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

New Dada-inspired poetry

Here are some new poems I have been working on recently.

Glossolalic Angel Dada won the Midwest Writing Center's Iron Poem contest.

These poems are all saved as graphics due to their enjambment. I didn't want them to lose their spacing.

Hope you like them. Leave me a message and tell me what you think.

Postmodernism inside Modernism: Dada and the Postmodern

If one of the great projects of political modernism was nation-building, including building empires, one of the great projects of postmodernism, in which the literary, artistic, and political are conterminous, is fragmentation. The sun has set on the British Empire, and the French and the Belgian and the Dutch Empires. The nations of Africa and Asia are politically independent of the West. Their artists and writers no longer reflect on the glory of those empires, but write about their own experiences, about their experiences as subjects – of an empire, of a newly-formed country, as a woman in a male-dominated culture, as an artist trying to find their way in the world, etc. Their audience is not exclusively those of us in the West anymore. They write and make art for themselves, for their own country, for their own historical moment. This is partly why the postmodern is considered fragmentary—because we recognize our subjectivity as different depending on which group we are a part of at the moment. The opposite of fragmentary is unitary—and modern: assuming a unitary self that assumes its place in a unitary empire under a united flag.

Many of the early avant-gardes were accused of co-opting African and Asian styles of art, but many of those movements were also anti-colonialist. While the most “modern” avant-garde was Futurism, which did glorify war and fascism, which did glorify the Italian state, others, such as Surrealism, were actively involved in the politics of the day. The Surrealists supported the Rift War for Moroccan independence and Andre Breton was present in Haiti as revolution broke out in the 1960s, a revolution some say was in part spurred by surrealism and his presence in Haiti at that time. Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo who were considered Surrealists were involved with revolutionary politics in Mexico, an anti-colonial, if still nation-building project, straddling the line between modern and post-modern politics.

The first postmodern art movement was Dada, with its international cadre of artists, with its rejection of specific nationalities, and most of all, with its fragmentary styles of art, literature, and performances that at first confounded and incensed their audiences. Cabaret Voltaire itself was a mishmash of politics and art, most of it unintelligible to the art-sophisticated audiences of its day. Dada was already post-modern while aspects that we associate with literary modernism was still in its infancy, learning how to stand on wobbly legs and take a step. Dada, with its assault on all styles of writing, on very meaning itself, took on such quintessentially modern behemoths as Soviet style communism, with its empire, uniting the countries of northern Eurasia in the teens and twenties. Dadaist writers were distinguishable from modernists such as Joyce and Pound because there was not a search for new meaning but for no meaning, for circumventing meaning and therefore finding something outside of meaning, to communicate through bypassing conscious understanding altogether. Not that this was a feeling-based art form full of sentimentalism, either. So without feeling or language, what is left? DADA is left. That is why it is so misunderstood, why it is so easy to write about and so hard to practice and why its trajectory led straight into post-modern literature while other avant-gardes of the day were still experimenting and struggling with the modern. The Dadaist revolution was incomplete and there is still a project there that we can engage with as artists and writers moving through this postmodern world.

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.



View all my reviews

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.

Kim Kardashian Dada Wedding Sound Poem

"Sound Poem" based on the previous post, cutting the words into nonsense syllables and being very careful not to make anything identifiable as a word.

I recommend reading this out loud with a particular emotion in mind. Perhaps love, since it is a wedding poem. Or disgust, since it is about the Kardashians. Maybe rage at the fact that these people are famous. Or laughter and humor, which should be self-explanatory.


Kim Kardashian Dada Wedding Sound Poem

Etluc utof aves plew ret emy ure ilo oun frit en eko fes kyab eup. Henin iha meweed thop meve sogla jod dat tivit venoid icsup yameit osel dsig. Olif vemy salit sola lyno semu intes. Elot nard exym tysak resfo ict tru shen. Urenam uraso eawe resh doysmy fisdet woute ket tage hud.

Kim Kardashian Dada Wedding Poem

I could only stand to watch the Kardashians for about 20 minutes. This poem is made up of words and phrases that Kim Kardashian uttered during those 20 minutes. This was also inspired by facebook. But don't hold that against the Dada intent here.


Kim Kardashian Dada Wedding Poem

Pretty sexy, makeup so lame. It's a little weird. I have no idea we're sisters. Festivities up your ass. So glad for your picture. I love my last name. My life is so selfish. Do you need me? We have stages, my friends. I get lucky about a week out of the loop. Then I need five hundred hours, 10 minutes, truly. No joke.

Optic Topic

This poem was inspired by a typo, in which I realized that optic and topic were anagrams of each other, and by a conversation I had with a former classmate of mine, Gina Dunphy, about Dadaism.

Optic Topic

Open your eyes to the
people who ride
to nowhere.
If you can believe it,
conceive it, create it and then sedate it

The Ramones will immortalize you in a song from the beyond
once they are complete again.
Punks and Dadas, artists and singers
in unison in disharmonic disarray
cry out, calling, curdling, curling your elf toes.

Avant Garde Poetry

In the US, a mass society with a large university-educated population inevitably breeds an “official verse culture” (Bernstein 1986: 246-49) – a culture whose discourse is as conventionalized as any other mass discourse from advertising to political campaign rhetoric to legal language.” (Marjorie Perloff, 21st Century Modernism, 155)

“The tradition has always been that you may more or less describe the things that happen but nowadays everybody all day long knows what is happening and so what is happening is not really interesting, one knows it by radios cinemas newspapers biographies autobiographies until what is happening does not really thrill any one . . . . The painter can no longer say that what he does is as the world looks to him because he cannot look at the world any more, it has been photographed too much and he has to say that he does something else.” (Gertrude Stein, “What Are Master-Pieces” cited in Perloff, 162-3)

“Writing is 50 years behind painting.” Bryon Gysin.

In 21st Century Modernism, Marjorie Perloff takes up the virtues of a literary avant garde, arguing that despite its seeming absence, despite declarations that the avant garde is a purely modernist beast murdered at the hands of post-modernism, that the avant garde of the early 20th century was only an infancy, a beginning, and that it remains relevant today, that is post-modernism that in a way, and I am massively paraphrasing, perhaps even projecting my own opinion here, wore itself out. I think of the metaphor, growing up in Illinois, of a tornado in a valley, a destructive force to be sure, but moreover, one that eventually wears itself out because it has nowhere to go, so it spins and spins until it has no more strength. The point here, and I digress, is not to engage in a debate on post-modernism vs. modernism, a debate that I am not really ready to settle at the moment. But I am very distrustful of the proclaimers that all that came before me is now dead and over. Further, my own personal take is that postmodernism itself is not contrary to the avant garde, but emerges from it. That if Futurism, for example, with its embrace of a fascistic nationalism, can be seen as the ultimate form of a modernism that is born of enlightenment values, emphasis on apparent rationalism, and the rise of the nation-state, then Dadaism, with its embrace of ir-rationalism, of nonsense and it’s highly inter- and anti-nationalism, along with its progeny Surrealism with its interest in the dark occult and the unconscious, make up the beginnings of the post-modern, of the multiplicity, of the backlash, and that therefore, modernism and post-modernism are temporal but contemporaneous to one another.

Perloff’s assessment of an unfinished literary avant garde, aborted, perhaps before it could be fully realized, when it was merely quickening, is near and dear to my heart then. If we take Bryon Gysin at his wise word that writing is 50 years behind painting, then we can look back 50 years ago to see Abstract Expressionism, particularly of the Pollock strain, all form and accident, lacking not only representation, but meaning itself. What is the meaning inscribed into a splatter painting? A chance operation? If meaning is created, if it is gleaned somehow by an audience member, it is nonetheless, not a meaning that can be “read” infallibly, deciphered authoritatively by a critic. It is an accidental meaning, a meaning created by a subconscious connection to a form or element or color within the piece, a synaptic pre- un- sub- conscious meaning, not a semiotic meaning to be read.

Where is the abstract expressionist poetry? Even a pre-splattering, Surrealist Pollock, a poetry of images to evoke imagination, idea, fully over meaning, story, intent? For all of her avant garde sympathies and apologetics, which are mighty, Perloff still spends much of her time explaining the meaning of things with a reading of poetry that still seeks to explain, that is about metaphor and enjambment and all of those things that matter most and maybe only to graduate students in English, not readers or audience hungering for the liberations (even if they don’t conceptualize it that way or don’t know that they are hungry yet) of imagination, of images. Watching her decipher a poem by Charles Bernstein, ironically, can make it harder for me, personally, to distinguish it from the non-avant garde poetry she sets up as contrast. Is it because her own avant garde of today is Language Poetry, a poetic avant garde immersed in and engaging with semiotics and teories of meaning in ways that, at the end of the day, still engage more with rather than subvert, semioitics and the tendency to “read everything as a text?” After all, if everything can be read as a text, is it possible to create a text that is not meant to be read, but felt, experienced, understood on a different level? Can we have experiences outside of language, and in particular, can we use language to create experiences outside of language? A heady question (pun appreciated, but not intended), to be sure.

Even Craig Dworkin, whose work on the avant garde I greatly admire and who has influenced and supported my own ideas immensely, has, in some of his writings on Zaum (To destroy language”, Textual Practice (18)2, 2004, 185-197) still focused on meaning. Dworkin describes the work of zaum’ as a utopian activity that seeks to circumvent what he sees as “totalitarian” desires to fix meaning. Using semiotic analysis, Dworkin suggests that zaum’ actually can be read not through the usual system of differences, but through chains of similarities and through linguistic and syllabic innuendo. In his reading, Dworkin shows that the “problem” to be solved with zaum’ is not that of making meaning, but the difficulty of limiting the number of possible meanings within each work. He places zaum’ within a matrix of nondiscursive literature including children’s nonsense rhymes as well as lettrism and experiments with concrete and sound poetry. Nonetheless, the very basis of his work shows that we have a hard time talking about poetry, even the avant garde, outside of semiotic analyses. While his work may be about “limiting” meanings, it still assumes that with enough imagination, we can learn to “read” the short syllables of zaum, to somehow understand them. To talk about them on the rational level of academic discourse seems to make it difficult, if not impossible, to talk or even think about them outside of that discourse. Is this the same criticism that writing about performance faces, that it potentially kills the very thing it seeks to examine? Is the avant garde, even a literary one, not always inherently performative, a performance, in the way in which the reader and audience must individually, privately engage with the piece, even if not necessarily on a private or personal level, the way they would with a piece of confessionalism?

Of course, I do not mean to belittle the great work and thinking done by Dworkin and Perloff and others. But it is to say that few people have been able to truly rethink poetry and language and the functions of language. If, as Perloff says, poetic culture has conventions just like advertising or journalism or all other forms of writing, and if as Stein says, those forms of writing make the “reportage” function of poetry are dated and irrelevant (100 years ago in Stein’s day—let alone today in our over-mediated cable television clear channel CNN You Tube etc etc world) then what is the new function of poetry, the Dadaist post-modernism of a poetry that is about freeplay and free association of language to generate its own pictures of a 1000 disjointed words to make the picture of a Pollock, quite outside of story, narrative or even (c)overt attempts at meanings, outside of any attempts at something that can be fixed, understood rationally, something to stimulate both left and right brain simultaneously, not only one or the other separately or sequentially.


“If we could change our language, that’s to say the way we think, we’d probably be able to swing the revolution.” (John Cage, M 210)

Academia and Poetry Slam

This is from my summer 2006 research trip and is a draft (read, in-progress, unfinished) of something that will work its way into my dissertation. I recently read someone else's brief blog posting on poetry slam and thought it would be interesting to post some of what I'm working on with my dissertation here.

Cheers.

Fluffy

Academia and Poetry Slam

It seems that academia has a very uncertain relationship to poetry slam. There is the appearance of a certain level of hostility between the two spheres, as poetry slam, and consequently much spoken work, promotes itself as being anti-academic and on the margins of the literati. Looking at anthologies from the "heyday" of spoken word and slam in the mid- to late-1990s, including Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café and Listen Up!, it becomes obvious that many, if not most, of the poets who have been promoted as "stars" of this movement do, in fact, have literary backgrounds and are educated in poetry and literature. It is something of a "stance" on the part of many of these artists to portray themselves as unschooled and from the streets. Miguel Algarin, himself, founder of the Nuyorican Poet's Café, teaches Shakespeare and Rutgers and did so even in the early days of the Nuyorican, when he was holding readings at his home. Zoe Anglesey's Listen Up!, includes a foreword by "Pulitizer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komynyakaa," which is touted on the cover. Anglesey's own introduction goes to great pains to place this work not within the literary canon of Harold Bloom (who has accused slam of "ruining art"), but very much within a modern "canon" that includes the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and the Beat Generation.

At a June, 2006 performance of "Louder Mondays" in Bar 13 in New York, this ambivalence was very apparent in one of the featured readers, 30-something white male poet who had just finished his MFA at The New School and announced to the audience that he wanted to "bring hip hop into the canon" as an alternative to "academic bullshit." A poet who teaches hip hop poetry to public school students, his work lacked any audible hip hop rhythms, although it did make reference to the rapper Old Dirty Bastard. Based on extensive conversations that I have had in panels and informally at the conferences, I suspect that many people in academia—particularly those who teach poetry and literature—are anxious to "critique" spoken word and particularly poetry slam.

I suspect, given the strong ties to hip hop and to marginalized cultures, such as the African American community, the Puerto Rican community that was the impetus for the founding of the Nuyorican, etc., that white academics are loathe to critique performance practices from an outsider position. At best, they seem to see their best course of action as trying to "embrace" the slam aesthetic in their work and in de facto making it part of the curriculum, having an opportunity to impact the work. I wonder to what degree this acceptance into the canon will actually neutralize this work, and if that isn't in fact some aspect of the goal. One of the major claims is that of community. When I attended both slams and open mics at the Nuyorican, the café was packed each night—standing room only. At the open mic, the room was very friendly. I ended up sharing a table with several women who come regularly to the Café and who were quite friendly and chatty with me. More often, though, people sat with people that they already knew or who had come to hear them read. There was not necessarily a sense of unity in the room or that there was a broader group of people who necessarily came regularly to see and support one another. There was also a great deal of time spent "warming up" the crowd, as with the slam several nights later.

While there may be sense of fun and camaraderie at these events, there is also a very passive spectatorship model, and the audience is there to experience and appreciate the creativity of the performer. Poetry Slam, Inc contends that "Slam is engineered for the audience, [emphasis mine] whereas a number of open mike readings are engineered as a support network for poets. Slam is designed for the audience to react vocally and openly to all aspects of the show, including the poet's performance, the judges' scores, and the host's banter,"[i] a claim which can be a bit misleading, even disingenuous. While judges are chosen from the audience to "score" a slam, nonetheless, the dynamic of a slam is still that of spectatorship and their participation is based on response. PSI's site further explains that the audience might even be instructed on how to react. At the Uptown Slam at Chicago's Green Mill Tavern, where poetry slam was born, the audience is instructed on an established progression of reactions if they don't like a poet, including finger snapping, foot stomping, and various verbal exhortations. If the audience expresses a certain level of dissatisfaction with the poet, the poet leaves the stage, even if he or she hasn't finished the performance. Though not every slam is as exacting in its procedure for getting a poet off the stage, the vast majority of slams give their audience the freedom and the permission to express itself."[ii] This definition also denies that there is an analogous audience interaction at an open mic or other type of reading, and of course overlooks the fact that anyone wandering in off the street can sign up to read at an open mic and the fact that at an open mic, the audience makes itself known by talking through a poet, leaving the room, and often interactively through banter with the poet onstage, as I have observed on many occasions. The rule at Voices From the Well, the open mic I came up through in Minneapolis, was to "respect the audience" while there was never an exhortation to respect the poet.

"[W]hen poetry and the poet move too far from their origins in communal expression--too far from participatory performance and the expectation of shared human feeling, too far into a regulated and predictable literacy bound up in academic role playing, where the reader is either passive appreciator-student or judgmental critic-professor—they are again in need of invigoration." [iii]

At the slam I attended at the Nuyorican, much time was spent encouraging the audience to "show their love" for the performers, rather than expressing themselves about the work. Where audience expression was encouraged, it was to show their dissatisfaction with the judges for not giving high enough scores. (This despite the fact the no poet that night received lower than an 8.9 out of a full 10-point range.) How would the dynamic change if instead of being exhorted a dozen or more times to clap and "show your love," there was a call and response poem, a spontaneous live creation of poetry, or an exquisite corpse that went around the room--some kind of dynamic that would engage the audience in the creative process and make them feel more like a part of the art? As Comte L'Autremont said, "poetry must be made by all," an ethos that the Surrealists insisted on. This was not a facile call for everyone to simply pick up a pen and start writing out their innermost feelings or their bad day, the "I wrote this at the table" poem so common at open mics. It was a call for techniques that released the imagination to be shared with all, rather than remaining the provenance of trained artists and intellectuals. Where better than a packed room at the Nuyorican Poets Café to put a call like that into practice? How can practices like this, borrowed in many cases from literary and performance avant gardes such as Dada lead performers to rethink their own work and their approaches to their work, the emphasis of them on stage as the "stars" and solitary geniuses (and isn't that the modernist ideal that questioning the canon is supposed to lead us away from to begin with?), as well as engendering a creativity that helps the audience question the "givens" of the world around them. This is not merely a panacea, an easy fix, for performed poetry, but it is one element on which the current model of poetry slam can be critiqued against its own rhetoric.

Despite the emphasis organizers put on community, there is no denying the doubled-edge sword of competition in poetry slams. Many poets try to downplay the competitiveness, pointing to academia and the competitive nature of getting work published at all. In Poetry Slam, the Competitive Art of Performance Poetry, contributing writer Jeffrey McDaniel points out that most poets hoping to see a first collection of their work in print must do so through the mechanism of contests, many of which charge entry fees as high as $20 or more.[iv] It is a common defense among slam poets that their approach is no more competitive than the rest of the literary and publishing world, only more open about it. Australian poet Liz Hall-Downs sees the duality of this competitiveness:

"Especially in the Poetry Slam movement, the American experience is that the arrival of spoken word on MTV has raised performance standards but has also raised the stakes. Writers can sometimes find themselves caught up in aggressive competition that serves an audience's desire to see blood on the floor but does little to enhance the writing community's cohesion and can shift individuals' focus from producing innovative work to being a kind of human joke machine or jukebox in the (I feel, misguided) belief that poetry might actually pay in the long-term."

Marc Smith, one of the founders of the slam and former head of Poetry Slam International, insisted in his manifesto that the slams are about building community, rather than competition.[v]

"The slam does not exist to glorify the poet, but rather to celebrate the community of which the poet is only a small part. . . ."

"We must all remember that we are each tied in some way to someone else's efforts. Our individual achievements are only extensions of some previous accomplishment. Success for one must spread to success for all. . . ."

[i] http://www.poetryslam.com, accessed August 1, 2006.

[ii] http://www.poetryslam.com/, accessed August 1, 2006.

[iii] Alicia Suskin Ostriker, Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America, . 239, quoted in Athanases 124.

[iv] Glazner, 45

[v] Marc Smith, "The Slam Manifesto," published on http://www.poetryslam.com/, access January 2003.