among so many others. In the beginning, there can be only dying, the abyss, the first laugh”

Prologue: What is writing?

What is writing? Writing is everything. Writing is
communication, imagination, learning, history, memory, language, there is
nothing outside the text says Derrida, and I believe it and I don't.


An attempted poetic interlude

Stream-of-Consciousness Internal Dialogue

Writing is all the knowledge and creativity and creation and evolution and revolution and punk rock and heavy metal music and hymns and poems and treatises and manifestos and novels and academic articles and everything that we have learned and try to learn and strive to learn and
know and catalogue and categorize and put into boxes marked kingdom phylum genre order class marxist proletariat species human and text and chora and Oedipus and his daddy Freud and his Mama Jocasta and Hamlet and Cleopatra the queen and the movie the woman(en) and the myth(s). How can you not be self-conscious with the weight of all that history upon you and all that knowledge and that was only half a paragraph?

There is something outside the text. Unnamable feelings and joy and wild ecstatic movement and birds songs but the minute we identify it as anything at all, it moves inside the textual fence as it moves into consciousness from unconsciousness and there it sits until it becomes text and writing.
What's the use of the text? If we can't get outside of the text anymore,
then that makes the text a kind of . . . ideology since Zizek's theory tell us
that it is impossible to get outside of our own ideologies, outside of our own heads, outside of the text. Stupid Derrida. I hate it when he's right (write).
Death of the Author: God and Mother, a Parable

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the text, the word, is sacred. We cannot seem to get out of the tradition. For all of their post-modernism and the agnosticism that frequently comes with that, Barthes (and Derrida) also come out of a French tradition which was very very Catholic. Thus, I am going to make the story of the death of the author, male and female, into a comparative parable.

In Christianity, Jesus (the author) must die and be resurrected so that believers (readers) can have safe passage to heaven (the text). This is the male-centered conception of the author as the all-knowing keeper of the text and of meaning. And in fact, Barthes speaks of “the ‘message’ of the Author-God” and says that “to refuse to fix its meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases – reason, science, law” .

Women, however, have historically had a different relationship to birth and death, with many medieval women dying in childbirth. In this model, the woman (author) dies so that her child (the reader) may be born, but that child will be orphaned, with no one to guide her through life (the text). There is a “death/not death,” a voluntary withdrawal that happens here that can be seen as Cixous’ metaphor for the author. Cixous also talks about the (female) author as continuing “to have what she has eternally, to not lose having, to be pregnant with having is . . . the text, already in the child, in the woman . . . ” The woman is birthing the text, bringing it into being, and like giving birth, some of herself with leave her along with the text. But that text will not necessitate a death for the author. If the reader is a co-creator in meaning, as with Barthes, the author-mother will do so in conjunction with, not opposed to, the reader and the text.

Gender and Genre

All of this brings me back to Amy Shuman's “Gender and Genre,” about a possible “rejection” or at least radical rethinking of academic work and what it means to be academic, what it means for women who have traditionally done “expressive” writing – short stories and fiction, storytelling, to rethink and remake what constitutes academic writing. Is it necessarily less rigorous? What potential do we have to remake academic writing and not have it devalued, like so many things in culture become once they are associated with women and with women's work? Is rigor always to be male-defined? Must we adhere to traditionally “male” academic standards that we had no role in setting, but must maintain, nonetheless? And if we choose to change those standards or to not uphold and maintain those standards any more, will our own work be less valid? What would the new standards look like?

Right away on the first page of the article she talks “how people negotiate the categories that are imposed upon them” . Many of the restrictions of academic writing predate women’s mass entrance into the academy and represent patriarchal categories of what “counts” as academic writing, what “counts” as academic publishing, etc. I have underlined at least half of the first page in the book because it says so much that I have come to love and agree with.

Theories of gender and genre converge in their exploration of the problems of classification and the disruption of boundaries. Genre is often gendered . . . . Gender scholarship questions how cultural categories are reproduced and under what conditions women are complicit with or resistant to the reproduction of conventions.
Shuman continues, talking about the way that “genre classification systems could represent the values of a culture ”, and the way that “genre systems are as much about disputes, maintenance, and shifting of boundaries ”. Thus, it is no wonder that feminists coming to academic would question those kinds of boundaries.

Sol LeWitt's Sentences on Conceptualism question the use of rationality in art, and by extension writing, since in conceptualist art the link between the writing and theorizing and the actual making of art is dissolved. For LeWitt, “Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.” The first four sentences are about the connection (or not) of rationality with art:

1. Rational judgments repeat rational judgments.
2. Irrational judgments lead to new experience.
3. Formal art is essentially rational.
4. Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically.

Since women have been traditionally associated with irrationality, it seems that avant-garde art, at least by LeWitt's definition, would inherently be a feminine realm. Cixous carries it farther, saying that she “has no right to write within your logic: nowhere to write from.” Because she is a woman, she has “no fatherland, no legitimate history. No certainties, no property. ” With no “fatherland,” no history or tradition, a woman has no “genre,” she feels an allegiance to. It is all up for grabs for her to make her own history, her own traditions. And hence, her own, if illegitimate (in the eyes of men), genres.

The Liberation of the Imagination:
From “Feminine Writing” to Revolutionary Poetry

In the introduction to Feminist Critique of Language, editor Deborah Cameron cites a quote by Shoshona Feldman on language that particularly resonates with me and my work on poetry, language and liberation.

The challenge facing women today is nothing less than to reinvent language . . . to speak not only against but outside the structure . . . to establish a discourse the status of which would no longer be defined by the phallacy of male meaning.

Cameron elaborates further upon Feldman's idea, discussing briefly the work of French Feminists such as Luce Irigaray and Helene Cixous and a search for a "feminine writing" and "women's language." Cameron also raises the other side of the debate, citing Elaine Showalter's position that the issue for women is not so much a male-based "prisonhouse of language," as Frederic Jameson says. The very fact of access and entitlement for women to speak is not the inadequacy of language, or as Judith Butler would point to, the way in which language performs, enacts, speaks into being our condition. Others reject an essentialist strain that says that women need different language than men to express their lives, their realities, their psyches, their thoughts, etc.
To me the core issue here is that all marginalized, disempowered people, need access to a language of imagination. Not a replacement language per se, but a paralanguage, a language that works, functions on a completely different level than the ordinary, the quotidian, the banal, the mundane, and (consequently) the hegemonic uses of language. The language as it is now practiced, even if it is not inherently structured to protect and maintain power, it has certainly been subverted to that use, propagated in contemporary life, by the constant onslaught of mainstream media—advertising, news, the normative values promoted by almost all television programming and many movies. In insidious ways we are constantly being told what to believe, what to buy, how to act, how to be moral, how to be patriotic, how to look a certain way, how to fit in and belong in American society, etc. etc. How is one to rethink the world, remake the world, the government, the neighborhood, the culture, the communities we come from and live in, our own very daily existence, among the onslaught of images that perpetuate someone else's vision and serve up to us only the world as we already (think) we know it?

To remake language to find new
creative imagistic practices of language
is to make resistance possible to move us
toward our vision to have visions
never before possible

I am talking here about a language that speaks outside of the dominant discourse, whether racialized, patriarchal, class-based, etc., an un-discourses or non-discourse, a paradiscourse, that brings with it the chance to step outside, run alongside, that does not attempt to use the tools of power that already exist, but to forge new tools that could create new structures, new edifices not previously imagined. The techne, the tool, in many ways prescribes what can be built. We know that with new technology new ways of thinking emerge. So why would we not want new mental and imaginative linguistic tools of our own? As Sol LeWitt says, “rational thoughts repeat rational thoughts.” The way we think perpetuates itself, we continue to think only in the ways we've always thought. I'm not looking then for a feminine language per se, except insofar as it might offer a resistive language, a paralanguage that we can frolic in and search for something unknown, a Dada language a non-sense that leads to sense a zaum a de-formed formalism that will birth new forms.

What Do Women Want?

Women want to be avant-garde.
We want to be on the c u t t
i n g
e
d
g
e
of literature, to operate
(within)(outside of) the m a r g i n s.
(That is where we reside anyway.)
We are used to working within that area
and we are
good at it.

We have gotten so used to it that we are not actually considered avant-garde. It comes very naturally to us. This is what Cixous is talking about when she speaks (or writes) of the ecriture feminine. If we are actually paying attention to how we function within society, even at this stage, even in 2016, we have to admit to ourselves that our involvement in culture and politics is still very radical and we operate, when we are being honest with ourselves, oppositionally.

To be a woman writer or artist
is to be truly
and inherently
avant-garde
whether
(you know it or not) (you call yourself that or not).
The Revolutionary Work of Poetry: or, To Destroy Language
"If we could change our language, that’s to say the way we think, we’d probably be able to swing the revolution," says John Cage.
My own sentences on revolutionary poetics
1. To restructure language is to restructure thought, to restructure possibilities.
2. To scramble, if not permanently, which is impractical and will not lead to the world we want, but temporarily, the world as we (think) we know it, the language that binds us to the now, to put new ideas, new juxtapositions into play, new planets into orbit.
3. As an instrument of "instruction" and propaganda, it is subject to the same pitfalls that all other forms of discourse and communication fall prey to.
4. The avant garde is the "first wave," the ground work of consciousness, preparing the field.

Ecriture Feminine and the Petit Mort of Writing

One of my interlocutors was talking about dying little deaths, small deaths along the way of writing, this made me think of the petit mort, which is French for orgasm. And as I read Cixous and think about her ecstasy in writing, talking about the flesh at work in a labor of love, I think more and more about the petit mort as a form of women's writing . This is all over Cixous. Her writing is full of ecstatic phrases about what it is to write. She does not fear the death of the author, either actual or metaphorical. Nor does writing, for Cixous, promise immortality. It is an in the moment activity. In “The Author in Truth,” Cixous writes about “striking out for the unknown, to make our way in the dark. To see the world with the fingers: isn't this the act of writing par excellence? ” In her manifesto “Coming to Writing,” there are extended passages that are about losing yourself in mad love (amour fou, as Andre Breton wrote of), to writing, to a feminine writing. This is not a nihilistic death, as might be seen in Foucault or Barthes, but a joyous celebration of what it is to write. “The text, already the lover who savors the wait and the promise,” she explains. “Text: not a detour, but the flesh at work in a labor of love” . As if she were taking the death of the author literally, then, she says “in the beginning, there can be only dying, the abyss, the first laugh. ” In Cixous' definition of the text, I do not feel the need to repudiate stupid Derrida. I can accept that there is nothing outside of this text, this ecriture feminine in which all things live as long as they live. It is not a hedge against death nor
a headlong dive into death.
It is not about immortality and “what survives.”
Writing is its own joy, its own reward its own pleasure.
It is a petit mort that is meant to be shared.
It is a revolution in language that is meant to liberate.
It is a private moment, expressivist and confessional.
It is everything.


Bibliography

Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author,” Image, Music, Text. Translated by Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang Press, 1977. p. 142-148.
Barthes, Roland. “From Work to Text,” Image, Music, Text. Translated by Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang Press, 1977. p. 155-164.
Cage, John. M: Writings '67-72. Hanover, NJ: Wesleyan University Press.
Cameron, Deborah. The Feminist Critique of Language. New York: Routledge, 1998.
Cixous, Helene. Coming to Writing and Other Essays. Translated by Deborah Jensen. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991.
Derrida, Jacques. “The Law of Genre,” Bulletin of the International Colloquim on Genre. University of Strasborg, 4-8 July, 1979. Translated by Avital Ronnell. Speech.
Dworkin, Craig. To destroy language", Textual Practice (18)2, 2004, 185-197.
Lewitt, Sol.“Sentences on Conceptualism,” http://www.altx.com/vizarts// Referenced November 27, 2016.
Shuman, Amy. “Gender and Genre,” Feminist Theory and the Study of Folklore. Susan Tower Hollis, Linda Pershing, M Jane Young, eds. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993. p. 71-88.

Pointed Out Like the Stars: Women and the Avant-Garde

I was 21 when I entered graduate school for the first time, and while it was mostly a psychological and academic disaster for me, one very important thing happened that affected me for the rest of my life. I discovered Dada. I can’t remember what precipitated my discovery of Dada. Something in my memory tells me that it was just an accident of “surfing” the library stacks. What I do remember is my first book of Dada that I came across and checked out: 7 Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries by Tristan Tzara . I remember being hooked the first time I opened the book. A little bit later, I came across of one Tzara’s poems, “Le printemps,” or “Springtime,” of which I can still, 30 years later, recite the first line or two in French. I could not tell you what about the work attracted me, but it made me happy, then, as now. It was delightful in its esoteric non-sense and at the same time, made me feel liberated. To a very young graduate student in English, an artistic and literary movement that could inspire playfulness in literature, as opposed to weighed down with assignments that felt oppressive, made me rediscover and remember my love for literature. Even now, 30 years later, picking up a book about Dada or Surrealism, going to an exhibit, still has the same ecstatic effect on me.

At that time, I wasn’t thinking about women in the avant-garde. I didn’t think about the fact that women were not highly visible among avant-garde movements. Frankly, women were not highly visible in most literary movements. The women involved in literary movements were anomalies. That was what made them special—a woman among so many male writers. Moreover, this was the middle 1980s. Growing up female in the 1970s, in the midst of second wave feminism, which I was also oblivious to at the time, I was raised to believe that I could do anything, participate in anything. When, years later, I did enter the fray of discussions about women in the avant-garde, I would initially assume that, sure, women were not represented, but that was then and this is now. Moreover, criticism of the lack of (visible) women that were made, either historically or in the present, did not apply to me. I did not see myself as frivolous, I was not a “girly-girl.” I was a young woman who could hold her own with any boy or man, especially when it came to intellect. I was special, like those other women. If there were not very many women historically in the avant-garde, that did not affect the women of today who could do whatever they chose to do. It would not be until years later that I would question where the women of the avant-garde were and why no one seemed to be talking about them. It seemed some of them had to become visible to me before I could ask where the rest of them were.

Fast forward to November 2016. I attend a 100th anniversary of Dada celebration at a small gallery in Chicago, where I meet Penelope Rosemont herself, the legendary American Surrealist from Chicago who had, by all accounts, met Andre Breton and received, along with her husband Franklin, Breton’s blessing to start a Surrealist group in the United States. As this is the last weekend of the exhibition, attendance is slight. The four people in the room at the time, myself included, look and comment on the irony that 100 years later, it is a group of women exclusively that are celebrating Dada. The tide has turned.

The Avant-Garde: A Man’s World?

When you think of Dada and Surrealism, the “first” major avant-gardes, what names come to mind? Number one is probably Andre Breton. Marcel Duchamp. Tristan Tzara. Man Ray. Salvador Dali. It is only once we have used up most of the male names that we might remember Leonora Carrington, or Dorothea Tanning, Kay Sage, Frida Kahlo, Mary Laban, Sophie Tauber, Baroness Elsa, or Mina Loy. When we think about contemporary scholarship on women in the avant-garde or any literary movement, we can look at the numbers and who gets published in major anthologies, how the women get counted and talked about in that movement, and who the scholars are that are “writing women back into the canon.”

Surrealist Women by the numbers

In 1998, Penelope Rosemont published a very influential volume entitled Surrealist Women. The anthology includes a total of just under 100 women, although she drew from a much higher number. Many of them are the most prominent names in Surrealism, Nancy Cunard, Meret Oppenheim, Leonora Carrington, Frida Kahlo, etc. Rosemont describes her method in detail:

I consulted a vast number of surrealist journals, exhibition catalogues, and other publications. Whenever I came across the name of a woman, I noted it on a file card. According to these cards, some three hundred women—at one time or another, to one degree or another—have taken part in the international Surrealist Movement. (xxxvi).

Three hundred women, and yet at best, most people even in the know could probably only name about 25 women from Dada and Surrealism combined, maybe 50 if they are really knowledgeable.

In that volume, organized chronologically, there are 11 women from the 1920s and 24 different women published in the 1930s, (vii-x) the period when according to Mary Ann Caws, women began to become more visible within Surrealism (Surrealism and Woman, 2). There were 17 unique women in the section before the end of WWII, and 27 unique women listed as post-War, from the end of the WWII to 1960. In period of the 1960s and 70s there are 24 unique women published, and 16 in the final chapter, that goes up to the 1990s (Surrealist Women, x-xx).

Contrast this with Willard Bohn’s 1993 anthology, The Dada Market: An Anthology of Poetry, which contains only 4 women out of 42 poets: Celine Arnauld, Baroness Elsa von Freitag-Loringhoven, Emmy Hennings, and Mina Loy (vii). Arsenal: Surrealist Subversions, a journal which was edited by Rosemont’s own Chicago Surrealist Group and was published sporadically in the 1970s and 80s had approximately 15 different women writers and artists in the issue I examined, as well as statements from a number of Surrealist groups worldwide which no doubt (or hopefully) included women, out of roughly 70 entries (1).

Today, there are also any number of Facebook pages devoted to contemporary Surrealist practices. As of February 15th, looking at two different FB pages, Surrealist Revolution and Surrealism and Esotericism, there were 155 women out of 532 members of Surrealist Revolution and 67 women out of 211 total members of Surrealism and Esotericism, which comes to roughly 1/3 in each group (and there is some overlap between the two lists, but there are also some discrete names a well). There were a few cases where the names were ambiguous and not obviously women, and which further had no identifying pictures, so I counted those as men. However, it is the men who are more visible on these lists, whereas the women tend to “lurk” on these particular lists, mostly posting when they have something to share, as opposed to getting involved in discussions. Is this because they have been discouraged in the past? Is it because they are busy being artists and moms and wives and employees—maybe being teachers of art and/or students--all in varying proportions and simply don’t have time? Are they doing Surrealism as opposed to talking about it? Is it something else altogether for some of them?

In fact, when I posted something to these two lists , telling a little bit about my project and asking them to respond to my gmail account, lists which I regularly participate in and which were selected for that very reason, I got no responses at all and only one man “liked” my comment. Is it possible that no women got word of my call to participate? Is it that women don’t want to think about their participation in avant-garde movements or assume, like I did, that the issue is one of history and not a current concern? Are they tired of talking about it? I will never know, of course, why my call failed to generate a single response, but those questions are interesting to speculate on, in and of themselves. I was disappointed. I wanted to know if other women’s experiences were the same as mine were, what their paths were to the avant-garde. For the moment, I will have to defer this knowledge.

There is also the issue of women not wanting to be featured in women-only anthologies. Rosemont talks about this in the introduction to Surrealist Women when she talks about Anne Ethuin, who “declined to participate in one such ‘No Men Allowed’ collection” (xxx). Ethuin responded by writing:

I have never thought that art and poetry could have a sex. On days when I feel the urge to write or create images, I do not decide before I begin that I am going to make ‘a woman’s work. I have lived and worked for forty-seven years in a perfectly mixed milieu and I have no intention of changing now. (qtd in Rosemont, Surrealist Women, xxxi).

Rosemont’s response to a statement like this is that she sees Surrealist Women as being about “reintegration . . . to make it impossible—or at least inexcusable—for student of surrealism to continue to ignore” these women and their writings. This is what Royce and Kirsch would call the work of “historical rescue, recovery, and (re)inscription” that feminist scholars engage in (20).

Men in the Avant-Garde: Oppressors or Champions of Women?

There is some disagreement among scholars about how complicit the Dada and Surrealist men were in suppressing the history of that/those movement(s) . Some, like Penelope Rosemont, say that the men deeply respected the women in the movement and supported women’s rights. Others say that the men used the women as sexual beings (or objects) to show how sexually liberated the male artists were, while still not affording the women their own independence and sexuality. In the introduction to Women in Dada, Naomi Sawelson-Gorse has some fairly biting things to say about the male attitudes towards women, as expressed in their own writings and manifestos. Sawelson-Gorse discusses New York Dadaist Paul Haviland, who talked about machines as female in not-so-flattering terms:

Man made machine in his own image. She has limbs which act . . . a nervous system through which runs electricity . . . The machine is his ‘daughter born without a mother.’ This is why he loves her. (xi).

She also cites Francis Picabia, who, writing in a similar vein, that “the machine is yet at a dependent stage . . . she submits to his will but he must direct her activities. Sawelson-Gorse sees the irony here, declaring that “this movement of absolute rebellion was also one of oppression” (xii). She also cites a manifesto by Tzara (my man!) as embedded in binary difference: female concerns are superficial, bound in commodifications of bodily vanity (such as skin creams and nail polish) in direct opposition to those of the male in the innovative sphere, particularly the innovative. (xi)

There are a number of books and articles that detail and debate the Dada’s and Surrealists’ attitudes toward women, and so my intention here is not to write the “definitive” account of those attitudes by any means, nor do I intend to significantly rehash those debates. And if feminist scholars have taught us anything, it is to pay attention to the particulars, rather than the broad brushes that movements are painted with. No doubt, there were men who truly championed women, those who saw women as frivolous and not worth their attention, and those men who thought they were being liberatory and open-minded, but who missed the mark. My intention here is simply to bring up those issues as a part of the reason that women have been excluded from the canon of the avant-garde for many years. The lack of support and champions of women’s work, either consciously or unconsciously must be mentioned.

And yet, there were still a number of women who chose to be a part of Dada around the world, in New York, France, Zurich, and Berlin. Perhaps like me, they assumed that the men who wrote things like Tzara, Picabia, and Haviland had written were not writing about them. They were different, liberated, artistic. Many were suffragists . These women deserved the liberation that Dada and similar movements promised. Perhaps these women, faced with no real alternative in men’s perceptions of them, decided to cast their lot with Dadaism, which was at least politically and artistically liberating.

In the 1970s, French feminist and Surrealist Helene Cixous wrote that she “has no right to write within your logic: nowhere to write from.” Because she is a woman, she has “no fatherland, no legitimate history. No certainties, no property. ” With no “fatherland,” no history or tradition, a woman has no “genre,” she feels an allegiance to. It is all up for grabs for her to make her own history, her own traditions. What better place, then, for women in the early 20th century than in the Dada movement, even if the men didn’t totally support them. The women in and affiliated or associated with Dada were liberated, despite these male attitudes, including Baroness Elsa, Mina Loy, Sophie Tauber, Emmy Hennings, and many more. Being liberated does not always equal visibility or acceptance. I was told by someone online, for instance, that Emmy Hennings, girlfriend and later wife of Hugo Ball, who wrote poetry and participated in the Cabaret Voltaire, was not an artist and was simply a prostitute. This despite the fact that she appeared in plenty of anthologies and wrote the introduction to Ball’s memoir Flight Out of Time.

Another aspect that the Hennings story brings to light and that also threatens to obscure women’s recognition within these movements is the fact that very often the women participants were the wives or girlfriends of the men involved in the movement. Thus seen as “appendages” of the men, their participation is subsumed into the man’s artistic participation, at least in the eyes of critics, if we are to accept Rosemont’s story. Elise Breton, Suzanne Duchamp, Jeanette Tanguy, Nadja, and Gala Dali are just a few of the women who are often noted as wives and girlfriends, as “muses,” but rarely recognized as artists in their own right.

Mary Ann Caws contends that this is part of the problematic history of Surrealism itself, when she says that “although the work is praised, the woman is not granted autonomous artist powers” (2). Caws also notes that women “joined Surrealism through personal relationships with male members” (2). Was it that the women actually participated because their husbands or partners were Surrealists, or was it that the men were attracted to the women because they shared similar interests in art and attitudes toward creativity?

By the numbers: contemporary redux

The erasure of women from avant-garde and experimental histories continues with contemporary movements of today, feminism notwithstanding. I remember reading a quote by Gregory Corso of the “Beat Generation” who said (and I paraphrase) “sure there were women there [among the Beats] and someday people will write about them.” I had talked to Maria Damon, professor at the University of Minnesota and a beat generation scholar/apologist about that quote and she told me “Gregory Corso is such a mess. He is not one to be responsible for that kind of scholarship.” The point is not that Gregory Corso himself should be responsible for bringing those writers to light, but as Angela Davis famously said, “Lift as you climb.” In other words, male authors could or should stop allowing the story of the “holy trinity” of the Beats – Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs—from being the only history of the Beat movement and take greater pains to mention some of the women writers, besides Dianne DiPrima, who were there and worked with them, read by their sides, and did much more than sleep with them, cook their dinners, etc. As the men are lifted up, they should also be mentioning and lifting up the women with whom they built the movement, not waiting for someone else to “discover” those writers, who should have already been “discovered” by virtue of their participation.

The Language Poets, inheritors of the Dada tradition, do a slightly better job, with about a dozen women writers out of a 280 page anthology, The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, in which most articles, poetry, and fiction run from 1-3 pages (v-viii). Being generous, this means that there is approximately 36 pages worth of women’s writing in this book. At a Conceptual Poetics conference that I attended in 2007, which featured many prominent Language Poets, nearly half of the attendees were women, yet we were still having discussions about gender, since the then-upcoming Conceptual Poetics anthology, which ended up being published in 2011 under the name Against Expression and was edited by Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith, was not going to reflect women’s participation and the nearly equal participation of women to men at the conference. And as usual with discussions like this, most of the men got defensive . Marjorie Perloff sided with the men, saying something to the effect that it wasn’t their job to ensure equal participation of men and women. The finished anthology has approximately 100-110 pages of women’s writing, representing approximately 25 women, out of a total of 593 pages (vii-xvi).

Women as Scholars of the Avant-Garde

Many women have been written back into the histories of the avant-garde, and this is, no doubt, due to women becoming scholars of the avant-garde as well. One of the most prominent and prolific of these is Mary Ann Caws, who has edited and translated dozens of books by and about avant-garde writers, has edited or contributed to more than a dozen books specifically about women in and around the avant-garde, including the 1991 critical edition of Surrealism and Women. In addition to Caws, there are a number of other women scholars of the avant-garde, including Whitney Chadwick, who has written about Frida Kahlo and other women of the avant-garde, or scholar Patricia Allmer, who is almost as prolific a writer on the avant-garde as Caws is. As more women not only enter the academy, but show an interest in the avant-garde, we learn more about women of the avant-garde. Thus, it is important to know the names of the scholars who are unearthing women buried under the mounds of male artists that have obscured their own contributions. After all, if, as Comte L’autremont is endlessly quoted in Surrealist book after Surrealist book, “poetry must be made by all,” then that must include women, as part of that “all.”

Echoing Cixous’ comments about how women have “no fatherland” and no stable place from which to write, Jacquline Jones Royster and Gesa Kirsch argue in Feminist Rhetorical Practices that women “need to claim a space for research at the edges (rather than the center) of the field, to claim an interdisciplinary space in the field” (6). Thus, it seems that to be female is to be inherently avant-garde, whether you are an artist or a scholar. What we are doing is inherently revolutionary and liberatory.

In addition to publishing the anthology Surrealist Women in 1998, Penelope Rosemont, a member of the Chicago Surrealists, has brought women like Toyen to light in her own memoirs and manifestos, as well as casually mentioning other women, as if to say that their participation in Surrealism should not be seen as shocking or separate, but to simply be recognized as being in the room. Of course, another way that women make themselves known, both in and outside of avant-garde movements is to write their own memoirs. Penelope Rosemont has written several autobiographical books, including Dreams and Everyday Life and Surrealist Experiences: 1001 Dawns, 221 Midnights and a co-authored a book entitled The Forecast is Hot! Tracts and Other Declarations of the Surrealist Movement in the United States, all of which talk about Rosemont’s own experiences with the Surrealists in Paris in the late 1960s and beyond. Yet Rosemont’s own participation in Surrealism has been questioned in the behind-the-scene discussions of her Wikipedia page, in which one person kept taking down references to her having met Andre Breton and having Breton's blessing for a Surrealist Group in Chicago, claiming there is no evidence that she and her husband Franklin had ever met Breton. I, personally, have never heard of someone’s memoirs being questioned in such a manner, unless it is proven that the memoir is false. This incident is emblematic of the struggles that women face to be included in the canon of the avant-garde. There is no such discussion on Franklin Rosemont’s page.

Scholarship of Women in the Avant-Garde: Who “Counts”

Even now, in 2017, when I went to the Documenting Dada Exhibit at the University of Iowa, there were two pages from the Dadaist journal 391 that had artwork done by women. It was mentioned in the program, but the women’s names were omitted. This despite the fact they were clearly visible on the pages and that someone could have investigated further and written about them. (The names were not as visible/legible through the class that contained the pages.) Were they anomalies in the Dada movement, only published or participating once or for a very short period of time? Or were they actively involved? As of 2017, apparently we do not know the answers to that question.

Rosemont contends that “until very recently most of the literature on women surrealists was written by other surrealists, male and female.” She goes on to note that “if these women remain little known to the larger reading public it is because critics and scholars have been shirking their responsibilities” (xxx). In fact, canon development is and remains a significant issue for women writers of all kinds, as has been documented by feminist scholars for approximately 50 years. Who is left in the canon are usually the “founders” of movements and the most visible, through the writing of their memoirs. Those are often men, as well. That said, even Andre Breton’s 1966 volume Surrealism and Painting has 52 discrete chapters on painters, of which 5 are about women (Breton, np). In a book entitled Lost Profiles: Memoirs of Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism by leading Surrealist Philip Souppault, translated from the French and published in the US in 2016, there is not a single chapter on any woman. Despite that, it was hailed by many, including Paul Auster, Pierre Joris, and Andrei Codrescu who has taken up the modern cause of Surrealism and published the literary journal called Exquisite Corpse. It would seem, then, that omission is not just errors on the part of critics. The men of Surrealism have failed to mention the women who worked beside them. It is up to female scholars to look back for their heroes and bring them into the light of day.

Conclusion

As more women enter academia, more women get showcased and added to various canons of writing. There is no “one canon,” but rather many. There is an avant-garde canon, and because that canon is so new, it is also easily expanded to include women. However, we cannot count on men, as seemingly sympathetic as they may be, to include women—their writings, their biographies, their existence. Even recent history shows us that despite improvements over the past century, there are still blind spots that will be largely corrected by women scholars in the foreseeable future, unearthing these women.

Post-Script: Note on Method

I have chosen to use my own memories and knowledge in places and often to use that to compare what other women’s experience of the avant-garde might have been or might be. There are several places where I talk about my memories of conversations I have had with scholars, with people through Facebook, etc., as back up information, as another way of talking about what I have experienced or have talked about or have known about the avant-garde over the years.

I have also conflated Dada and Surrealism. I could add to this Italian Futurism and Russian Formalism, but I am not as familiar with the latter two movements. Dada led directly into Surrealism and a number of Surrealists, including Breton and Dali, among many many others, started off in Dada. If the transition was not seamless, it was relatively smooth and in many ways, the goals of the two movements were similar. These two movements are also considered among the first avant-gardes, from which later avant-garde and experimental literary movements would take inspiration.

Finally, I used Wikipedia here to show attitudes towards the people and subjects that I am talking about. There is a time and a place for traditional scholarship, and there is also a time and a place to talk about what is commonly known or understood in the popular imagination. I can think of no better place to trace the history of those attitudes combined with scholarship than Wikipedia.

Works Cited

Andrews, Bruce, and Charles Bernstein. The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book. Poetics of the New. Carbondale Ill.: Southern Illinois University P, 1984.
Bohn, Willard. The Dada Market: An Anthology of Poetry. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University P, 1993.
Breton, Andre. Surrealism and Painting. Simon Watson Taylor, trans. New York, NY: Icon Editions, Harper & Row P, 1966.
Caws, Mary Ann, et al, editors. Surrealism and Women. MIT P, 1991.
Cixous, Helene. Coming to Writing and Other Essays. Translated by Deborah Jensen. Harvard UP, 1991.
Dworkin, Craig and Goldsmith, Kenneth. Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 2011.
Facebook. “Member List,” Surrealism and Esotericism. https://www.facebook.com/groups/1586657041590569/members/
Facebook. “Member List,” La Revolution Surrealiste. https://www.facebook.com/groups/1578166949079758/members/
Rosemont, Penelope. Dreams and Everyday Life: Andre Breton, Surrealism, Rebel Worker, SDS, and the Seven Cities of Cibala, a Sixties Journal. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr. 2008.
---. Surrealist Experiences: 1001 Dawns, 221 Midnights. Surrealist Editions, Black Swan P, 2000.
---. Surrealist Women. Austin, TX: University of Texas, 1998.
Royster, Jacqueline Jones and Gesha E. Kirsch. Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literary Studies. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University P, 2012.
Sawselson-Gorse, Naomi, editor. Women in Dada. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1998.
Shipe, Timothy. Documenting Dada//Disseminating Dada. Exhibition Guide. Iowa City: University of Iowa Libraries, 2017.
Souppault, Phillipe. Lost Profiles: Memoirs of Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism. Alan Bernheimer, trans. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 2016.
Wikipedia. Penelope Rosemont, Talk Tab. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Penelope_Rosemont

Democracy, anti-intellectualism, and "proletariat" art

I am watching the Surrealist documentary Europe After the Rain. They are talking about Breton’s argument with the Soviet Union about whether or not Surrealism could be a good representation of the proletariat, being bourgeois art and all. Breton says that to the extent that culture is proletariat, it is not yet culture and to the extent that art is bourgeois it cannot be proletariat.

Now, nearly 100 years later, the irony is that there are entire generations, starting with the Beat generation and those who returned from the war under the GI Bill that allowed them to get college educations, of “proletarian” artists, of artists who have been influenced by Dada and Surrealism, who founded Fluxus and Conceptualism and all manners of avant-garde movements. This is Republicans’ worst nightmare and the reason that they are working so hard to defund education, to stop the teaching of critical thinking, to provide only STEM, not STEAM, to education, so that they can grow generations of educated drones who will do the technical work of society without trying to transform it. What once drove this country was not technical proficiency, but the imagination required to innovate. But that imagination comes at a cost.

Free-thinking people who can imagine other possibilities, will not accept attempts to control them. That’s why intellectuals must be attacked as elitists and made into the “enemies of the people,” much like what was done in the former Soviet Union to the dissidents: artistic, scientific, and political. We now have a “proletarian” art, even if we don’t have much of a proletariat, or working class, left in the United States. All people need to see artists, avant-garde or not, as being on their side, not being “elitists” opposed to their goals, but as allies, working side by side with them to achieve their goals.

The physicist Andrei Sakharov said, "Everyone wants to have a job, be married, have children, be happy, but dissidents must be prepared to see their lives destroyed and those dear to them hurt. When I look at my situation and my family's situation and that of my country, I realize that things are getting steadily worse."

We denounce any attempt to divide and conquer those of us who are not part of the ruling elite. We must stand together against the real enemy, not allow ourselves to be pitted against one another. The “first wave” of this coming together is art, is the avant-garde, those who will prepare the way of imagination so that we can return to creating, innovating, and evolving.

Mallarme I?

In the end, much of the avant-garde comes back to Mallarme. Every book I read, whether by Breton in the 1920s or from a contemporary writer like Barrett Watten, James Harding, or Anna Lovatt, they all mention Mallarme. “Crisis in Poetry,” starts off by saying that as a reader, Mallarme had “the feeling of having read it all twenty years ago”1 I think of Eugene Ionesco who said in an interview that he started writing plays because he found the theatre to be so stale. He started writing plays that he himself would want to see.

"I still could not see quite how to get rid of that positive feeling of malaise produce by my awareness of the “impurity” of acted drama. I was by no means an agreeable theatregoer, but on the contrary, sulky, grumbling, always discontented. Was this due to some deficiency in myself alone? Or was it something lacking in the theatre?"

In a similar way, Mallarme speaks of poetry that is “extinct, or rather worn threadbare by repetition”3 because it is not of its time, tries too hard to imitate 17th century French poetry. I, too, started writing avant-garde poetry because it all had that “been there, done that, feeling.” Dada and Surrealism were like a breath of fresh air to my 21 year-old mind and have captivated me every since. Since I can't really get out of meaning though, try as I may, I keep collections of words and images that I occasionally go through. I pull out phrases that feel like they go together. In this way, I avoid writing about one specific thing, because when I try to write about something in particular, the poems suck. They are terrible, as are most poems that try to be about something4. Rather than trying to write about things, I try to write avant-gardely. Because the avant-garde in poetry, theatre, and art makes me happy. I like art that I don't understand, that I don't get on a conscious level, that I either have to work for or just let my mind go and appreciate the disparate images.

This often gets me in trouble with academic writing, because I have a high threshold for writing that I don't understand. I don't get hung up on meaning.

Thought Language Language Thought Thought Thought Language Language Thought Writing

Week 11 - Language and Writing


It is impossible, or nearly impossible, for me at least, to talk about writing without talking about language. The two for me go hand-in-hand. I think of language as the atoms of writing.


After at least a century of searching actively for a revolutionary function of poetry, (why) have we given up? (why) have we abandoned the incomplete experiments of the past? Where and how can poetry function uniquely, in other words, what are the unique functions of poetry, as a revolutionary practice? I prefer instead to think of the avant garde as the “first wave,” the ground work of consciousness, preparing the field. The change of consciousness, overused and virtually emptied of meaning as that idea may have become, is what necessarily must predate genuine social change. It is not up to poets (or even activists, politicians or “leaders”) to proscribe where that change needs to go, but to empower the imaginations around us to imagine something new, to dream our way out of the current world, which works only for a very few people.


To restructure language is to restructure thought, to restructure possibilities. To scramble, if not permanently, which is impractical and will not lead to the world we want, but temporarily, the world as we (think) we know it, the language that binds us to the now, to put new ideas, new juxtapositions into play, new planets into orbit. This is the revolutionary work of the poet.


To. . . . . remake . . . . . language. . . . . to . . . . find. . . . . .new
. .. .creative . . . . .imagistic . . . . .practices . . . . . of language
. . . . is to make . . . . . .resistance . . . possible . . . . . . to move us
. . . . . . toward our vision . . . . . . . . . . . . . . to have visions
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . never . . . before . . . . possible


I am talking here about a language that speaks outside of the dominant discourse, whether racialized, patriarchal, class-based, etc., an un-discourses or non-discourse, a paradiscourse, that brings with it the chance to step outside, run alongside, that does not attempt to use the tools of power that already exist, but to forge new tools that could create new structures, new edifices not previously imagined. The techne, the tool, in many ways prescribes what can be built. We know that with new technology new ways of thinking emerge.  So why would we not want new mental and imaginative linguistic tools of our own?  As Sol Lewitt says, “rational thoughts repeat rational thoughts.” The way we think perpetuates itself, we continue to think only in the ways we've always thought.  I'm not looking then for a feminine language per se, except insofar as it might offer a resistive language, a paralanguage that we can frolic in and search for something unknown, a Dada language a non-sense that leads to sense a zaum a de-formed formalism that will birth new forms. 

Novel forms

I have been re-reading the chapters of "My Accursed Novel" as I have called it and I have started to see that they are not really that bad. In fact, I think some of the chapters are quite good. The problem is that I can't really get it into the appropriate "novel format," which is a consistency of time with a recognizable plot. But then, I don't write traditionally any more with ANY format, so why would I think that I could or would write a traditionally structured novel?

So, now that all of this stuff is out there and has been seen and read by at least a dozen of you (I am of course being modest. It looks like 2 dozen people have actually read the stories). But there has to be an even wonkier way of organizing this work.

If you have any thoughts, let me know!

This is a continuation of my thinking for my paper on Gerard Manley Hopkins and the avant-garde. This is a little incomplete and ragged right now, but I wanted to share some thoughts.

Language Play in Hopkins and the Coming Avant-Garde


“Patterns of play, when seen as a whole, illuminate both his art as a poet and his unique imagination. . . Playfulness touches almost everything Hopkins treats: God the saints, sacraments, himself, other people . . . When he plays, Hopkins’s preferred modes are whimsy, comedy and the incongruous, wit, light satire, and silliness.” (Feeney 173).

I am not really sure what other forms of play there are besides that list, so it might be said that Hopkins’ wordplay embraces much, if not all forms of play that are available. Feeney further describes some of Hopkins' more whimsical images in his poems.

[W]himsy includes imagining himself as a woodlark, buxom football, and a Welsh bard. The moon wraps herself in scarfs, and Welsh hills hug cow-clouds for rain-milk. A little square house is like a man with a toothache and a bright stormcloud like a shiny bland heard. Moonlight is a blue cobweb. God sits on a thunder-throne and creates with hewing axe and tricking water. Christ is a stage-actor and the Holy Ghost is a male who cheers on a fellow cricketer and a female who broods on her huge world-as-egg. Christ, Mary and the saints live in a lighted barn as Hopkins peeks through a knothole. Stars are fire-folk, citadels, diamond mines, elves’-eyes. A pocket watch is Hopkins’ “mate” and his poems are babies, a pile of linen and dirty Thames-water. Pixies, fairies, goblins, and witches grace hi pages. And he blows a kiss to the stars.

Feeney also cites “wordplay hyphenates, concepts, and sound play” as elements of Hopkins’ poetry. This is the stuff of the avant-garde as well, including avant-garde movements such as Dada and Surrealism, Oulipo, and the Language Poets. It must be said that Andre Breton and others who have come after him stress that Surrealism is not a product or a style, but an approach. Thus, there cannot be said to be any truly Surrealist literature that doesn’t emanate from the imagination, from the subconscious. You cannot “copy” surrealistic style. Furthermore, Breton maintained that Surrealism was first and foremost, a verbal, not a visual, art form. “Whoever says expression says, to begin with, language . . . you must not be surprised to see surrealism place itself first of all almost exclusively on the plane of language.” 2nd manifesto. Surrealist Mind p. 44

I am going to use Dada and Surrealism, which are very closely related and which had many of the same artists involved in both movements, to compare to Hokpins’ poetry for a number of reasons. First, because they are among the earliest manifestations of avant-garde activity and most avant-gardes that came after were reacting to them, either in the positive or reacting against them. Second, Andre Breton had published Hopkins and evidently held him in esteem. And third, and most important, because of the timing of Hopkins’ life and publication, which was very close in time to the historical moment that Dada and Surrealism had developed out of. Had Hopkins’ life gone on for another 20-40 years, into his 60s or even his 80s, he would have had direct knowledge of those movements. Whether or not he would have joined or affiliated himself with them is a matter of pure speculation. I will deal with the pros and cons here briefly before I move on. There are arguments for both sides.

Hopkins and (anti-) Clericalism

Notably, there was the anti-clericalism of Breton and many Surrealists. While it did not keep Breton from admiring Hopkins, it more than likely would have put Hopkins off and kept him from affiliating himself too closely with the movement. In fact, because the Surrealist movement was so heavily French, Spanish and German, most of the Surrealists were Catholic in upbringing and Benjamin Peret was one of the most anti-Catholic anti-clerical members of the surrealists (https://melbourneartcritic.com/2012/11/27/anti-catholicism-surrealism/). For someone who was not only a Jesuit priest in the Catholic Church, but had converted to Catholicism as an adult, this would likely have precluded Hopkins’ from participating fully within the Surrealist movement. Hopkins was a very devout Catholic. In fact, in 1888, his last year, he wrote:
I was a Christian from birth or baptism, later I was converted to the Catholic faith and am enlisted 20 years in the Society of Jesus. I am now 44. I do not waver in my allegiance, I never have since my conversion to the Church. (qtd in Harris, XV.)

Notwithstanding, Harris sees in Hopkins’ “terrible sonnets,” written in the final years of his life, something of a crisis of faith; certainly a different direction, which Hopkins called “inspirations unbidden and against my will . . . [that] revealed a deformed image of his own humankind and a violation of Christ’s body” (xiii). Harris talks about a shift in Hopkins’ poetry “that illustrates the grave anxieties the age experienced in seeking a sound basis for epistemology in the face of a metaphysics exploded by ocean empiricism and a Biblical authority devastated by Higher Criticism” (4). At the turn of the 19th/20th centuries, the crisis of faith suffered in the West corresponded in large part to the rise of science, as well as the horrors that were to come out of World War I. Hopkins was feeling the pull of the former and was decidedly trying not to let doubt overtake him.

Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Avant Garde (a draft)

There is some confusion about where to place Hopkins and some people have a desire to place Hopkins within the avant-garde due to his playfulness and experimentation with language. Christopher Wilson writes that Hopkins doesn’t have “a comfortable place in literary history” (137) due to his idosyncracies and “unusual style” (137) placing him both before and after his time, a kind of harbinger and throwback, but other crtcis “are quite certain that Hopkins belonds to the Victorian age, even though they find his literary style difficult to trace” (137). Tom Zaniello describes Hopkins as “a Victorian poet but also a forerunner of modernist poetics”(4) Meredith Martin, likewise, writes “construed by critics as “always obscure” and “on the whole disappointing; . . . too often needlessly obscure, harsh, and perverse” (qtd. in Roberts 89, 111), the first edition of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poems, published in 1918, baffled more readers than it converted.”

In fact, in a letter to Robert Bridges, Hopkins wrote of his own work:
“No doubt my poetry errs on the side of oddness. I hope in time to have a more baanced and Miltonic style. But as air, melody, is what strikes me most of all in music and design in painting, a design, pattern, or what I am in this habit of calling 'inscape' is what I above all aim at in poetry. Now it is the virtue of design, pattern or inscape to be distinctive and it is the vice of distinctiveness to become queer. This vice I cannot have escaped” (qtd in Milroy 6)

Thus, Hopkins knew that his work was odd, that it was influenced by the science of the day, and that he was out of time. His desire was not necessarily to move poetry forward to a new place for a new time, but to be part of the tradition of poetry that had come before him. In this way, as a poet he has much more of the English attitude than the French.

William Donald Harvey’s dissertation at the University of Toronto, written in 1999, discusses Appolinaire, Mallarme, and Hopkins. But two of those writers came out of the French tradition rather than Victorian England and while Hopkins spoke French, he also associated “Parnaissanism” to describe competent but uninspired poetry. He identified this trend particularly with the work of Alfred Tennyson, citing the poem "Enoch Arden" as an example[citation needed].[1] Thus there is little evidence to suggest that Hopkins was influences by any kind of proto-avant-garde activity in France, despite the fact that Hopkins; own life was wthin 20 years of the beginning of avant-garde activity in France. The Chat Noir the bohemian parisien cabaret, started in 1881. Stephen Mallarme, who was considered a precursor to the avant garde, was writing in France from until his own death in 1898. Gerard Manley Hopkins died in 1889, so it is entirely conceivable that he was aware of these goings on. Whether or not he found them significant or paid them any mind is another question. A very cursory glance shows that in the 19th century France was still dealing with the after-effects of revolution, internal strife, and certainly anti-clericalism, which would continue to dominate into the early 20th century of the avant-garde as well.

In fact, The pull between tradition and advance, which would be part of Hopkins’ struggle, that would mark him as somewhat different than avant-gardists, especially of the French, as they rushed forward to embrace the new and impending technology, as evidenced from the Italian Futurists and the Dadaists, who embraced newness. Hopkins found himself caught, trapped, by Victorianism, which in poetry, resulted in trying to deal with, manage, the increasing onslaught of industrialization and in many cases, to retreat back into nature.

On Goldsmith, Perloff and Race

I am hopelessly behind on many things. I teach and am currently attending yet another graduate school, this time to get my second Master’s degree – in English. This means that I am working or in class 14 hours some days and the days I do not spend in that way I spend my time grading or writing papers. So apparently there has been a whirlwind blowing up about Marjorie Perloff, Kenneth Goldsmith, and race that I am behind on. Having been out of the loop on this, I nonetheless had a few thoughts as I read Jen Hofer’s account as well as the portion of the transcript that she had published. I don't know that I have anything shockingly new to add to the conversation, but since when did that stop anyone, especially me, from commenting?

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I just read Marjorie Perloff’s statements about Michael Brown, made at an art festival ¬¬in Demark At that festival, in a Q&A, she talked about Michael Brown as “scary” and she started saying that we shouldn’t always equate victimhood with innocence. According to a transcript from Hofer and published in this online article, Perloff then went on to talk about victims of the holocaust as not so innocent and if you look into their backgrounds, many were (probably) really terrible people.

All this would be fine if the Michael Brown incident were isolated and not a product of persistent racism stemming not just from a history of slavery, or segregation and discrimination that were all part of our past, now that we are “post-racial,” and not part of persistent racism that occurs on a daily basis in the 1990s and 2000s in America. If there were not a report released on 14 US cities where only black Americans were killed by the police this year. The comments would be fine if what happened in WWII Germany had not been the result of persistent anti-Semitism for centuries and had reared its ugly head again in the recent decade(s) leading up to WWII. If these things were not a part of an ongoing pattern and were simply things that happened to a few morally ambiguous individuals.

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In both of these comments, Perloff comes off as sounding like Kenneth Goldsmith himself, being intentionally provocative while maintaining an Alfred E. Neuman-like “What, Me?” stance. While I admire much about Goldsmith’s work, I can also see the flaws in his approach and the “radical artifice” in his attitudes. I find much of Goldsmith’s work to be said with a wink designed to get people’s hackles up and there really are no limits, as he has shown by his use of “found materials,” repurposing non-poetic materials to his non-poetic (wink wink, nudge nudge) ends.

I think the thing that unites all of this work, Perloff’s statements that many perceive as racist, her continued advocacy of “white male” poets and a while male avant-garde, and Goldsmith’s appropriation of Michael Brown’s autopsy report is not necessarily an inherent racism, but moreover, the belief that the “canon” of literature can and should somehow be a-historical. That somehow it shouldn’t comment on our times, but should rise above the specific historical context is something that only a privileged few – mostly white men and some privileged white women – have the luxury to do. The rest of us are struggling with our historical moment as women and non-white males.

For many of us, we do not have the luxury of being a-historical, and frankly, neither did many of the best previous avant-gardists of any era. Andre Breton and Louis Aragon were deeply embroiled in the politics of their era. Tristan Tzara worked for the French Resistance and Robert Desnos died in a concentration camp. Breton was in Haiti as the Haitian revolution broke out and it has been suggested that his presence hastened that revolution. Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera were involved in revolutionary politics and harbored Trotsky. Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece brought unapologetic attention to the politics around women’s bodies. There are countless examples of artists and poets in the avant-garde who did not hide behind their art, even if they were white males, but used their art, their free speech, to push their politics and the art was enriched by their politics, rather than being impoverished by it.

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Does being a victim of an atrocity erase any previous misdeeds? Does being a respected and at times revered literary theorist or poet insulate you from social criticism of your work and your comments? It seems to be that these two situations may be equivocal.

In Hofer's transcript, Perloff gives us the usual critique of the younger generation: “Back in my day, we didn’t do that.” Abe Simpson’s voice rings clearly in my head.

“When I went to school I was taught you say “Ah, this is good, but might he have not done this, or there could be more of that,” or you know, you attacked politely” when I went to school I was taught you say “Ah, this is good, but might he have not done this, or there could be more of that,” or you know, you attacked politely (Perloff qtd in Hofer). Perloff blames this on internet culture and incivility. And certainly there are uncivil things being said on the internet. But this emphasis on “being attacked politely” is also part of the assumption that academia should be a nice place where people don’t discuss things that they feel strongly about or that involve strong passions? Where does the line between outrage and incivility get drawn?

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I have not seen Kenneth Goldsmith’s piece, but I do know a lot about his work and his detached persona. That is not an inherent part of the avant-garde. He could have used the autopsy to bring attention to the injustice that is being done to African-Americans throughout the country. Baltimore, Ferguson, New York, Minneapolis, etc. etc. Perhaps that is what he intended to do in his “objective” hipster way. I tend to give him the benefit of the doubt on some of this. But Perloff is on dangerous ground not only with her comments about Michael Brown and of victimhood vs. innocence, but in her insistence that the work of anyone that is not white, privileged, and male is not worthy of her notice.

Review of Mina Loy on Goodreads

The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy by Mina Loy

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Mina Loy was an early feminist and an avant-garde poet and writer. This book features Loy's amazing poetry as well as her manifestos on futurism and feminism. My favorite poem is Songs to Johannes. It is basically just an edifying book for any woman working in the avant-garde who has been led to believe that the avant-garde had been a largely male domain until the 1960s. As more and more collections of poetry and biographies emerge on Loy, Baronness Elsa, and a host of other women, our contributions to the avant-garde and to poetry and art in general are being acknowledged and our stories told.



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The Debate Over Conceptual Poetics

So lately I have found myself talking a fair amount about conceptual poetics, which I had also blogged about in 2008 when I went to the Conceptual Poetics conference at the University of Arizona Poetry Center. I was talking with a friend of mine about Conceptual Poetics and Kenneth Goldsmith's appearance at the White House and on The Colbert Report.

Then, lo and behold, my friend Arthur Durkee writes about Goldsmith and Conceptual Poetics at his blog, Dragon Cave in response to an article written by Robert Archambeau on the Poetry Foundation website.

So, I am adding my two cents to the conversation.


I was at the Conceptual Poetics conference held at the U of Arizona poetry center in 2008. Craig Dworkin talked about a desire to link a literary movement to an artistic one, which hadn't been done I think, since Dada/Surrealism. Of course, it's a self-conscious, rather than an organic linking. But I think the desire behind it is a good one.

I agree that much of the techniques employed are very similar to ready-mades and to cut-up poetry, Flarf, etc. I doubt that most of the conference participants would identify exclusively as conceptual poets, except maybe for Dworkin and Goldsmith, although hearing Goldmsith's work at the White House, it was a bit more "artful" than what Goldsmith usually practices and advocates.

I think of conceptual poetics as trying to update and expand on Dadaist and post/modernist poetry practices. I think it is useful for discussion of what poetry is and is not. I use some of Goldsmith's writings in my community education classes, which generates a lot of heated debates because ultimately, people DO want poetry to be charming or beautiful or to help people make connections between seemingly unrelated objects and situations. Ironically, I find Goldsmith himself, in his writings, on television,and in person, to be quite charming and very thoughtful about what it is that he does. He just wrote a very thoughtful blog on the Poetry Foundation's blog, for example, on coming across some of Jackson Mac Low's book collection at a book dealer that was very poignant and thoughtful, despite the glibness of the title, The Burden of Artists' Crap.

Like Surrealist techniques, I find Conceptualist Poetics to be very good for maintaining a writing practice, which can lead to creativity just by forcing one to sit down and write anything. (Keep in mind that visual artists learn to copy as they are learning and developing their own style.) It is very useful for stimulating thought (since Goldsmith would be against the idea of stimulating "creativity."). It can be helpful getting people to believe that everyone can write poetry. (I used to have this debate with people at open mics who would claim everyone is a poet. Not everyone is a poet, anymore than everyone is a plumber, a doctor, an accountant, or a dancer. But everyone should write poetry, dance, be able to do math, and take care of their health.)

There is much that can be borrowed and learned from previous art and literary movements rather than treating them as if they are merely dead relics to be crammed into museums and looked at, rather than a living practice. There is value in updating our venerated avant-gardes then, which, if they have any value to offer, can and should be updated. It is a tenet of modernism to declare what came before you as dead and to proclaim yourself the new hot thing. This, ironically, is both what conceptual poetics is out to deny by denying any idea of creativity in process, and a stance which conceptual visual artists frequently embrace.

Two new cut up poems

The following two poems were written after I went to see John M. Bennett give a reading in Minneapolis this afternoon. For years I had tried to write in Spanish and in English, especially back when my Spanish was a little bit fresher, but it always came out too forced. When I heard John read this afternoon, for some reason it occurred to me to use Spanish and French language source texts for my cut up poems, so here are a couple. I was really impressed at the way they came out more or less grammatically accurate with what was going on in the English part of the poems!

Enjoy.



Transperences (Fr)


Too bright. Outspoken. A community
of women. En realidad, el director.
Political despair, 13 spins, the massacre
donde los hombres, musical and
programming the relation between
the appearance of des orages se
troublent the rose garden. Strike
of people on dit in bookstores, shooting
the innovative: a window, a phone, a
wheelchair, doorway of humanity.



Imperative


Early and often did the lord,
Greatly relieved to hear,
Bound to end by shaking hands,
Durant toute la semaine, after
Several thousand years of oppression,
Declare I am becoming.

En cualquier parte parezca que dominating
Even in the long shot,
Civilian casualties are inevitable.
So it began.

On est arrive, carrying the cross
Himself, the posturing that sometimes fulfills the
Conditions, willing to face himself. Me parece
Que the ideal ripens within our spirit
In the bathtub.

The lines were clearly drawn.

Excess of Containment: a brief, partial manifesto of avant garde artistic and literary practices that is belied by its excessively long title

For all of the criticism from English teachers that it is difficult to teach the writing of avant-garde poetry and literature, it is not if you have the right approach. The avant garde is playful. It is only when you are trying to create something perfect, beautiful, it's a chore: a chore to write, a chore to "try" to be avant-garde, to think up the next new great technique when we all know (this is for you Rosalind Krauss et al) that the avant-garde is all about stealing to make art, appropriating, not originality. The true avant-garde artist it would seem should strive to be the least original (but then there is an art to being creatively unoriginal or uncreatively original but then we get back to trying too hard). Appropriating not originality. That frees you up to actually be creative, if creativity is within you, and it is. Some may just have to excavate more, be more unoriginal more often that others in order to dredge up a remnant of creativity from the dregs of anti- non- un-creative subconscious. It will be unlocked. The form creates the container, the structure that will allow its own excess to bubble up like a cesspool of creativity, an excess of containment, an excess of form that enables a glorious excess of content, that feeling that I can put anything into this structure, not the drudgery of a blank page, but the excitement of a child towards an empty box that could be a house, a train, a robot head, infinite possibities lie in the empty container, not on the blank page.