avant-garde

Avant-Canada

On the Canadian avant-garde

In November 2014, a representative sample of Canada’s avant-garde gathered in St. Catharines, Ontario, at the Avant Canada: Artists, Prophets, Revolutionaries conference to map out the state of experimental writing today and for the future. A major focus of the event was Indigenous poetics and politics, including the keynote address by Stó:lõ First Nations elder, philosopher, and author Lee Maracle. Her apposite message to the future-oriented, mostly settler audience was to remember: remember how and why your families came to Canada, remember who was here to greet them, remember the violence of displacement and the violence of the passage across the Atlantic. 

Publishing Genius interview!

Atlanta-based press!

Adam Robinson of Publishing Genius talks about the philosophy of the press.

I interviewed Adam Robinson, editor and founder of Publishing Genius, about the press. If you want to learn more, or to order books, see www.publishinggenius.com.  They have been around, making books, for almost ten years.

a. Who started the press, and what are your hopes for its future?

I started Publishing Genius in 2006. It has gone through a few different stages, first publishing broadsides and then chapbooks, then short books of poetry — poetry is usually short, right, like somehow most poetry books end up being 88 pages long — and novellas, and then eventually more traditional books. At least traditional in terms of length.

Tweets, poems, and... kimchi?

Image of Margaret Rhee's installation "The Kimchi Poetry Project"
Margaret Rhee's installation "The Kimchi Poetry Project"

Kimchi, a Korean side dish of fermented vegetables and spices, is perhaps best known as a polarizing condiment, engendering love, hatred, and YouTube videos of screaming children trying it for the first time. It is also serves as inspiration for the work of Margaret Rhee, a feminist new media artist and scholar. In The Kimchi Poetry Project, she asks, "What feminist methods, histories, and stories can we unearth and create through the poetics of kimchi?" (Rhee, "Installation - The Kimchi Poetry Project"). Rhee's innovative work explores the possibilities at the intersections of kimchi, tweets, and poetry.

After publishing her poem "A Feminist History of Kimchi" in the anthology Conversations at the Wartime Cafe (2011), Rhee was invited to a poetry reading where she asked the audience to make "kimchi poetry" with her. The Kimchi Poetry Project was born. Rhee's participatory poetry venture includes a series of multimedia installations and objects.

Monoculture beer no more

Other poetries from Ireland

Left to right: Anamaría Crowe Serrano, Catherine Walsh, Dylan Harris, Kit Fryatt, Susan Connolly.

Discussions of the Irish poetry avant-garde, or avant-garde poetry from Ireland, or avant-garde poetry produced in Ireland, tend to focus on a lineage that begins with the quartet of Samuel Beckett, Brian Coffey, Thomas MacGreevy, and Denis Devlin, before continuing with Michael Smith’s New Writers Press and Trevor Joyce, Randolph Healy, Maurice Scully, Billy Mills, and Catherine Walsh.

Reconsidering the environment

A review of 'Kindergarde'

Children often have the ability to cut to the chase and say something without dissembling.  Within such purity, gems often leave their small mouths, hence the saying, “From the mouth of babes … ” All children possess this capacity, but I suspect that for orphans — or perhaps any child with a difficult (so to speak) background — this ability to swiftly and directly see and analyze is honed.

Ways to be

A review of 'Kindergarde'

“They don’t always do as they are told or follow the instructions about how to act on paper or in society. They remind us that there are lots of ways to be,” editor Dana Teen Lomax says of the contributors to Kindergarde: Avant-garde Poems, Plays, Stories, and Songs for Children (viii).

Marjorie Perloff's twenty-first-century modernism

Published in 2002 as part of Blackwell’s “Manifestos” series, Marjorie Perloff’s 21st-Century Modernism is a passionate restatement of her commitment to avant-garde writing and its role in an increasingly mediatized future. At a moment when the notion of the postmodern seems “to have largely lost its momentum,” we need to appreciate, says Perloff, the full potential of modernism’s continuing legacy.[1] 21st-Century Modernism accordingly revisits some old enthusiasms — Stein, Duchamp, Khlebnikov — and also returns to Eliot’s early work to discover there an avant-gardism Perloff now feels she undervalued in her previous books. This review of literary modernism neatly summarizes the qualities of avant-garde writing that Perloff will then rediscover in the “second wave of modernism” that she associates with the contemporary texts of Lyn Hejinian, Steve McCaffery, Charles Bernstein, and Susan Howe (5). The features emphasized are by now familiar ones: the collage-text, the “indeterminacy” of meaning that underwrites a determined anti-subjectivism, the repudiation of mainstream “authenticity” or what Bernstein has nicely called “the natural look,” and, above all, the recognition of the text as “verbal artifact.” This latter term consistently governs Perloff’s approach to the avant-garde, compelling her readers to realize that when Williams, for example, declares “No ideas but in things” or Pound calls for “Direct treatment of the ‘thing’”, they are speaking not of material objects but of the poem as “thing,” as conception and as verbal construction (a distinction missed by subsequent generations of critics, but not, of course, by the modernists’ immediate successors: the Objectivists).[2]

Syndicate content