What's the quality of this poem?
M.H.Benders
>> Translation: "I was ludicrously wrong when I said Hill's poem was
>> fluff, and, what's worse, readers obviously liked it,
>
> "Makes no difference, but I think it's tepid tapwater mixed with Karo
> syrup."
>
> -- Dale Houstman, in response to Martijn's request for an objective crit
> of Josh's poem.
You beat me to it. So let's do a body count:
We have at least 2 poets who say the work is crap.
We have one plaudible critic who says the work is crap.
We have 20 Web TV posters that say Josh wrote a great poem.
I would like to hear more opinions from people one could consider poets.
Sheard, Yourcenar, Crowther, Tynan.....whomever.
Not because of Josh bashing - merely for the sake of science this time.
The poem in question:
In the Night, When Blooms Are Black
In the night, when blooms are black
And talons dip from unseen skies,
When silent feet pad ancient track,
In the night she dies.
But by the day, when blooms are bright
And eagles swoop on feathered wing,
The path we walk is filled with light,
And we yet laugh and sing.
In the Night, When Dreams Have Come
In the night, when dreams have come
And hard day's fancies flutter free,
I wander up the meadow some,
And there she waits for me.
But by the day, when dreams have fled,
I look about and all is bare:
The shelf, the desk, the half slept bed,
The brush that combed her hair.
Josh
Alacrity Stone
"M.H.Benders" <m.be...@spamchello.nl> wrote in message
news:417054C4...@spamchello.nl...
> Chandra P. Das wrote:
>
> >> Translation: "I was ludicrously wrong when I said Hill's poem was
> >> fluff, and, what's worse, readers obviously liked it,
> >
> > "Makes no difference, but I think it's tepid tapwater mixed with Karo
> > syrup."
> >
> > -- Dale Houstman, in response to Martijn's request for an objective
crit
> > of Josh's poem.
>
> You beat me to it. So let's do a body count:
>
> We have at least 2 poets who say the work is crap.
> We have one plaudible critic who says the work is crap.
>
> We have 20 Web TV posters that say Josh wrote a great poem.
>
> I would like to hear more opinions from people one could consider poets.
> Sheard, Yourcenar, Crowther, Tynan.....whomever.
>
> Not because of Josh bashing - merely for the sake of science this time.
>
> The poem in question:
>
> In the Night, When Blooms Are Black
The title is bad in that the result is a blank,
dark canvas. There is no image. There
is no imagination. There is no surprise.
There is no.
>
> In the night, when blooms are black
Repeating the title just emphasises its weakness.
> And talons dip from unseen skies,
"unseen skies" is more repetition of the non
image. We have three lines that convey blackness.
> When silent feet
It's as though it's been written by someone who was
reared in a sensory deprivation tank.
If a good poem were a painting, this would be its photographic negative:
It's Colorless with nothing where things should be and things where nothing
should ever be.
Alacrity
Josh Hill
<m.be...@spamchello.nl> wrote:
>You beat me to it. So let's do a body count:
>
>We have at least 2 poets who say the work is crap.
>We have one plaudible critic who says the work is crap.
>
>We have 20 Web TV posters that say Josh wrote a great poem.
>
>I would like to hear more opinions from people one could consider poets.
>Sheard, Yourcenar, Crowther, Tynan.....whomever.
>
>Not because of Josh bashing - merely for the sake of science this time.
You're such a liar, Benders. You know full well that there are only
two poets, not "at least two," that one of those poets is you, that
the "plaudible" [sic] critic is Chandra, and that the people you
lyingly call Web TVers are mostly AAPC regulars and include capable
poets like Jerry Jenkins. The pathetic thing of it is, one senses that
you lie to yourself as avidly as you lie to others, always with the
same purpose: to protect yourself from your feelings of inadequacy.
So while I'm always glad to hear what people have to say about my
poems, you've ruined things by prejudicing this, by putting Dale's
negative opinion first, omitting the favorable ones its received since
you reposted it, and lying about those who said they liked the poem
and about what they said about it. What you expect to accomplish,
other than earning even more contempt from those of us who don't like
liars, I don't know.
--
Josh
Michael Cook
>
> In the Night, When Blooms Are Black
>
> In the night, when blooms are black
> And talons dip from unseen skies,
> When silent feet pad ancient track,
> In the night she dies.
>
> But by the day, when blooms are bright
> And eagles swoop on feathered wing,
> The path we walk is filled with light,
> And we yet laugh and sing.
>
> In the Night, When Dreams Have Come
>
> In the night, when dreams have come
> And hard day's fancies flutter free,
> I wander up the meadow some,
> And there she waits for me.
>
> But by the day, when dreams have fled,
> I look about and all is bare:
> The shelf, the desk, the half slept bed,
> The brush that combed her hair.
>
> Josh
>
Contrasts leading to a catharsis.
The poem is just too darn innocent to beat up
Not so bad as to be branded as such nor
so good as to earn said label.
It is a great idea surrounded by mediocrity
All and all it is one of the few poems
I have read here in a great while
That being said it is also one of the better ones.
mdc
M.H.Benders
poet,but your opinion on this piece has been recorded.
M.H.Benders
>>In the Night, When Blooms Are Black
>
>
> The title is bad in that the result is a blank,
> dark canvas. There is no image. There
> is no imagination. There is no surprise.
> There is no.
>
>
>>In the night, when blooms are black
>
>
> Repeating the title just emphasises its weakness.
>
>
>>And talons dip from unseen skies,
>
>
> "unseen skies" is more repetition of the non
> image. We have three lines that convey blackness.
>
>
>>When silent feet
>
>
> It's as though it's been written by someone who was
> reared in a sensory deprivation tank.
> If a good poem were a painting, this would be its photographic negative:
> It's Colorless with nothing where things should be and things where nothing
> should ever be.
>
> Alacrity
>
>
--
Herr Derrick, Kriminalpolizei
http://www.derrick-fanclub.de/
Michael Cook
"Michael Cook" <mic...@NOSPAMnet-kooks.org> wrote in message
news:fOCdncHIDpg...@comcast.com...
having been said
and that having been said I retract
my comments on poem, the context in which
opinion was asked precludes the objective,
slightly, but none the less.
In fact had you not asked I would have not read
and having not read would not have uttered a mumbling word
mdc
M.H.Benders
Josh Hill wrote:
>>We have at least 2 poets who say the work is crap.
>>We have one plaudible critic who says the work is crap.
>>
>>We have 20 Web TV posters that say Josh wrote a great poem.
>>
>>I would like to hear more opinions from people one could consider poets.
>>Sheard, Yourcenar, Crowther, Tynan.....whomever.
>>
>>Not because of Josh bashing - merely for the sake of science this time.
>
> You're such a liar, Benders.
Wiggy wiggy on the wall....
> You know full well that there are only
> two poets, not "at least two,"
I don't know if one should count either me or Dale as exactly one poet,
but for the sake of convenience let's do so. But it's quite likely that
there are more serious poets out there who will think the work is crap,
so the 'at least' in above sentence structure is of course completely
justifiyable.
> that one of those poets is you, that
> the "plaudible" [sic] critic is Chandra, and that the people you
> lyingly call Web TVers are mostly AAPC regulars and include capable
> poets like Jerry Jenkins.
That Jerry Jenkins is a 'poet' is merely your opinion. When I look for
the name on Google I can find just this guy:
http://www.jerryjenkins.com/
Doesn't seem much of a poet to me. I remember some guy hanging around
here calling himself Jerry Jenkins who wrote some sort of lightverse
sonnets that were sometimes nice to read. If he were known you'd expect
him to at least show up in Google when you type his name there. I have
no problem finding either Dale Houstman or me. An active poet and
someone who is liked by others will have no problem turning up on Google
on his own name.
The rest of the people who responded to your work are the sort of
characters one always finds hanging around cosy teaclubs. Their opinions
have no meaning or weight.
> The pathetic thing of it is, one senses that
> you lie to yourself as avidly as you lie to others, always with the
> same purpose: to protect yourself from your feelings of inadequacy.
That is a very silly thought. There's nothing 'inadequate' about my
observation that your poem is complete fluff. But since you want to be
so stubborn about it and keep pretending it's a good work I thought:
well, let's ask some other poets then.
M.H.Benders
M.H.Benders
as one of a 'plaudible critic'. There are responses in four catagories:
Poets
Plaubible Critics
Cosy Commenters
Web TV Persona
If I count now, we have
Poets: Dale, Martijn
Plaudible Critics: Jerry, Rick, Chandra, Michael
Cosy Commenters: a whole bunch
Web TV persona : a whole bunch
M.H.Benders
> Contrasts leading to a catharsis.
> The poem is just too darn innocent to beat up
> Not so bad as to be branded as such nor
> so good as to earn said label.
> It is a great idea surrounded by mediocrity
>
> All and all it is one of the few poems
> I have read here in a great while
> That being said it is also one of the better ones.
>
> mdc
>
>
Alacrity Stone
> Thanks for your reply, Rick. I am not sure if I should count you as a
> poet,but your opinion on this piece has been recorded.
>
> M.H.Benders
I replied for Josh's benefit and I suspect he will thank me of his own
accord.
I'll take your uncertainty as a compliment. As for the "count"ing and
"recorded"ing,
please tell the committee
that I don't exist.
Alacrity
Alacrity Stone
Your first try at surrealism?
Alacrity
M.H.Benders
Alacrity Stone wrote:
> Poets: Dale, Martijn
>
> Your first try at surrealism?
Anyone who wrote over 300 poems, won national poetry prizes and
has published a handful of works would count as a 'poet', regardless
of the quality of his work. The qualification is not 'good poet' but
merely 'poet', which is a relatively easy position to earn.
M.H.Benders
Josh Hill
<m.be...@spamchello.nl> wrote:
>
>
>Josh Hill wrote:
>
>>>We have at least 2 poets who say the work is crap.
>>>We have one plaudible critic who says the work is crap.
>>>
>>>We have 20 Web TV posters that say Josh wrote a great poem.
>>>
>>>I would like to hear more opinions from people one could consider poets.
>>>Sheard, Yourcenar, Crowther, Tynan.....whomever.
>>>
>>>Not because of Josh bashing - merely for the sake of science this time.
>>
>> You're such a liar, Benders.
>
>Wiggy wiggy on the wall....
>
>> You know full well that there are only
>> two poets, not "at least two,"
>
>I don't know if one should count either me or Dale as exactly one poet,
>but for the sake of convenience let's do so.
I'd count Dale as one, you as .5.
I'm in a generous mood, you see.
> But it's quite likely that
>there are more serious poets out there who will think the work is crap,
And it's quite likely that there are more serious poets who think the
work is wonderful.
>so the 'at least' in above sentence structure is of course completely
>justifiyable.
You're such a liar, Benders
>> that one of those poets is you, that
>> the "plaudible" [sic] critic is Chandra, and that the people you
>> lyingly call Web TVers are mostly AAPC regulars and include capable
>> poets like Jerry Jenkins.
>
>That Jerry Jenkins is a 'poet' is merely your opinion. When I look for
>the name on Google I can find just this guy:
>http://www.jerryjenkins.com/
>
>Doesn't seem much of a poet to me. I remember some guy hanging around
>here calling himself Jerry Jenkins who wrote some sort of lightverse
>sonnets that were sometimes nice to read. If he were known you'd expect
>him to at least show up in Google when you type his name there. I have
>no problem finding either Dale Houstman or me. An active poet and
>someone who is liked by others will have no problem turning up on Google
>on his own name.
Liar. A search for Jerry Jenkins turned up page after page of hits:
>The rest of the people who responded to your work are the sort of
>characters one always finds hanging around cosy teaclubs. Their opinions
>have no meaning or weight.
Liar. They include people like Rick, whom you've just concluded in
your own anal bureaucrat list as a credible critic, Sandy, and Michael
Stephens.
>> The pathetic thing of it is, one senses that
>> you lie to yourself as avidly as you lie to others, always with the
>> same purpose: to protect yourself from your feelings of inadequacy.
>
>That is a very silly thought. There's nothing 'inadequate' about my
>observation that your poem is complete fluff. But since you want to be
>so stubborn about it and keep pretending it's a good work I thought:
>well, let's ask some other poets then.
Your "observation" is stupid: whatever the poem is, it is not fluff.
As to whether it is good or not, that's entirely relative. If I were
to judge it by the standards of your poetry, I would say it's sublime;
if I were to judge it by the standards of T S Eliot, I would say it
sucks.
--
Josh
Alacrity Stone
Amazing. First you stand there with your arm around Dale-in-effigy
and then you burn him.
You're on fire tonight, Martijn.
Alacrity
M.H.Benders
Josh Hill wrote:
>>But it's quite likely that
>>there are more serious poets out there who will think the work is crap,
>
> And it's quite likely that there are more serious poets who think the
> work is wonderful.
Very unlikely.
>>Doesn't seem much of a poet to me. I remember some guy hanging around
>>here calling himself Jerry Jenkins who wrote some sort of lightverse
>>sonnets that were sometimes nice to read. If he were known you'd expect
>>him to at least show up in Google when you type his name there. I have
>>no problem finding either Dale Houstman or me. An active poet and
>>someone who is liked by others will have no problem turning up on Google
>>on his own name.
>
> Liar. A search for Jerry Jenkins turned up page after page of hits:
>
> http://tinyurl.com/3q4d4
This guy has published in some unknown magazines and started writing in
1993 when he was already 60 years old. That's ok, really, but it would
be a bit of an egaggeration to claim that poetry is his life's mission.
>>The rest of the people who responded to your work are the sort of
>>characters one always finds hanging around cosy teaclubs. Their opinions
>>have no meaning or weight.
>
> Liar. They include people like Rick, whom you've just concluded in
> your own anal bureaucrat list as a credible critic, Sandy, and Michael
> Stephens.
Rick is a pathetic myope whose only purpose in life is to try convince
others he deserves their attention. The guy has 'ressentiment' written
all over his face (like you). I counted him as a 'plaudible critic'
because I wanted to set the standards for this poetry test as low as
would be virtually possible. Sandy - no idea who that is. Stephens is a
known psychopath.
>>That is a very silly thought. There's nothing 'inadequate' about my
>>observation that your poem is complete fluff. But since you want to be
>>so stubborn about it and keep pretending it's a good work I thought:
>>well, let's ask some other poets then.
>
> Your "observation" is stupid: whatever the poem is, it is not fluff.
Until now, at least two poets think so, and no poet thinks it isn't.
M.H.Benders
M.H.Benders
Alacrity Stone wrote:
>>>Your first try at surrealism?
>>
>>Anyone who wrote over 300 poems, won national poetry prizes and
>>has published a handful of works would count as a 'poet', regardless
>>of the quality of his work. The qualification is not 'good poet' but
>>merely 'poet', which is a relatively easy position to earn.
>
> Amazing. First you stand there with your arm around Dale-in-effigy
> and then you burn him.
Fry, you can't read (or write).
As to Dale, there's no doubt the guy is a poet. As to the quality of
his work - it is not entirely to my liking but let me put it this way:
if I were a publisher I'd publish the guy immediately. He's surely
better than 99% of the American poets I saw published. (Not that that is
too hard, either)
M.H.Benders
Alacrity Stone
Alacrity Stone wrote:
> too hard, either).
I have no doubt whatsoever that Dale is a poet. I have no doubt whatsoever
that you are not. You are an exhibitionist, Martijn. You bare, here and
there, the odd
tidbit of a twisted mediocrity that is interesting.
You are pure Committee, Martijn. Watching you suck up to Dale like this -
fending off imaginary
attacks on his worth as a poet when the only thing attacked was your notion
that the fantastically
incongruous juxtaposition of "Poets: Dale, Martijn." is anything but
surreal - I'm reminded of your
tirades against the U.S. invasion of Iraq because they lied to the world
about a threat that did not exist.
If you use Committee tactics, you are committe. You are an ally of George
Bush and I bet
you don't have a clue what I'm talking about, do you?
You might as well have written this:
Gemstones: Emerald, Weird-Looking-Piece-Of-Slag
Alacrity
Josh Hill
Thanks, though, Michael. I'm always interested in unvarnished opinion,
and for that reason I think it's too bad that Martijn prejudiced
things (or maybe not, since I've found that the main problem with crit
is that your friends don't want to say anything bad).
BTW, this is in fact a five year old draft that Martijn Googled up,
not something I think is "great," and I can see the infelicities to
which I think your alluding -- correct me if I'm wrong: cliches,
filler, a repetition that doesn't work, too-heavy alliterations,
changes in voice, obvious word choices, perhaps (I haven't made up my
mind yet) the abrupt shift to ballade rhythm.
--
Josh
Josh Hill
<elizabeth...@rogers.com> wrote:
>
>"M.H.Benders" <m.be...@spamchello.nl> wrote in message
>news:4170DC36...@spamchello.nl...
>> Thanks for your reply, Rick. I am not sure if I should count you as a
>> poet,but your opinion on this piece has been recorded.
>>
>> M.H.Benders
>
>
>I replied for Josh's benefit and I suspect he will thank me of his own
>accord.
Heh. yes. Thanks, Rik. Martijn's prejudiced this by lying about who
liked it and who didn't and claiming I thought it was "great" when in
fact it's a draft I posted for crit five years ago, but in a way
that's good, since people on these groups are apt to be far too
complementary. I'm always glad to hear your opinion. (BTW, did you
know that you commented on this five years ago? You didn't like the
second stanza much then either, except the half-slept bed, but were
more positive towards the first. I'll take the change as evidence of
poetic growth! :-) )
--
Josh
M.H.Benders
Alacrity Stone wrote:
>>As to Dale, there's no doubt the guy is a poet. As to the quality of
>>his work - it is not entirely to my liking but let me put it this way:
>>if I were a publisher I'd publish the guy immediately. He's surely
>>better than 99% of the American poets I saw published. (Not that that is
>>too hard, either).
>
> I have no doubt whatsoever that Dale is a poet. I have no doubt whatsoever
> that you are not.
Your opinion is not relevant.
> You are pure Committee, Martijn. Watching you suck up to Dale like this -
Sucking up to Dale? If anyone hasn't been sucking up to Dale it would be
me. He knows that. I don't like him much for several different reasons,
but I wouldn't say he's not a poet. I would say he classifies as a good
poet, not an excellent poet. But to be a good poet is already an
accomplishment.
> I'm reminded of your
> tirades against the U.S. invasion of Iraq because they lied to the world
> about a threat that did not exist.
There is no doubt whatsoever that your political opinions are just as
stupid as your poetical ones, and just as irrelevant.
> If you use Committee tactics, you are committe. You are an ally of George
> Bush and I bet
> you don't have a clue what I'm talking about, do you?
Sure I have. I recommend anyone out there to vote for George Bush. He's
clearly the preseident the Americans deserve.
> You might as well have written this:
>
> Gemstones: Emerald, Weird-Looking-Piece-Of-Slag
You can't write, you non-existant Google entity.
M.H.Benders
Alacrity Stone
> >> poet,but your opinion on this piece has been recorded.
> >>
> >> M.H.Benders
> >
> >
> >I replied for Josh's benefit and I suspect he will thank me of his own
> >accord.
>
> Heh. yes. Thanks, Rik. Martijn's prejudiced this by lying about who
> liked it and who didn't and claiming I thought it was "great" when in
> fact it's a draft I posted for crit five years ago, but in a way
> that's good, since people on these groups are apt to be far too
> complementary. I'm always glad to hear your opinion. (BTW, did you
> know that you commented on this five years ago? You didn't like the
> second stanza much then either, except the half-slept bed, but were
> more positive towards the first. I'll take the change as evidence of
> poetic growth! :-) )
>
> --
> Josh
Josh, It's really dull arguing with Martijn. Could you post something you're
working on
or perhaps start in on some of Mine?
Regards,
Alacrity
michael
Ha Ha, Benders is panicking
Panick, Benders, Panick
See Benders panicking
Dale
I agree: not a hard terrain to cross.
dmh
Dale
M.H.Benders wrote:
>
>
> Alacrity Stone wrote:
>
>
>
>> You are pure Committee, Martijn. Watching you suck up to Dale like this -
>
>
> Sucking up to Dale? If anyone hasn't been sucking up to Dale it would be
> me. He knows that.
No doubt about it.
> I don't like him much for several different reasons,
That's all right of course: I don't like myself for several different
reasons. I don't expect others to do better.
> but I wouldn't say he's not a poet. I would say he classifies as a good
> poet, not an excellent poet. But to be a good poet is already an
> accomplishment.
And I wouldn't generally classify myself at all, because it would be
irrelevant to the simple act of imagination that makes ANY poetry at
all. But - if I had a gun held to my temple and were forced to be honest
for once in my life - I'd say I was "somewhat north of merely passable
and somewhat south of tepidly essential." And then I'd ask for black
pudding and a spot of tea.
dmh
>
Josh Hill
You got it.
--
Josh
Josh Hill
<m.be...@spamchello.nl> wrote:
>
>
>Josh Hill wrote:
>
>>>But it's quite likely that
>>>there are more serious poets out there who will think the work is crap,
>>
>> And it's quite likely that there are more serious poets who think the
>> work is wonderful.
>
>Very unlikely.
>
>
>>>Doesn't seem much of a poet to me. I remember some guy hanging around
>>>here calling himself Jerry Jenkins who wrote some sort of lightverse
>>>sonnets that were sometimes nice to read. If he were known you'd expect
>>>him to at least show up in Google when you type his name there. I have
>>>no problem finding either Dale Houstman or me. An active poet and
>>>someone who is liked by others will have no problem turning up on Google
>>>on his own name.
>>
>> Liar. A search for Jerry Jenkins turned up page after page of hits:
>>
>> http://tinyurl.com/3q4d4
>
>This guy has published in some unknown magazines and started writing in
>1993 when he was already 60 years old. That's ok, really, but it would
>be a bit of an egaggeration to claim that poetry is his life's mission.
Get real.
>
>
>>>The rest of the people who responded to your work are the sort of
>>>characters one always finds hanging around cosy teaclubs. Their opinions
>>>have no meaning or weight.
>>
>> Liar. They include people like Rick, whom you've just concluded in
>> your own anal bureaucrat list as a credible critic, Sandy, and Michael
>> Stephens.
>
>Rick is a pathetic myope whose only purpose in life is to try convince
>others he deserves their attention. The guy has 'ressentiment' written
>all over his face (like you). I counted him as a 'plaudible critic'
>because I wanted to set the standards for this poetry test as low as
>would be virtually possible. Sandy - no idea who that is. Stephens is a
>known psychopath.
Get real.
>>>That is a very silly thought. There's nothing 'inadequate' about my
>>>observation that your poem is complete fluff. But since you want to be
>>>so stubborn about it and keep pretending it's a good work I thought:
>>>well, let's ask some other poets then.
>>
>> Your "observation" is stupid: whatever the poem is, it is not fluff.
>
>Until now, at least two poets think so, and no poet thinks it isn't.
No. Several poets think it isn't and two do, one of them a fellow who
thinks Yeats, Keats, Blake, Shakespeare, Milton, and Elliot are
mediocre, and whose opinion is therefore about as useful to me as a
mongoloid's.
--
Josh
Josh Hill
Right, and Jerry Jenkins, who has written hundreds of poems, won
national poetry prizes, been published in eminent journals like The
Formalist, and has a book of poems in print is not?
Get real, Bonkers.
--
Josh
Josh Hill
Heh
--
Josh
M.H.Benders
Josh Hill wrote:
>>Anyone who wrote over 300 poems, won national poetry prizes and
>>has published a handful of works would count as a 'poet', regardless
>>of the quality of his work. The qualification is not 'good poet' but
>>merely 'poet', which is a relatively easy position to earn.
>
> Right, and Jerry Jenkins, who has written hundreds of poems, won
> national poetry prizes,
Not seen any.
> been published in eminent journals like The
> Formalist,
Say what? The Formalist an 'eminant journal'?
You mean that journal he's editor from?
Poetry Editor
Lamon Cull
Managing Editor
David Castleman
Contributing Editor
Jerry Jenkins
> and has a book of poems in print is not?
Well, to be frank: he could be considered a poet.
If you'd insist I could include him in the 'poet' section, but I'm
thinking of a serious refinement for the classification system in general.
M.H.Benders
Samuel Vriezen
> No. Several poets think it isn't and two do, one of them a fellow who
> thinks Yeats, Keats, Blake, Shakespeare, Milton, and Elliot are
> mediocre, and whose opinion is therefore about as useful to me as a
> mongoloid's.
You and what army? Yeats, Keats, Blake, Shakespeare, Milton, Eliot.
Hm. Not a bad lineup. Those names appear a lot in books I read.
Does Chaucer also think your poetry is not fluff?
--
samuel
concerten.free.fr
http://composers21.com/compdocs/vriezens.htm
Alacrity Stone
"Dale" <dm...@citilink.com> wrote in message
news:417140D1...@citilink.com...
The authority and truthfulness in which the statement "I am a poet" is made
are not vested in us by publication, prizes or recognition. If you are a
poet,
then you were a poet before anyone said "Dale is a poet".
And the fact that people say it, makes it no more true than if they said
the opposite.
The authority of the poetic voice is contained within the words it utters.
Recognition
of that voice and the issuing of a Poetic License is the kind of fraud the
committee's
been pulling off since time immemorable.
Dear Committee Spokesman,
Your definition of what constitutes a poet
is an insult to anyone upon which you "bestow" (Thief!) that honor.
You embrace and burn in effigy the voice of every poet you care to name.
You are a truly insidious cock-sucker with a testicle collection in your
eyes
that can't replace your long lost Voice. Your praise is no more than the
burps of butter flies, fat with Lilac nectar; and your condemnation no more
substantial than their farts.
I urge you to inform the Committee immediately
of my non-existence.
Alacrity Stone
M.H.Benders
Alacrity Stone wrote:
> The authority and truthfulness in which the statement "I am a poet" is made
> are not vested in us by publication, prizes or recognition. If you are a
> poet,then you were a poet before anyone said "Dale is a poet".
I think the Comittee is going to call you 'Wigmeister the Second'.
Your insane rants against the merits of the International Poetbureau and
its chairmen Benders, Sheard, Houstman and Vriezen do not deserve our pity.
A poet is a poet is he's approved by the Poetbureau. That's the way it
always has been, and we see no reason to change that fact.
A million alcoholoic fortune cookie writers can drop by and throw
their wigs in protest - it will not temper our resolve to clean the
international ranks of Poetry from imposters, now and forever.
M.H.Benders
Josh Hill
<m.be...@spamchello.nl> wrote:
>Josh Hill wrote:
>
>>>Anyone who wrote over 300 poems, won national poetry prizes and
>>>has published a handful of works would count as a 'poet', regardless
>>>of the quality of his work. The qualification is not 'good poet' but
>>>merely 'poet', which is a relatively easy position to earn.
>>
>> Right, and Jerry Jenkins, who has written hundreds of poems, won
>> national poetry prizes,
>
>Not seen any.
"His poetry has won awards in competitions sponsored by Poetic
Eloquence, The Devil's Millhopper Press, and the World Order of
Narrative and Formalist Poets. His recent chapbook, "Avian" won second
place in the 1996 chapbook competition sponsored by Anamnesis Press
and is scheduled to appear in March, 1997."
http://www.alittlepoetry.com/jenkins.html
>> been published in eminent journals like The
>> Formalist,
>
>Say what? The Formalist an 'eminant journal'?
>You mean that journal he's editor from?
>
>Poetry Editor
>Lamon Cull
>
>Managing Editor
>David Castleman
>
>Contributing Editor
>Jerry Jenkins
Erm, no, that's the /New/ Formalist. The Formalist is the preeminent
journal of New Formalism, and is a print publication. Its advisory
board:
Robert Conquest
Wendy Cope
Douglas Dunn
Anthony Hecht
Donald Justice
X. J. Kennedy
Arthur Miller
Howard Nemerov
W. D. Snodgrass
John Updike
Mona Van Duyn
Derek Walcott
Richard Wilbur
No Jerry.
>> and has a book of poems in print is not?
>
>Well, to be frank: he could be considered a poet.
>If you'd insist I could include him in the 'poet' section, but I'm
>thinking of a serious refinement for the classification system in general.
One that limits defines poets as holders of junior chess
championships, no doubt.
--
Josh
Josh Hill
<sqv.do.not.spam@xs4all> wrote:
>Josh Hill wrote:
>
>> No. Several poets think it isn't and two do, one of them a fellow who
>> thinks Yeats, Keats, Blake, Shakespeare, Milton, and Elliot are
>> mediocre, and whose opinion is therefore about as useful to me as a
>> mongoloid's.
>
>You and what army? Yeats, Keats, Blake, Shakespeare, Milton, Eliot.
>
>Hm. Not a bad lineup. Those names appear a lot in books I read.
>
>Does Chaucer also think your poetry is not fluff?
Frankly, I don't care who thinks or doesn't think my poetry is fluff.
Ratings are your slow friend's hard-on -- except, of course, when
anyone criticizes his poetry, in which case he promptly goes limp and
starts insulting the critic.
--
Josh
M.H.Benders
Josh Hill wrote:
>>>Right, and Jerry Jenkins, who has written hundreds of poems, won
>>>national poetry prizes,
>>
>>Not seen any.
>
> "His poetry has won awards in competitions sponsored by Poetic
> Eloquence, The Devil's Millhopper Press, and the World Order of
> Narrative and Formalist Poets. His recent chapbook, "Avian" won second
> place in the 1996 chapbook competition sponsored by Anamnesis Press
> and is scheduled to appear in March, 1997."
All very minor prizes.
> Erm, no, that's the /New/ Formalist. The Formalist is the preeminent
> journal of New Formalism, and is a print publication. Its advisory
> board:
Sounds like a real Wigfest.
I have read some of Jenkins work just now. He's not really bad, but he's
not too sharp either. Take, for example, his poem 'incident in a
barnyard' which has the most unimaginative title, which starts off well,
but which ends in the most boring types of observations.
Incident In A Barnyard
The fresh-killed rooster's shank was scaled and spurred.
He glowed with heat, a dark and compact sun.
I gloated as I plucked his glossy feathers,
recalling the old tyranny of the birds
in their pitiless reign as predators,
monsters on the prairies of the world,
scouring the plains on foot, filling the niche
left by the dying of the dinosaurs.
Remodeled raptors, reptiles redesigned,
scourge of the veldt, part viper, vulture, hawk,
those Miocene marauders. We remember,
deep in the crannies of our mammal minds.
A rooster is innocent, nothing at all to fear
till you tumble down the murderous well of its eyes
and drown in onyx pools of ancient rage
that urges birds, all these uneasy years,
to strike at man, as once at megatheres.
On a conceptual level the poem is plainly boring. The use of language is
not exceptional, the title is a complete bore, and the poem has some
unforgivable bad lines like 'onyx pools of ancient rage' - further more,
there's forced rhyme and much repitition of the same idea.
So, would I call the guy a poet? Maybe. But if this is the standard for
your most exclusive magazines, then I'm actually starting to feel proud
of dutch literature.
Samuel Vriezen
> Frankly, I don't care who thinks or doesn't think my poetry is fluff.
okay, then, Josh - let me ask you this -
Do you feel your poem is *interesting*?
I chose that term deliberately. A poem can have no technical
shortcomings but not be interesting; alternatively, a poem can be not
particularly well-crafted, it could even be cliché-ridden, but have
basic interest somewhere in it.
I wonder where in your poem the interest lies, because frankly, I can't
see it - I think it's fatally cute - Laugh and sing, I mean, what are
you trying to suggest, the Boy Scouts? - as Stacey said, it seems to be
exercise at best.
Exercise in what, though?
Chandra P. Das
> On Fri, 15 Oct 2004 22:52:57 GMT, "M.H.Benders"
> <m.be...@spamchello.nl> wrote:
>
>
>>You beat me to it. So let's do a body count:
>>
>>We have at least 2 poets who say the work is crap.
>>We have one plaudible critic who says the work is crap.
>>
>>We have 20 Web TV posters that say Josh wrote a great poem.
>>
>>I would like to hear more opinions from people one could consider poets.
>>Sheard, Yourcenar, Crowther, Tynan.....whomever.
>>
>>Not because of Josh bashing - merely for the sake of science this time.
>
>
> two poets, not "at least two," that one of those poets is you, that
> the "plaudible" [sic] critic is Chandra, and that the people you
> lyingly call Web TVers are mostly AAPC regulars and include capable
> you lie to yourself as avidly as you lie to others, always with the
> same purpose: to protect yourself from your feelings of inadequacy.
>
> poems, you've ruined things by prejudicing this, by putting Dale's
> negative opinion first, omitting the favorable ones its received since
> you reposted it, and lying about those who said they liked the poem
> and about what they said about it. What you expect to accomplish,
> other than earning even more contempt from those of us who don't like
> liars, I don't know.
Amazing. One of your poems gets trashed and you reel and rant like a
webtver for days. Detach yourself from the poem, Josh. It's a bad poem.
It's not the end of the world. Get on with your life, try to write
something better. A lot better. And get your mind out of the eighteenth
century wig-wank fest for fuck's sake, it's downright silly.
Josh Hill
<m.be...@spamchello.nl> wrote:
>Josh Hill wrote:
>
>>>>Right, and Jerry Jenkins, who has written hundreds of poems, won
>>>>national poetry prizes,
>>>
>>>Not seen any.
>>
>> "His poetry has won awards in competitions sponsored by Poetic
>> Eloquence, The Devil's Millhopper Press, and the World Order of
>> Narrative and Formalist Poets. His recent chapbook, "Avian" won second
>> place in the 1996 chapbook competition sponsored by Anamnesis Press
>> and is scheduled to appear in March, 1997."
>
>All very minor prizes.
As were yours. Next . . .
>> Erm, no, that's the /New/ Formalist. The Formalist is the preeminent
>> journal of New Formalism, and is a print publication. Its advisory
>> board:
>
>Sounds like a real Wigfest.
>
>I have read some of Jenkins work just now. He's not really bad, but he's
>not too sharp either. Take, for example, his poem 'incident in a
>barnyard' which has the most unimaginative title, which starts off well,
>but which ends in the most boring types of observations.
It ends with a wonderful observation.
>Incident In A Barnyard
>
>The fresh-killed rooster's shank was scaled and spurred.
>He glowed with heat, a dark and compact sun.
>I gloated as I plucked his glossy feathers,
>recalling the old tyranny of the birds
>
>in their pitiless reign as predators,
>monsters on the prairies of the world,
>scouring the plains on foot, filling the niche
>left by the dying of the dinosaurs.
>
>Remodeled raptors, reptiles redesigned,
>scourge of the veldt, part viper, vulture, hawk,
>those Miocene marauders. We remember,
>deep in the crannies of our mammal minds.
>
>A rooster is innocent, nothing at all to fear
>till you tumble down the murderous well of its eyes
>and drown in onyx pools of ancient rage
>that urges birds, all these uneasy years,
>to strike at man, as once at megatheres.
>
>On a conceptual level the poem is plainly boring. The use of language is
>not exceptional, the title is a complete bore, and the poem has some
>unforgivable bad lines like 'onyx pools of ancient rage'
The line's fine. Ever seen a chicken's eye?
> - further more,
>there's forced rhyme and much repitition of the same idea.
>
>So, would I call the guy a poet? Maybe. But if this is the standard for
>your most exclusive magazines, then I'm actually starting to feel proud
>of dutch literature.
You don't know how little I care.
--
Josh
M.H.Benders
Samuel Vriezen wrote:
> okay, then, Josh - let me ask you this -
>
> Do you feel your poem is *interesting*?
As a sidenote to this, Mr Vriezen:
Do you see any simularities between J.S.Bach and Communism?
M.H.Benders
--
Herr Derrick, Kriminalpolizei
http://www.derrick-fanclub.de/
michael
"Chandra P. Das" <vze1...@verizon.net> wrote in message
news:z_ecd.1318$Ug4.300@trndny01...
what is the point of Chandra. Why would anyone care about a Junior Benders?
Samuel Vriezen
>
>
> Samuel Vriezen wrote:
>
>> okay, then, Josh - let me ask you this -
>>
>> Do you feel your poem is *interesting*?
>
>
> As a sidenote to this, Mr Vriezen:
> Do you see any simularities between J.S.Bach and Communism?
>
Apart from such differences as that Bach was a great composer and that
Communism ended up killing a lot of people, there are no real
differences. As John Cage said, the music of Bach is a machine for
churning out repetitions which have to be done by sunday. While this may
have been put in too irreverent a way, it does indicate where the two
meet.
M.H.Benders
Samuel Vriezen wrote:
>> As a sidenote to this, Mr Vriezen:
>> Do you see any simularities between J.S.Bach and Communism?
>>
> Apart from such differences as that Bach was a great composer and that
> Communism ended up killing a lot of people, there are no real
> differences.
Right. One might as well argue that Communism as a communal entity was a
great composer, and Bach ended up killing lots of music.
> As John Cage said, the music of Bach is a machine for
> churning out repetitions which have to be done by sunday. While this may
> have been put in too irreverent a way, it does indicate where the two
> meet.
You have just mentioned a name, 'John Cage', that will incite great rage
into the wigfactor of P.Hills online appearance. For the record: do you,
as Holland's most famous composer, think Christo is a talented artist?
Samuel Vriezen
>> As John Cage said, the music of Bach is a machine for churning out
>> repetitions which have to be done by sunday. While this may have been
>> put in too irreverent a way, it does indicate where the two meet.
>
>
> You have just mentioned a name, 'John Cage', that will incite great rage
> into the wigfactor of P.Hills online appearance. For the record: do you,
> as Holland's most famous composer, think Christo is a talented artist?
Why, obviously! Just think of the discipline and dedication that his
stuff requires! To get all that design, planning, organisation and
lobbying done requires serious talent. Just imagine how horrible the
result would be had Christo not had such talent. Angry members of the
Reichstag suddenly discovering they can't go to work that day... birds
picking the wrapping apart... tremendous commerical loss... accidentally
wrapping up the wrong building... wrapping materials in just the wrong
colour that give everybody headaches...
M.H.Benders
Samuel Vriezen wrote:
>> You have just mentioned a name, 'John Cage', that will incite great
>> rage into the wigfactor of P.Hills online appearance. For the record:
>> do you, as Holland's most famous composer, think Christo is a talented
>> artist?
>
> Why, obviously!
Thanks.
Who do you feel will end up in the Canon of music a few hundred years
later: Beethoven or Snoop Doggy Dog?
M.H.Benders
Samuel Vriezen
That's a type of question I refuse to consider. I just hope they'll have
a life of their own by then.
M.H.Benders
Samuel Vriezen wrote:
>> Who do you feel will end up in the Canon of music a few hundred years
>> later: Beethoven or Snoop Doggy Dog?
>
> That's a type of question I refuse to consider. I just hope they'll have
> a life of their own by then.
What do you think of my idea to replace the word 'Canon' in the English
language with the word 'Wig'?
M.H.Benders
Samuel Vriezen
It's like totally secular!
Josh Hill
I'm not sure I can say whether you'll find it interesting or not, but
I can tell you that the surface is deceptively simple. As someone said
when I posted it here five years ago, "It resonates with ambiguity,
buried but accessible though unstated allusions, all of which allow
the perceptive reader to discover, cherish, and remember its multiple
layers of meaning." If you find those meanings underneath and sense
the purpose of the symmetries, and if the poem elicits the right
emotions as you do so, it's doing it's job; if not, it's failed.
I confess I was surprised both then and now by the strongly positive
reactions to this poem, BTW. See, for example, the original comments
at
The question I'm asking myself now is not so much how good this is,
which would be a fool's errand. Nor am I wondering what, if one were
to take a conventional approach, one would want to fix: I can see
cliches, filler, clumsy repetition, overly obvious alliterations,
inconsistent voice, obvious and sometime stodgy word choice,
sentimentality, a whole bag of Gummi Worms. What I'm asking myself --
and I have to approach this almost as a stranger, five years later --
is the degree to which the poem's success /depends/ on those seemingly
clumsy choices.
And as I reread it, I'm increasingly inclined to believe that it does,
that the choices were not as clumsy as they seem. Whether it's the
childlike language with which the narrator describes the dream, "And
we yet laugh and sing" or the barren imagery of the last stanza, the
words were chosen to do a job. Chandra and Martijn have been making
fun of "I wander up the meadow some," but they haven't asked
themselves why I chose those particular words, which tell us that the
meadow is so familiar that the narrator forgets that the reader isn't
familiar with it; that the girl's presence is inevitable, is part of
the logic of the recurring dream, that she'll always be there,
allowing him to "wander," that the wandering (as opposed to walking or
running or what have you) says a lot about his state, and so forth.
One of the commenters said that not one word was out of place in this
poem, and as I reread it, I'm beginning to understand why they did,
and to suspect that a rewrite would have to be very careful indeed to
avoid stripping it of its impact and interest and transforming it into
another oh-so-good and oh-so-forgettable paean to verbal virtuosity.
--
Josh
Josh Hill
<sqv.do.not.spam@xs4all> wrote:
>M.H.Benders wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> Samuel Vriezen wrote:
>>
>>> okay, then, Josh - let me ask you this -
>>>
>>> Do you feel your poem is *interesting*?
>>
>>
>> As a sidenote to this, Mr Vriezen:
>> Do you see any simularities between J.S.Bach and Communism?
>>
>
>Apart from such differences as that Bach was a great composer and that
>Communism ended up killing a lot of people, there are no real
>differences. As John Cage said, the music of Bach is a machine for
>churning out repetitions which have to be done by sunday. While this may
> have been put in too irreverent a way, it does indicate where the two
>meet.
Nah. Bach is truth; Marxism is dogma; and who listens to Cage anymore?
--
Josh
Josh Hill
<m.be...@spamchello.nl> wrote:
>
>
>Samuel Vriezen wrote:
>
>>> You have just mentioned a name, 'John Cage', that will incite great
>>> rage into the wigfactor of P.Hills online appearance. For the record:
>>> do you, as Holland's most famous composer, think Christo is a talented
>>> artist?
>>
>> Why, obviously!
>
>Thanks.
Er, I believe you've just had your dick removed.
--
Josh
M.H.Benders
Josh Hill wrote:
>>>>You have just mentioned a name, 'John Cage', that will incite great
>>>>rage into the wigfactor of P.Hills online appearance. For the record:
>>>>do you, as Holland's most famous composer, think Christo is a talented
>>>>artist?
>>>
>>>Why, obviously!
>>
>>Thanks.
>
> Er, I believe I just had my wig removed.
You can't read. Samuel's comment wasn't ironic. He really thinks Christo
is talented.
Filed in map: wigthinkers nr 4856364.
M.H.Benders
Alacrity Stone
> Alacrity Stone wrote:
>
> > The authority and truthfulness in which the statement "I am a poet" is
made
> > are not vested in us by publication, prizes or recognition. If you are a
> > poet,then you were a poet before anyone said "Dale is a poet".
>
> I think the Comittee is going to call you 'Wigmeister the Second'.
>
> Your insane rants against the merits of the International Poetbureau and
> its chairmen Benders, Sheard, Houstman and Vriezen do not deserve our
pity.
>
> A poet is a poet is he's approved by the Poetbureau. That's the way it
> always has been, and we see no reason to change that fact.
Dale? do you belong to this Poetbureau?
Jim?
Alacrity
Josh Hill
<m.be...@spamchello.nl> wrote:
>
>
>Josh Hill wrote:
>
>>>>>You have just mentioned a name, 'John Cage', that will incite great
>>>>>rage into the wigfactor of P.Hills online appearance. For the record:
>>>>>do you, as Holland's most famous composer, think Christo is a talented
>>>>>artist?
>>>>
>>>>Why, obviously!
>>>
>>>Thanks.
>>
>> Er, I believe I just had my wig removed.
>
>You can't read. Samuel's comment wasn't ironic. He really thinks Christo
>is talented.
"Why, obviously! Just think of the discipline and dedication that his
stuff requires! To get all that design, planning, organisation and
lobbying done requires serious talent. Just imagine how horrible the
result would be had Christo not had such talent. Angry members of the
Reichstag suddenly discovering they can't go to work that day... birds
picking the wrapping apart... tremendous commerical loss...
accidentally wrapping up the wrong building... wrapping materials in
just the wrong colour that give everybody headaches... "
LOL. But then I'm talking to someone who thinks criticism is hard and
art easy . . .
--
Josh
Samuel Vriezen
> What I'm asking myself --
> and I have to approach this almost as a stranger, five years later --
> is the degree to which the poem's success /depends/ on those seemingly
> clumsy choices.
You make it sound very similar to the big Bush question: does his
success perhaps not depend on his image of just an well-meaning,
God-fearing idiot - one of the guys?
> Chandra and Martijn have been making
> fun of "I wander up the meadow some," but they haven't asked
> themselves why I chose those particular words, which tell us that the
> meadow is so familiar that the narrator forgets that the reader isn't
> familiar with it;
Sorry, this reasoning I find very far-fetched. No reader has any sort of
problem whatsoever with a meadow that was not there in line one - it's
utterly unproblematic in poetry. You're making too much more or your
darling find. And a find it is indeed: a meadow! Incredible!
> that the girl's presence is inevitable, is part of
> the logic of the recurring dream, that she'll always be there,
> allowing him to "wander," that the wandering (as opposed to walking or
> running or what have you) says a lot about his state, and so forth.
I have tried to read it again seeing all those silly, clumsy and
hackneyed phrases as being silly, clumsy and hackneyed in an artistic,
positive way but I must say I fail to do so. You're presenting those
choices as some sort of highly refined irony, but I completely fail to
see how or why this poem should be ironic, except because it's like a
general part of romanticism or something like that. As ironic images,
your choices seem to me to be just randomly piled up.
And in the end, I just can't care for ambiguity and irony and meaning
when the words are just telling me that night in dark in some fanciful
way or that wings have feathers. I really only see your fanciful banalities.
I'm now reading Charles Bernstein, who can be quite a frustrating
author, but at least there's a lingual sharpness in every single line of
his that I've read so far, that even invites me every now and then to
look for resonances and meanings. I'll quote just a line:
toast without tempestuousness, farms
Actually, he also presents good models for irony of tone. Compare this
to your Laugh and sing:
DOGGY BAG
have you seen my doggy bag
have to nag, have to nag
have you seen my emerald chain
hate to brag, hate to brag
I ate supper in the village
lunch at the lodge
if you don't give me back my
upper teeth
I am going to drool like a
man that once had silver
man that once had gold
man that once had everything
but a tune of his own
so have you seen my nodding mare
my lurking pony, my sultry donkey
have you seen my cuts and jags
hate to frag, hate to frag
have you seen my broken drum
hate to gab, hate to grab
the toilet seat is down now
it's there I plan to sit
until I find that doggy bag
I lost while just a kid
Samuel Vriezen
>
> and who listens to Cage anymore?
>
John Cage, like most great avant-gardists, have always been considered
outmoded by the pedants, only on ever larger scales. But in fact, I
think interest in Cage has been increasing rather than decreasing since
his death.
Do you realize that so far, every new note in the 639 year Halberstadt
performance of ASLSP has been world news?
Samuel Vriezen
>
>
> Josh Hill wrote:
>
>>>>> You have just mentioned a name, 'John Cage', that will incite great
>>>>> rage into the wigfactor of P.Hills online appearance. For the
>>>>> record: do you, as Holland's most famous composer, think Christo is
>>>>> a talented artist?
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Why, obviously!
>>>
>>>
>>> Thanks.
>>
>>
>> Er, I believe I just had my wig removed.
>
>
> You can't read. Samuel's comment wasn't ironic. He really thinks Christo
> is talented.
It's not merely a question of talent, Christo really is a great artist.
I went to Berlin to see the Reichstag long ago; it was very beautiful.
M.H.Benders
Josh Hill wrote:
>>>Er, I believe I just had my wig removed.
>>
>>You can't read. Samuel's comment wasn't ironic. He really thinks Christo
>>is talented.
(..)
> LOL. But then I'm talking to someone who thinks criticism is hard and
> art easy . . .
You got caught with your pants down again, Hillbilly. The ability to
read simple texts is absolutely essential before you can even start to
dream of writing. You clearly didn't understand a word from what Samuel
was writing.
As to art being easy - of course it is easy. To you it isn't, but that's
because you're not an artist.
M.H.Benders
M.H.Benders
Alacrity Stone wrote:
>>A poet is a poet is he's approved by the Poetbureau. That's the way it
>>always has been, and we see no reason to change that fact.
>
> Dale? do you belong to this Poetbureau?
> Jim?
Members of the Poetbureau can only be questioned by other members of the
Poetbureau.
M.H.Benders
Josh Hill
<sqv.do.not.spam@xs4all> wrote:
>M.H.Benders wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> Josh Hill wrote:
>>
>>>>>> You have just mentioned a name, 'John Cage', that will incite great
>>>>>> rage into the wigfactor of P.Hills online appearance. For the
>>>>>> record: do you, as Holland's most famous composer, think Christo is
>>>>>> a talented artist?
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Why, obviously!
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Thanks.
>>>
>>>
>>> Er, I believe I just had my wig removed.
>>
>>
>> You can't read. Samuel's comment wasn't ironic. He really thinks Christo
>> is talented.
>
>It's not merely a question of talent, Christo really is a great artist.
>I went to Berlin to see the Reichstag long ago; it was very beautiful.
Interesting.
--
Josh
Josh Hill
<sqv.do.not.spam@xs4all> wrote:
>Josh Hill wrote:
>> and who listens to Cage anymore?
>John Cage, like most great avant-gardists, have always been considered
>outmoded by the pedants, only on ever larger scales. But in fact, I
>think interest in Cage has been increasing rather than decreasing since
>his death.
Has it? My sense of the musical avant-garde is that it's on the wane.
But then, that's my sense of the avant-garde in general; it seems to
me that the spirit of discovery that once fueled modernism has given
way to a new academicism so strict it would have pleased David, that
the appearance of innovation has come to replace the actuality, that
modernism (and its successive subchapters) in the end became the very
academic thing it most abhorred -- and that at some point along the
way, beginning, perhaps, with Schoenberg, it grew academic,
theoretical, disavowed the audience.
>Do you realize that so far, every new note in the 639 year Halberstadt
>performance of ASLSP has been world news?
Sounds like a gimmick to me, albeit a cute one.
--
Josh
Michael Cook
"Josh Hill" <Josh44...@snet.net> wrote in message
news:7732n0hm77833k2a1...@4ax.com...
> On Sat, 16 Oct 2004 04:39:08 -0400, "Michael Cook"
> <mic...@NOSPAMnet-kooks.org> wrote:
>
> Thanks, though, Michael. I'm always interested in unvarnished opinion,
> and for that reason I think it's too bad that Martijn prejudiced
> things (or maybe not, since I've found that the main problem with crit
> is that your friends don't want to say anything bad).
>
> BTW, this is in fact a five year old draft that Martijn Googled up,
> not something I think is "great," and I can see the infelicities to
> which I think your alluding -- correct me if I'm wrong: cliches,
> filler, a repetition that doesn't work, too-heavy alliterations,
> changes in voice, obvious word choices, perhaps (I haven't made up my
> mind yet) the abrupt shift to ballade rhythm.
>
> --
> Josh
<In the night, when blooms are black>
"the" first and last line of this strobe
would drop it from first, after all is 'a' night
in the first line and 'the' in the last
least that is how I read it
< And talons dip from unseen skies,>
would drop "and"
<When silent feet pad ancient track,>
would add "and" to line i/e and when
<In the night she dies.>
With my changes we now have action, image and
an even flow of idea.
I think anyway
<But by the day, when blooms are bright>
<And eagles swoop on feathered wing,>
<The path we walk is filled with light,>
<And we yet laugh and sing.>
a reworking to follow changes made to one
would tidy it up a bit,
"feathered wing"
"filled with light"
"laugh and sing"
if we are to use the common to illustrate the uncommon
I think it necessary to treat them (the common) in a fashion
so as to minimize their innate triteness
Note the beginning word of each line:
"But"
"And"
"The"
"And"
YUCK! We know it is "and"
It's the next line!
"The" kills a description just show me
forget the definitions, your readers are
smart folks.
"In the Night, When Dreams Have Come
In the night, when dreams have come
And hard day's fancies flutter free,
I wander up the meadow some,
And there she waits for me.
But by the day, when dreams have fled,
I look about and all is bare:
The shelf, the desk, the half slept bed,
The brush that combed her hair."
I like the last two lines.
maybe: "a brush"
"the" you are pointing
"a" you are holding out for others to see
I think the poem needs a rewrite
I think it is salvageable,
That is, salvageable to the point
you had intended to take it.
mdc
Chuckk Hubbard
> Josh Hill wrote:
>
> > poets like Jerry Jenkins.
>
> That Jerry Jenkins is a 'poet' is merely your opinion. When I look for
> the name on Google I can find just this guy:
> http://www.jerryjenkins.com/
"jerry h jenkins"
Stacey Knecht
"Josh Hill" <Josh44...@snet.net> schreef in bericht
news:du13n0l5ffa9l3330...@4ax.com...
> On Sat, 16 Oct 2004 20:28:59 +0200, Samuel Vriezen
> <sqv.do.not.spam@xs4all> wrote:
>
> >Josh Hill wrote:
> >
> >> Frankly, I don't care who thinks or doesn't think my poetry is fluff.
> >
> >
> >okay, then, Josh - let me ask you this -
> >
> >Do you feel your poem is *interesting*?
> >
> >I chose that term deliberately. A poem can have no technical
> >shortcomings but not be interesting; alternatively, a poem can be not
> >particularly well-crafted, it could even be cliché-ridden, but have
> >basic interest somewhere in it.
> >
> >I wonder where in your poem the interest lies, because frankly, I can't
> >see it - I think it's fatally cute - Laugh and sing, I mean, what are
> >you trying to suggest, the Boy Scouts? - as Stacey said, it seems to be
> >exercise at best.
> >
> >Exercise in what, though?
>
> I'm not sure I can say whether you'll find it interesting or not, but
> I can tell you that the surface is deceptively simple. As someone said
> when I posted it here five years ago, "It resonates with ambiguity,
> buried but accessible though unstated allusions, all of which allow
> the perceptive reader to discover, cherish, and remember its multiple
> layers of meaning." If you find those meanings underneath and sense
> the purpose of the symmetries, and if the poem elicits the right
> emotions as you do so, it's doing it's job; if not, it's failed.
Sorry, Josh, but it doesn't do a thing for me. No layers, just surface, as
far as I can see/ feel.
sincerely, Stacey (not so much a John Cage fan, as a George Crumb
appreciator)
Josh Hill
<sqv.do.not.spam@xs4all> wrote:
>Josh Hill wrote:
>
>> What I'm asking myself --
>> and I have to approach this almost as a stranger, five years later --
>> is the degree to which the poem's success /depends/ on those seemingly
>> clumsy choices.
>
>You make it sound very similar to the big Bush question: does his
>success perhaps not depend on his image of just an well-meaning,
>God-fearing idiot - one of the guys?
If you were writing the part for a dumb hick, would you have him speak
like Kerry or like Bush? Even Shakespeare would have had him speak
like Bush, albeit the dialog would have been significantly elevated --
he would have been a much funnier, more acute Bush than Bush. I
wasn't, as it happens, writing a hayseed, but I intentionally chose
short words and basic images because I was writing about grief and
chose to dramatize some aspects of it that way, and because the
situation was hazardously sentimental and at risk of bathos given our
current sensibility. Schiller could write this:
Ye will meet -- oh thought of rapture full! --
Yonder, at the gate of Paradise!
Hark! the coffin sinks with echo dull;
As it re-ascends the death-rope sighs!
Then, with sorrow drunk, we madly roll'd,
Lips were silent, but the mute eye spoke --
Stay, oh, stay! -- we grudg'd the tomb so cold;
But soon warmer tears in torrents broke.
But we can't; I was pushing the envelope as it was, and, in fact,
devoted a good deal of effort to paring back the language and imagery
at the end.
>> Chandra and Martijn have been making
>> fun of "I wander up the meadow some," but they haven't asked
>> themselves why I chose those particular words, which tell us that the
>> meadow is so familiar that the narrator forgets that the reader isn't
>> familiar with it;
>
>Sorry, this reasoning I find very far-fetched. No reader has any sort of
>problem whatsoever with a meadow that was not there in line one - it's
>utterly unproblematic in poetry. You're making too much more or your
>darling find. And a find it is indeed: a meadow! Incredible!
No. You've missed the clear implication of the language here. This is
not a subtle point in English, where the indefinite article would
normally be used:
I wander up a meadow some
As to the meadow, it is, rather obviously, symbolic, and juxtaposed
with the track of the predator which occurs at the same relative point
within the first poem:
A. When silent feet pad ancient track
B. I wander up the meadow some
Note the parallels (seekers, nature, purpose) and reversals:
predator/victim, pad purposefully/wander, track
(confining/bare/made)/meadow (spread out/alive/natural ).
>> that the girl's presence is inevitable, is part of
>> the logic of the recurring dream, that she'll always be there,
>> allowing him to "wander," that the wandering (as opposed to walking or
>> running or what have you) says a lot about his state, and so forth.
>
>I have tried to read it again seeing all those silly, clumsy and
>hackneyed phrases as being silly, clumsy and hackneyed in an artistic,
>positive way but I must say I fail to do so. You're presenting those
>choices as some sort of highly refined irony, but I completely fail to
>see how or why this poem should be ironic, except because it's like a
>general part of romanticism or something like that. As ironic images,
>your choices seem to me to be just randomly piled up.
There's nothing ironic about the choices, except perhaps insofar as
I've let the narrator's tone change from formal to almost childlike as
the subject matter changes and to dramatize the emotional lability and
inattention that accompanies grief. And as I think I've pretty amply
demonstrated, the word choices couldn't be farther from "just randomly
piling up."
>And in the end, I just can't care for ambiguity and irony and meaning
>when the words are just telling me that night in dark in some fanciful
>way or that wings have feathers. I really only see your fanciful banalities.
If the words are telling you only that, either I failed as a poet, or
you're failing as a reader, because well chosen or not, there's a lot
more behind them than that. Or perhaps our sensibilities are just too
far apart.
>I'm now reading Charles Bernstein, who can be quite a frustrating
>author, but at least there's a lingual sharpness in every single line of
>his that I've read so far, that even invites me every now and then to
>look for resonances and meanings. I'll quote just a line:
>
>toast without tempestuousness, farms
I'm not sure that I see how the likes of toast without tempestuousness
would suit this poem; it seems to me that using that kind of language
here would be like competing in the Tour de France dressed in drag.
The word choices suit the poems.
Blake wrote:
Merry, Merry Sparrow!
Under leaves so green
He also wrote:
In heavy wreaths folds over every nation: cruel works
Of many Wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic
Moving by compulsion each other, not as those in Eden, which,
Wheel within wheel, in freedom revolve in harmony and peace.
Is one better than the other?
I wrote:
I wander up the meadow some,
And there she waits for me.
I also wrote (with tongue in cheek, or against it):
Tongue incarnadine flopped seemingly lame
At the flew; haunch ingathered, fleetly springing.
Gathered, as when my mistress calls my name
And I fly to her with my wolf heart singing.
Is one better than the other?
The Blake is better than the Hill, but within the Blake, and within
the Hill, and within, I assume, the Bernstein as well, the language
and imagery have been chosen to suit the poem.
--
Josh
Josh Hill
<m.be...@spamchello.nl> wrote:
>
>
>Josh Hill wrote:
>
>>>>Er, I believe I just had my wig removed.
>>>
>>>You can't read. Samuel's comment wasn't ironic. He really thinks Christo
>>>is talented.
>
>(..)
>
>> LOL. But then I'm talking to someone who thinks criticism is hard and
>> art easy . . .
>
>You got caught with your pants down again, Hillbilly. The ability to
>read simple texts is absolutely essential before you can even start to
>dream of writing. You clearly didn't understand a word from what Samuel
>was writing.
Heh, no, I understood what he said. The question is whether he
understood what he said.
>As to art being easy - of course it is easy. To you it isn't, but that's
>because you're not an artist.
LOL. You do have your fantasies, don't you?
--
Josh
Josh Hill
Stacey Knecht
> Josh
Josh Hill
<mic...@NOSPAMnet-kooks.org> wrote:
Agreed, and I think it's an excellent point. The changes couldn't be
made quite in the manner indicated, though, because of the meter.
><But by the day, when blooms are bright>
> <And eagles swoop on feathered wing,>
> <The path we walk is filled with light,>
> <And we yet laugh and sing.>
>
>a reworking to follow changes made to one
>would tidy it up a bit,
>"feathered wing"
>"filled with light"
>"laugh and sing"
>if we are to use the common to illustrate the uncommon
>I think it necessary to treat them (the common) in a fashion
>so as to minimize their innate triteness
This is a song of innocence, and I was aiming for a childlike
simplicity here. At a minimum, I would eliminate the cliches. Beyond
that, I'm not sure. My choices may have been too banal -- I'm not,
after all, writing from the perspective of a child, but of an adult.
And, of course, Blake used simple language in a magnificently
sophisticated way. Either way, I think your point a valid one.
>Note the beginning word of each line:
>"But"
>"And"
>"The"
>"And"
>YUCK! We know it is "and"
>It's the next line!
>"The" kills a description just show me
>forget the definitions, your readers are
>smart folks.
Again, part of the voice that, rightly or wrong, I was going for. To
do it differently would change the voice of the poem, make it, as you
point out, punchier and more dramatic. But . . .
> "In the Night, When Dreams Have Come
>
> In the night, when dreams have come
> And hard day's fancies flutter free,
> I wander up the meadow some,
> And there she waits for me.
>
> But by the day, when dreams have fled,
> I look about and all is bare:
> The shelf, the desk, the half slept bed,
> The brush that combed her hair."
>
>I like the last two lines.
> maybe: "a brush"
> "the" you are pointing
>"a" you are holding out for others to see
Excellent point, and will definitely make it into the final version.
>I think the poem needs a rewrite
>I think it is salvageable,
>That is, salvageable to the point
>you had intended to take it.
Thanks, Michael, for an excellent crit. It was a first draft, and, as
such, has always been slated for a rewrite. The problem for me will be
preserving what makes it work for so many people (and I was frankly
surprised by the reaction), to preserve the intricacies and patterns
and the voice.
I looked in my poetry file and found that I'd already revised some of
the more egregious draftisms; forex, I changed "the brush that combed
her hair," which is silly, to "the brush that stroked her hair." But
as in that example, each of the changes seemed to diminish the poem,
to tart up the elemental simplicity I was aiming for. So what would in
another poem be a matter of straightforward revision seems to me here
a surprisingly delicate matter. Perhaps it just isn't possible to make
significant revisions without changing the poem's basic nature.
--
Josh
M.H.Benders
Josh Hill wrote:
> I looked in my poetry file and found that I'd already revised some of
> the more egregious draftisms; forex, I changed "the brush that combed
> her hair," which is silly, to "the brush that stroked her hair."
The brush that *stroked* her hair? This just proves my theory that the
initial version of a poem is the authentic version, and that any
meddling with the poem afterwards will likely just screw it up.
I mean, is it really possible to make this little poem even more
sugarcoated than it already is? Yes - instead of a brush that combs
hair you suddenly introduce a brush that 'strokes' hair as if the poem
wasn't an epitome of kitsch already.
Don't let this happen to your poetry!
M.H.Benders
Samuel Vriezen
> As to the meadow, it is, rather obviously, symbolic,
Of what?
Of the general Romantic atmosphere that the poem has been stuffing down
our throats for a few stanzas by that point.
Do you really think that your clever use of an article gives the line
any sort of poetic impetus?
>>As ironic images,
>>your choices seem to me to be just randomly piled up.
>
> There's nothing ironic about the choices,
Again you misunderstand yourself. Indeed, you're awfully serious all the
time and that's one thing that makes the cuteness of the poem
unbearable. But it really is ironic, only perhaps not intended. When you
think to invoke a sense of the childlike by writing about laughing and
singing, for example, you're invoking a sense of childhood that even in
Disneyworld would seem faintly ridiculous.
>>I was bored with your poem, not because it's simple - I agree it's not
>>simple - but because it struck me as simplistic, ambiguities and all.
>>
>
>
> Is it? It seems to me among other things a treatise on the evolution
> and purpose of emotion, conation, dreams, full of tidbits both subtle
> and even arcane, e.g., the bookshelf, desk, and bed represent Freud's
> trinity of play, work, and love.
Josh, you're well-educated man, but trinities don't make poetry. Writing
about a bookshelf, desk, and bed and then bringing in Freud seems to me
a sign of exactly the sort of simplicism that I find off-putting in your
poem.
>>And in the end, I just can't care for ambiguity and irony and meaning
>>when the words are just telling me that night in dark in some fanciful
>>way or that wings have feathers. I really only see your fanciful banalities.
>
>
> If the words are telling you only that, either I failed as a poet, or
> you're failing as a reader, because well chosen or not, there's a lot
> more behind them than that.
I fail as a reader, because the poem just isn't very encouraging. How
about that?
Samuel Vriezen
>>John Cage, like most great avant-gardists, have always been considered
>>outmoded by the pedants, only on ever larger scales. But in fact, I
>>think interest in Cage has been increasing rather than decreasing since
>>his death.
>
>
> Has it? My sense of the musical avant-garde is that it's on the wane.
> But then, that's my sense of the avant-garde in general;
People die, things turn into history, but as long as we have capitalist
normality there will be avantgardes of sorts. And this sense of the
normal always needs to feel this avantgarde is on the wane, or being
marginalized, which when you think about it is really the avantgarde's
natural habitat.
What *is*, I think, on the wane is the shock potential of radical art,
though the recent performance in London of 4'33'' was good for another
round of nation-wide taxpayer resentment. (50 years after it was
written, mind!).
This shock value is waning, because the pedants no longer let themselves
get angry, instead they've learned to shrug which is politically a much
more effective strategy.
Also, the evolution of 20th century media scandal has gone from the Rite
of Spring to Monicagate. Scandal itself has been thoroughly devaluated.
Which has, of course, been tremendously helpful to your present, highly
scandalous, administration and its cronies in the world of big bucks.
In the meantime, however, people continue to have wonderful ideas in art.
> it seems to
> me that the spirit of discovery that once fueled modernism has given
> way to a new academicism so strict it would have pleased David, that
> the appearance of innovation has come to replace the actuality, that
> modernism (and its successive subchapters) in the end became the very
> academic thing it most abhorred -- and that at some point along the
> way, beginning, perhaps, with Schoenberg, it grew academic,
> theoretical, disavowed the audience.
Schoenberg has indeed become an important academic model in the United
States in particular. Myself, when I think of the avantgarde, I do not
tend to think of Schoenberg who after all was aesthetically not a
radical at all but a conservative, though he did further develop
harmonic language. Rather, I think of the anti-tradition that includes
Lautreamont, Jarry, Roussel, the surrealists and today includes people
such as Ashbery, Bernstein, Hejinian, Linh Dinh, Palmer, Bök, Mac Low
etc. In music it might have started with Satie, and also included
Cowell, Antheil, Stravinsky, possibly Debussy, Nancarrow, Cage, Feldman,
Stockhausen, Xenakis etc.
>>Do you realize that so far, every new note in the 639 year Halberstadt
>>performance of ASLSP has been world news?
>
>
> Sounds like a gimmick to me, albeit a cute one.
Wrong again. It's not a gimmick and it's certainly not 'cute'.
Personally, though, I also doubt if it's truly in the spirit of Cage. I
think, rather, it's a very German type of take on history and it's
rather audacious.
M.H.Benders
Josh Hill wrote:
>>You got caught with your pants down again, Hillbilly. The ability to
>>read simple texts is absolutely essential before you can even start to
>>dream of writing. You clearly didn't understand a word from what Samuel
>>was writing.
>
> Heh, no, I understood what he said. The question is whether he
> understood what he said.
"You know, besides the fact that only a liar or a fool believes that
European subsidies and trade barriers aren't higher than those of the
United States (far higher, actually --- hell, until today I don't
think I've ever known even a European who was gullible enough to
believe that), only a liar or a fool would claim to have evidence that
Colin Powell, who stated what has long been obvious to anyone not
himself a liar or a fool, wasn't telling the truth. Indeed, someone
not himself a liar or a fool might almost see a pattern emerging."
Josh, calling anyone a liar who didn't believe Colin Powell's
presentation at the UN
"I say give it time. Blair has already benefitted from the success of
the war and the obvious gratitude of so many Iraqis. He will benefit
further as they find out about the WMD's and about some of the sleazy
dealings that, according to some partially reliable sources, Iraq had
with the French, the UN, the Russians, and so forth (seized papers are
apparently proving a treasure trove of information)."
Josh, explaining how Blair got popular from the war in Iraq
(..)
Josh, I think *anyone* would agree with me that the writer of above
paragraphs has a serious problem interpreting texts or events, oh well,
interpreting anything, really.
>>As to art being easy - of course it is easy. To you it isn't, but that's
>>because you're not an artist.
>
> LOL. You do have your fantasies, don't you?
Whether I am an artist or not, there is only one thing sure: you aren't.
M.H.Benders
Mikel
(in article <cku1vm$dfs$1...@news4.zwoll1.ov.home.nl>):
>> Thanks, Stacey.
>>
> For what?
>
There was a custom, in the ancient past of AAPC, where a poet said thank you
for any comments received, whether good or bad, agreed with or not.
Where there is no history of malice, the older members are likely to revert,
and often enough new members spontaneously rediscover this courtesy.
Josh Hill
Erm, no.
What I think is that some idiot with a fragile ego is looking through
my many thousands of posts to find a handful of predictions that were
wrong.
And what I think is that you think the CIA blew up the World Trade
Center and that you're a better poet than Shakespeare.
And, really, what could be more pathetic than that.
>>>As to art being easy - of course it is easy. To you it isn't, but that's
>>>because you're not an artist.
>>
>> LOL. You do have your fantasies, don't you?
>
>Whether I am an artist or not, there is only one thing sure: you aren't.
Well, then, you aren't either, since I write better poetry than you
do.
--
Josh
M.H.Benders
Mikel wrote:
>>>Thanks, Stacey.
>>>
>>
>>For what?
>>
> There was a custom, in the ancient past of AAPC, where a poet said thank you
> for any comments received, whether good or bad, agreed with or not.
Thank you.
M.H.Benders
M.H.Benders
Josh Hill wrote:
>>"I say give it time. Blair has already benefitted from the success of
>>the war and the obvious gratitude of so many Iraqis. He will benefit
>>further as they find out about the WMD's and about some of the sleazy
>>dealings that, according to some partially reliable sources, Iraq had
>>with the French, the UN, the Russians, and so forth (seized papers are
>>apparently proving a treasure trove of information)."
>>
>>Josh, explaining how Blair got popular from the war in Iraq
>>
>>(..)
>>
>>Josh, I think *anyone* would agree with me that the writer of above
>>paragraphs has a serious problem interpreting texts or events, oh well,
>>interpreting anything, really.
>
>
> Erm, no.
13 year old girls have better arguments.
> What I think is that some idiot with a fragile ego is looking through
> my many thousands of posts to find a handful of predictions that were
> wrong.
All your posts were wrong. It doesn't matter what subject one types in
at Google - if it combines with your name you end up with something
ridiculous. That's why someone in another newsgroup claimed you get
sexual arousement from humiliating yourself in public. It's the truth.
> And what I think is that you think the CIA blew up the World Trade
> Center and that you're a better poet than Shakespeare.
The World Trade Center wasn't blown up. As to the latter, maybe, but
that wouldn't be much of an accomplishment. My little niece writes stuff
that's more interesting than Shakespeare.
> And, really, what could be more pathetic than that.
Claiming that anyone who didn't trust the speech of Colin Powell at the
UN is a liar? Claiming that Tony Blair got popular over the Iraq War?
>>Whether I am an artist or not, there is only one thing sure: you aren't.
>
> Well, then, you aren't either, since I write better poetry than you
> do.
You write the sort of poetry one would expect 13 year old girls would
write, the difference is just that you wear a wig and don't keep your
diary to yourself.
M.H.Benders
Josh Hill
wrote:
For reading the poem and giving me your honest opinion. Critiques are
worth nothing if they aren't frank. I'd rather have 100 people tell
me, honestly, that they don't like a poem than have one person tell
me, dishonestly, that they do.
--
Josh
Stacey Knecht
"Mikel" <mikel...@gci.net> schreef in bericht
news:10n5fk7...@corp.supernews.com...
across as slightly sarcastic.
Stacey Knecht
S
> Josh
Josh Hill
<sqv.do.not.spam@xs4all> wrote:
>Josh Hill wrote:
>
>> As to the meadow, it is, rather obviously, symbolic,
>
>Of what?
>
>Of the general Romantic atmosphere that the poem has been stuffing down
>our throats for a few stanzas by that point.
>
>Do you really think that your clever use of an article gives the line
>any sort of poetic impetus?
Dramatic impetus, yes.
>>>As ironic images,
>>>your choices seem to me to be just randomly piled up.
>>
>> There's nothing ironic about the choices,
>
>Again you misunderstand yourself. Indeed, you're awfully serious all the
>time and that's one thing that makes the cuteness of the poem
>unbearable. But it really is ironic, only perhaps not intended. When you
>think to invoke a sense of the childlike by writing about laughing and
>singing, for example, you're invoking a sense of childhood that even in
>Disneyworld would seem faintly ridiculous.
Perhaps. My sense, though, is that that's dependent on the reader:
some people will find such things over the top, some not. The poet
himself is split.
> >>I was bored with your poem, not because it's simple - I agree it's not
> >>simple - but because it struck me as simplistic, ambiguities and all.
> >>
> > Is it? It seems to me among other things a treatise on the evolution
> > and purpose of emotion, conation, dreams, full of tidbits both subtle
> > and even arcane, e.g., the bookshelf, desk, and bed represent Freud's
> > trinity of play, work, and love.
>
>Josh, you're well-educated man, but trinities don't make poetry. Writing
>about a bookshelf, desk, and bed and then bringing in Freud seems to me
>a sign of exactly the sort of simplicism that I find off-putting in your
>poem.
My point was merely that the poem isn't simple-minded fluff, as some
have suggested, and that the words and symbols weren't chosen
randomly. Beyond that, it may be a sucky poem or not, or, more likely,
a little experiment with strengths and flaws that elicits varying
reactions because some of the choices I made were fairly extreme, and
because of various shortcomings on my part.
>>>And in the end, I just can't care for ambiguity and irony and meaning
>>>when the words are just telling me that night in dark in some fanciful
>>>way or that wings have feathers. I really only see your fanciful banalities.
>>
>>
>> If the words are telling you only that, either I failed as a poet, or
>> you're failing as a reader, because well chosen or not, there's a lot
>> more behind them than that.
>
>I fail as a reader, because the poem just isn't very encouraging. How
>about that?
I don't have a problem with that. Several others have, in effect, said
the same thing: Jerry Jenkins said, aptly I think, that it was subtle
to the point of humdrum, but that in the end he considered it a fine
poem; Michael Cook referred to it as a good idea cloaked in
mediocrity, or something like.
--
Josh
Samuel Vriezen
>>>Is it? It seems to me among other things a treatise on the evolution
>>>and purpose of emotion, conation, dreams, full of tidbits both subtle
>>>and even arcane, e.g., the bookshelf, desk, and bed represent Freud's
>>>trinity of play, work, and love.
>>
>>Josh, you're well-educated man, but trinities don't make poetry. Writing
>>about a bookshelf, desk, and bed and then bringing in Freud seems to me
>>a sign of exactly the sort of simplicism that I find off-putting in your
>>poem.
>
>
> My point was merely that the poem isn't simple-minded fluff, as some
> have suggested, and that the words and symbols weren't chosen
> randomly.
You write about a bookshelf, a desk and a bed, then bring in Freud to
prove that these are actually very profound bookshelves, desks and beds?
Has it occurred to you that we can take any combination of words and
bring in Freud, Marx, Wittgenstein and dozens of others and find
meanings; but that it's still up to you to make the poem interesting?
Words are almost never chosen randomly, and in fact it takes quite some
effort to choose words randomly, but words are very often chosen
mindlessly - or, more fatal: uninspiredly.
If you spend five years reading a bad poem, of course impressive
meanings will offer themselves, but that doesn't make the poem less
simplistic in its poetic strategies.
Josh Hill
<m.be...@spamchello.nl> wrote:
>
>
>Josh Hill wrote:
>
>>>"I say give it time. Blair has already benefitted from the success of
>>>the war and the obvious gratitude of so many Iraqis. He will benefit
>>>further as they find out about the WMD's and about some of the sleazy
>>>dealings that, according to some partially reliable sources, Iraq had
>>>with the French, the UN, the Russians, and so forth (seized papers are
>>>apparently proving a treasure trove of information)."
>>>
>>>Josh, explaining how Blair got popular from the war in Iraq
>>>
>>>(..)
>>>
>>>Josh, I think *anyone* would agree with me that the writer of above
>>>paragraphs has a serious problem interpreting texts or events, oh well,
>>>interpreting anything, really.
>>
>>
>> Erm, no.
>
>13 year old girls have better arguments.
Yes, they do, which is why I didn't bother to respond.
>> What I think is that some idiot with a fragile ego is looking through
>> my many thousands of posts to find a handful of predictions that were
>> wrong.
>
>All your posts were wrong. It doesn't matter what subject one types in
>at Google - if it combines with your name you end up with something
>ridiculous. That's why someone in another newsgroup claimed you get
>sexual arousement from humiliating yourself in public. It's the truth.
"Same goes for Berlin. Most people there want the wall back." -
Martijn Benders
"[Al Jazeera] is a normal newschannel with perfectly credible
newsitems. It's not censured and state-owned like the American Media."
- Martijn Benders
"It is all too easy and too dangerous to remember Pol Pot as a unique
monster. What is remarkable about the U.S. coverage of his death is
the omission of U.S. complicity in his rise to power, a complicity
that sustained him for almost two decades." - Martijn Benders
"I have never studied the actual Pearl Harbor case but it has always
seemed quite unnatural to me - why would Japan all of a sudden decide
to attack some US Islands?" - Martijn Benders
"He's a great fan of Margaret Thatcher too. You see this phenomenon
more often in certain types of homosexuals - its the masochist
tendency to embrace the things that surpress you. Plenty of
homosexuals become catholic for this very reason." - Martijn Benders
"The most annoying boy in class, the Jew, who (indeed) for a thousand
years has stressed the opinion that he was 'chosen by god' while all
the other races are simply inferior (ergo: he believes in a Racist
God) will always get his nose punched sooner or later - probably a
direct effect of having put faith in a God with racial preferences." -
Martijn Benders
" The Europeans have every right to hate jews - they have been
poisened by an offspring variant of Judaism for 2000 years called
'christianity'." - Martijn Benders
"Milosevic should be released immediately, as he's about as guilty as
Jacques Chirac was on the atrocities in former Yugoslavia." - Martijn
Benders
"As to the Americans, the only reason they got involved [in World War
II] was that it was clear that entire Europe would become communist if
they didn't. Which would cripple their market and their militairy
power considerably. Of course they had to fabricate some stupid event
(Pearl Harbor) to get the dumb american public convinced, as they did
again with 9-11." - Martijn Benders
"The motives of Hitler, or Nietzsche, for disliking Jews are perfectly
understandable. I don't like Jews as a race either." - Martijn Benders
"Besides, Bin Laden is clearly a CIA guy. He convieniently sets up
terrorists camp in every mineral rich area the US wants to control." -
Martijn Benders
"As to Mr Hussein - likely always was a CIA puppet and the fact that
you 'can't find him' in 6 months in a country the size of california
just means you've made a deal with him. Nothing like a bogey man for
crowd control - the CIA always works like that." - Martijn Benders
I could go on, but even I am not that cruel.
>> And what I think is that you think the CIA blew up the World Trade
>> Center and that you're a better poet than Shakespeare.
>
>The World Trade Center wasn't blown up. As to the latter, maybe, but
>that wouldn't be much of an accomplishment. My little niece writes stuff
>that's more interesting than Shakespeare.
More at your level, anyway.
>> And, really, what could be more pathetic than that.
>
>Claiming that anyone who didn't trust the speech of Colin Powell at the
>UN is a liar? Claiming that Tony Blair got popular over the Iraq War?
But, of course, you've quoted selectively, misrepresented what I said,
and removed context. And I'm not going to bother with that.
>>>Whether I am an artist or not, there is only one thing sure: you aren't.
>>
>> Well, then, you aren't either, since I write better poetry than you
>> do.
>
>You write the sort of poetry one would expect 13 year old girls would
>write, the difference is just that you wear a wig and don't keep your
>diary to yourself.
Yes, of course, and you're a better poet than Shakespeare.
Now that you've established that, I suggest you put on your bunny foot
pajamas, go back to your ward, and get a good night's sleep.
--
Josh
M.H.Benders
Josh Hill wrote:
Go on. Every quote above is almost literally true. I have no idea
why you think they would be untruthful opinions. They're not.
Now, claiming that Blair got popular since the Iraq war and that people
who didn't believe Colin Powell's speech at the UN are liars, that's the
sort of stuff that's really hilarious.
M.H.Benders
Josh Hill
The words here may not have been chosen inspiredly, but they were
certainly not chosen mindlessly. And, of course, I don't have to read
the poem for five years to know why I chose them, having written it,
and so being familiar with the conscious elements of its creation. Of
greater interest, perhaps, is the degree to which an obscure allusion
such as this one, which might be picked up by a professor but will
pass by most readers, affects the reader's appreciation of the poem.
My feeling is that such allusions do, frequently, have an effect, at
least insofar as they are true and fundamental, or touch the
subconscious. So while the reader will not be consciously aware that
they represent theory, he will, to some extent which will of course
vary from person to person, be affected by the truth they embody. And
I take as evidence in this case -- without representing this little
effort as anything more or better than it is -- that it has affected
some people very strongly, as you know if you've read all the crits (I
didn't and don't expect you to be that interested, but I did include
the URL); and as evidence that such techniques have an effect I offer
an infinitely superior example, the insistently repeated
representation of the cross in the continuo of the St. Matthew
Passion, which is not at first consciously apprehended by the listener
but which exerts a profound emotional effect nonetheless.
--
Josh
Mikel
(in article <ckum8b$cci$1...@news2.zwoll1.ov.home.nl>):
Bereft of elaboration we tend to see what we expect. That you might expect
sarcasm in this enviroment, well, probably should be expected.
I'm not immune. I just have a tendency to unwind quickly enough to choose the
delete button instead of send. Not always, though.
Mikel
(in article <4172CE35...@spamchello.nl>):
You're welcome.
Samuel Vriezen
> The words here may not have been chosen inspiredly, but they were
> certainly not chosen mindlessly.
If you're going to have to use Freud again...
There are many kinds of mindlessness, and in writing a poem, only one
counts. You may have been full of it, full of meaning, when writing the
poem but empty of poetry, and then it's esthetically mindless.
In the present case, you seem not to have realised how droll your
romantic pastiche is, how that works against itself, how tired it makes
the whole thing look, and in the end that's a question of having an
attentive ear/mind.
> and as evidence that such techniques have an effect I offer
> an infinitely superior example,
Poetry is about words, and you have just used two words there that one
poet whose work I've been reading of late had a great ear for in one
poem. I'll quote the poem; perhaps it has some bearing on this debate.
It's by Linh Dinh:
ACADEMY OF FINE ARTS
Seeing a dog walking around with its tail upturned, its asshole exposed,
I feel infinitely superior. I am a man, after all, and do not walk
around with my asshole exposed. Even with my pants down, my asshole
would not be exposed.
Once I saw a young mother blow hot air rhythmically into her infant
son's asshole hoping to cure him of something.
- LINH DINH
Josh Hill
<sqv.do.not.spam@xs4all> wrote:
>Josh Hill wrote:
>
>>>John Cage, like most great avant-gardists, have always been considered
>>>outmoded by the pedants, only on ever larger scales. But in fact, I
>>>think interest in Cage has been increasing rather than decreasing since
>>>his death.
>>
>>
>> Has it? My sense of the musical avant-garde is that it's on the wane.
>> But then, that's my sense of the avant-garde in general;
>
>People die, things turn into history, but as long as we have capitalist
>normality there will be avantgardes of sorts. And this sense of the
>normal always needs to feel this avantgarde is on the wane, or being
>marginalized, which when you think about it is really the avantgarde's
>natural habitat.
I question your association of the avant-garde with capitalism.
Leninist Russia gave birth to a flourishing avant-garde, which was
suppressed by Stalin. And is the avant-garde really so new? Was
Giotto, say, any less avant-garde than Picasso? As I think about it,
it seems to me that the prime requirement for the existence of an
avant-garde is social change, that art changes only gradually if at
all during periods of relative cultural stability, but at a breakneck
pace when cultural paradigms shift.
>What *is*, I think, on the wane is the shock potential of radical art,
>though the recent performance in London of 4'33'' was good for another
>round of nation-wide taxpayer resentment. (50 years after it was
>written, mind!).
>
>This shock value is waning, because the pedants no longer let themselves
>get angry, instead they've learned to shrug which is politically a much
>more effective strategy.
>
>Also, the evolution of 20th century media scandal has gone from the Rite
>of Spring to Monicagate. Scandal itself has been thoroughly devaluated.
>Which has, of course, been tremendously helpful to your present, highly
>scandalous, administration and its cronies in the world of big bucks.
>
>In the meantime, however, people continue to have wonderful ideas in art.
My sense of it is that the avant-garde long ago became the
establishment in art, accepted by the universities and critical
establishment and no less a part of the social structure than the
school of David. That's why it no longer shocks.
Works like Ulysses challenged society at many levels. Today they're
taught in school. It's precisely because I think that modernism has
become as doctrinaire as the romanticism it replaced and is
increasingly as obsolete that I've chosen to work in and search for
other forms.
Modernism is DDT and SUV's; I want something else, a new synthesis of
potential and need.
>> it seems to
>> me that the spirit of discovery that once fueled modernism has given
>> way to a new academicism so strict it would have pleased David, that
>> the appearance of innovation has come to replace the actuality, that
>> modernism (and its successive subchapters) in the end became the very
>> academic thing it most abhorred -- and that at some point along the
>> way, beginning, perhaps, with Schoenberg, it grew academic,
>> theoretical, disavowed the audience.
>
>Schoenberg has indeed become an important academic model in the United
>States in particular. Myself, when I think of the avantgarde, I do not
>tend to think of Schoenberg who after all was aesthetically not a
>radical at all but a conservative, though he did further develop
>harmonic language. Rather, I think of the anti-tradition that includes
>Lautreamont, Jarry, Roussel, the surrealists and today includes people
>such as Ashbery, Bernstein, Hejinian, Linh Dinh, Palmer, Bök, Mac Low
>etc. In music it might have started with Satie, and also included
>Cowell, Antheil, Stravinsky, possibly Debussy, Nancarrow, Cage, Feldman,
>Stockhausen, Xenakis etc.
A varied lot, but to the extent I subscribe to the whole business I
tend to agree.
>>>Do you realize that so far, every new note in the 639 year Halberstadt
>>>performance of ASLSP has been world news?
>>
>>
>> Sounds like a gimmick to me, albeit a cute one.
>
>Wrong again. It's not a gimmick and it's certainly not 'cute'.
>Personally, though, I also doubt if it's truly in the spirit of Cage. I
>think, rather, it's a very German type of take on history and it's
>rather audacious.
On this I think we'll have to disagree: you seem to place a high value
on conceptual art, while my interest in such things waned with the
sixties.
--
Josh
Josh Hill
<sqv.do.not.spam@xs4all> wrote:
>Josh Hill wrote:
>
>> The words here may not have been chosen inspiredly, but they were
>> certainly not chosen mindlessly.
>
>If you're going to have to use Freud again...
>
>There are many kinds of mindlessness, and in writing a poem, only one
>counts. You may have been full of it, full of meaning, when writing the
>poem but empty of poetry, and then it's esthetically mindless.
>
>In the present case, you seem not to have realised how droll your
>romantic pastiche is, how that works against itself, how tired it makes
>the whole thing look, and in the end that's a question of having an
>attentive ear/mind.
Actually, when Martijn dug this up and reposted it, I could scarcely
get past the first few words; it seemed to me fatally clumsy and
uninspired. Curiously, as I've reread snippets of it, it's grown on
me. I've observed that one's experience of a work tends to follow,
temporally, it's genesis, and the genesis of this is that I was in one
of those bleak, uncreative moods where nothing wants to emerge; it was
created out of that, smithed from dross, and from what I've seen
whether a reader reacts to the dross or what was made from it depends
very much on the reader; the writer sees both.
As to whether it's droll, I would argue that that's a cultural and
individual matter. As any bored schoolboy who would rather be playing
ball or looking at girls or reading about spaceships and robots could
tell you, all poetry is potentially funny, potentially a joke at its
own expense. But if Oscar Wilde could argue that no one could read the
death of Little Nell without laughing, the readers of forty years
before could argue the opposite. One ought not mistake one's own
reaction for a generality. My own interest here lies not so much in a
debate over merit -- I can see the poem's strengths and weaknesses
easily enough -- but in why different people have different reactions
to it.
>> and as evidence that such techniques have an effect I offer
>> an infinitely superior example,
>
>Poetry is about words, and you have just used two words there that one
>poet whose work I've been reading of late had a great ear for in one
>poem. I'll quote the poem; perhaps it has some bearing on this debate.
>It's by Linh Dinh:
>
>ACADEMY OF FINE ARTS
>
>Seeing a dog walking around with its tail upturned, its asshole exposed,
>I feel infinitely superior. I am a man, after all, and do not walk
>around with my asshole exposed. Even with my pants down, my asshole
>would not be exposed.
>
>Once I saw a young mother blow hot air rhythmically into her infant
>son's asshole hoping to cure him of something.
>
> - LINH DINH
Doesn't interest me all that much; trite, unoriginal, dogmatic thought
rendered in mildly clever symbol with minimal MFA craftsmanship and a
trite and obligatory attempt to shock. It reminds me in a way of that
Virgin Mary made of shit, the one that upset Giuliani. I'm not
religious, I'm not a Republican, and I couldn't care less what people
make their virgins out of, but neither am I so poor that I can't
afford paint.
--
Josh
Josh Hill
Too pathetic. You belong in a ward.
--
Josh
Dale
Josh Hill wrote:
> On Sun, 17 Oct 2004 19:06:01 +0200, Samuel Vriezen
> <sqv.do.not.spam@xs4all> wrote:
>
>
>> Josh Hill wrote:
>>
>>
>>>> John Cage, like most great avant-gardists, have always been
>>>> considered outmoded by the pedants, only on ever larger scales.
>>>> But in fact, I think interest in Cage has been increasing
>>>> rather than decreasing since his death.
>>>
>>>
>>> Has it? My sense of the musical avant-garde is that it's on the
>>> wane. But then, that's my sense of the avant-garde in general;
>>
>> People die, things turn into history, but as long as we have
>> capitalist normality there will be avantgardes of sorts. And this
>> sense of the normal always needs to feel this avantgarde is on the
>> wane, or being marginalized, which when you think about it is
>> really the avantgarde's natural habitat.
>
>
> I question your association of the avant-garde with capitalism.
> Leninist Russia gave birth to a flourishing avant-garde, which was
> suppressed by Stalin. And is the avant-garde really so new? Was
> Giotto, say, any less avant-garde than Picasso? As I think about it,
> it seems to me that the prime requirement for the existence of an
> avant-garde is social change, that art changes only gradually if at
> all during periods of relative cultural stability, but at a breakneck
> pace when cultural paradigms shift.
If anything capitalism has gradually eroded the basis for the
avant-garde, since everything is more and more quickly co-opted, and the
"niche" aspect that is the hallmark of avant-garde groups (insulated
neighborhoods, cheap liquor joints, and local coffee houses) has been
sadly sanitized: look to the selling iotential of "hip." But I think it
is necessary to conceive of any possible avant-garde in terms of groups:
Giotto - no matter how radical his notions might have been - is hard to
fit into the general notion we now think of as avant-garde. One man
isn't a front-line. But it appears your idea about stability is (at
least in part) correct: witness the growth spurt in such ideas which
occurred in Europe just following WWI, with Dadaism, then Surrealism,
and a score of other Isms, such as the fascist Futurists. The same can
be seen in the hippie movement during the Vietnam war, and Modernism
after WWII. But didn't the Beats develop out of the relative stability
(to the point of boredom) of 1950s America? So I think it possible too
much stability (which is after all a matter of control) can prompt
similar reactions. Of course, it stands to reason that a TRUE
avanmt-garde will always be surprising, so we probably cannot predict
when, how, or if such a bloom will happen again.
>
> My sense of it is that the avant-garde long ago became the
> establishment in art, accepted by the universities and critical
> establishment and no less a part of the social structure than the
> school of David. That's why it no longer shocks.
Well, the OLD avant-garde has, but that's in the nature of ALL ideas;
they become mainstream and safe.
>
> Works like Ulysses challenged society at many levels. Today they're
> taught in school. It's precisely because I think that modernism has
> become as doctrinaire as the romanticism it replaced and is
> increasingly as obsolete that I've chosen to work in and search for
> other forms.
>
> Modernism is DDT and SUV's; I want something else, a new synthesis of
> potential and need.
Capitalism fills many aching holes with fake promises.
>>
>> Wrong again. It's not a gimmick and it's certainly not 'cute'.
>> Personally, though, I also doubt if it's truly in the spirit of
>> Cage. I think, rather, it's a very German type of take on history
>> and it's rather audacious.
>
>
> On this I think we'll have to disagree: you seem to place a high
> value on conceptual art, while my interest in such things waned with
> the sixties.
>
For me conceptual art grew wings and flew off after Duchamp got his
ironic hands all over it. Since then it has fallen into sad repetition
and museum presentations. The "children" of Duchamp now somehow include
the likes of Yoko Ono, who has so awfully combined "performance ideas"
with rather a banal "politics of sentiment." Her meanings are all too
obvious (though she will go to great dull lengths to explicate them
anyway), and all the marvelous humor Marcel found in guying the art
world, now lies dead in the hands of hungry curators.
Even Duchamp suggetsed that the only recourse left to artists in a
corrupted atmosphere was to basically go underground. I suspect much of
what is still interesting in art is happening in people's basements.
After all, such fantastic personalities as Joseph Cornell could as
easily have gone by without any notice at all.
dmh
Samuel Vriezen
> I question your association of the avant-garde with capitalism.
> Leninist Russia gave birth to a flourishing avant-garde,
In a book by Ron Silliman that I read recently, he was calling that
system 'state capitalism'. But it's of course a phenomenon that will
appear anywhere where there is an oppressive normality; since the demise
of the Soviet Union, capitalism has had free reign and it's I think in
sore need of alternatives to compete with. I think it's the lack of
competition - not for consumers, but for social credibility - that is
threatening to turn capitalism into not merely a system but really an
institution of oppression. I think the USA has in recent years made
significant advances down the road to becoming a capitalist banana republic.
> And is the avant-garde really so new? Was
> Giotto, say, any less avant-garde than Picasso?
There are many ways of thinking about the avant-garde. In music for
example you often hear the idea that the 14th century Ars Subtilior was
avantgarde. Now it certainly had an experimental side, but it was not
disruptive.
I would say there's a historical notion of avantgarde which according to
Calinescu can be traced back to the positivism of Saint-Simon, but which
became more associated with assertive movements that championed contrary
esthetic ideals. From there, it became associated with experimentation.
So you have to be careful which avantgarde you're talking about.
> As I think about it,
> it seems to me that the prime requirement for the existence of an
> avant-garde is social change, that art changes only gradually if at
> all during periods of relative cultural stability, but at a breakneck
> pace when cultural paradigms shift.
That may be true. Both world wars spawned accelerated experimentation in
their wakes.
> My sense of it is that the avant-garde long ago became the
> establishment in art, accepted by the universities and critical
> establishment and no less a part of the social structure than the
> school of David. That's why it no longer shocks.
It's partly true. But whereever there is an establishment, and if there
is still some freedom left, you get this contrary impulse. Establishment
categories have fed off avantgarde notions all the time. But that's not
enough to kill the zest for avantgardism. Nowadays, the aesthetically
radical is probed sometimes within institutions - though it's not always
easy to avoid compromise there - and sometimes in margins.
Shock value really has very much to do with the willingness of people to
make a scandal out of something. The prime example of scandal was the
Rite of Spring, and this was very much a society thing and possibly
partly a marketing ploy. But there have been 'scandals' that are much
more subtle:
> Works like Ulysses challenged society at many levels. Today they're
> taught in school.
But what about the Gertrude Stein of Stanzas in Meditation? Or why is it
that nobody seems to read The Making of Americans? I hold those works to
be more radical and confrontational than Joyce, but somehow they never
became scandalous - perhaps because of the absence of obviously
scandalous, e.g. 'pornographic' content? But I think her dismissal of
the noun, for example, is still a very radical position and it will
always be so, because it questions the normal use of language which is
one foundation for everyday experience of reality.
>>>>Do you realize that so far, every new note in the 639 year Halberstadt
>>>>performance of ASLSP has been world news?
>>>
>>>
>>>Sounds like a gimmick to me, albeit a cute one.
>>
>>Wrong again. It's not a gimmick and it's certainly not 'cute'.
>>Personally, though, I also doubt if it's truly in the spirit of Cage. I
>>think, rather, it's a very German type of take on history and it's
>>rather audacious.
>
>
> On this I think we'll have to disagree: you seem to place a high value
> on conceptual art, while my interest in such things waned with the
> sixties.
I think all art is conceptual and has an ideological dimension but a lot
of the garden variety lyrical art you get tries to hide its
conceptuality. I also think it's wonderful that you can go to hear a
tiny fragment of a 639 year concert, like visiting a shrine to time.
It's not just good because it's conceptual, it's good because the
concept is very strong.
Samuel Vriezen
>>ACADEMY OF FINE ARTS
>>
>>Seeing a dog walking around with its tail upturned, its asshole exposed,
>>I feel infinitely superior. I am a man, after all, and do not walk
>>around with my asshole exposed. Even with my pants down, my asshole
>>would not be exposed.
>>
>>Once I saw a young mother blow hot air rhythmically into her infant
>>son's asshole hoping to cure him of something.
>>
>> - LINH DINH
>
>
> Doesn't interest me all that much; trite, unoriginal, dogmatic thought
> rendered in mildly clever symbol with minimal MFA craftsmanship and a
> trite and obligatory attempt to shock. It reminds me in a way of that
> Virgin Mary made of shit, the one that upset Giuliani. I'm not
> religious, I'm not a Republican, and I couldn't care less what people
> make their virgins out of, but neither am I so poor that I can't
> afford paint.
Funny, I hadn't thought of it as shocking at all, and certainly I fail
to see the dogma in this little piece of writing. Perhaps the thing that
shocks is how it makes the words 'infinitely superior' so funny, and it
can remind you that this ludicrous sense of superiority is in fact a
very human thing, something to be wary of all the time, because you may
well be feeling infinitely superior to a dog. The second stanza I
actually find touching.
As to Ofili, I think that was typically a fabricated scandal. Everybody
interpreted it as an assault on the holy and nobody took the idea that
elephant dung could be painterly material, an expression of beauty,
seriously.
Josh Hill
Exactly. Worse, I think that the putative representatives of the
avant-garde have in many cases seized on that, have commercialized
themselves. They're like those guys who admit that they grew their
hair long to get in on the free love.
I've long suspected that Christo was of that ilk -- his doings seem
calculated to achieve notoriety -- and that's why I compare him to
Andrew Lloyed Webber, who improbably commercialized Jesus Christ and
the counterculture simultaneously and went on to hawk talentless
pretension to tourists, or that sublimely ungifted mockery Madonna,
whose genius for self-promotion led her to make art out of
self-promotion. (Though not being overly familiar with Christo's work,
I'm open minded to the possibility raised by Samuel that he has
genuine talent.)
> But I think it
>is necessary to conceive of any possible avant-garde in terms of groups:
>Giotto - no matter how radical his notions might have been - is hard to
>fit into the general notion we now think of as avant-garde. One man
>isn't a front-line.
Giotto was a member of a broader proto-Renaissance movement that
included Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, and apparently had within the
art for which he's best known (he was also a poet and composer)
followers and imitators. Hegel would, I think, have referred to him as
a world-historical individual, one of those who most embody the
zeitgeist -- and such people are I think by necessity part of
movements. I suspect that Giotto seems to us a more isolated figure
than he otherwise would in part because of the period of reaction that
followed the plague of 1348 and separates him and his contemporaries
from the rest of the Renaissance.
> But it appears your idea about stability is (at
>least in part) correct: witness the growth spurt in such ideas which
>occurred in Europe just following WWI, with Dadaism, then Surrealism,
>and a score of other Isms, such as the fascist Futurists. The same can
>be seen in the hippie movement during the Vietnam war, and Modernism
>after WWII. But didn't the Beats develop out of the relative stability
>(to the point of boredom) of 1950s America? So I think it possible too
>much stability (which is after all a matter of control) can prompt
>similar reactions.
I think you're right about that.
And really, while we look upon the fifties as a period of comfortable
stability, wasn't that stability itself a revolutionary change of
sorts? The factory-farm comforts of Levittown, television -- something
between a boon and terminal enervation, the germination of today's
designer sneaker shopping mall sensory deprivation tank suburban
culture.
Either way, I agree that the beats developed as a reaction to that
stability, that it's no accident that as Beaver Cleaver came to occupy
the national consciousness, the beats, film noir, rock 'n roll, and
even horror movies emerged as a necessary corrective.
And it seems to me that that corrective consisted not just of a
reminder that Sue had to drink from a different water fountain, Nikita
had missiles, and Mom was drinking, popping diet pills, and sleeping
with the repairman, but as a means of repairing the damage done by an
absence of trees and sex. The suburban teenager, who otherwise had to
content himself with prolonged infantilization, could read Kerouac and
dream he was getting some, even as he did his homework and plotted to
acquire the keys to the car, and, as such, there was something
vicarious about what the counterculture had to offer.
There's always something vicarious about art, a guilty pleasure above
and beyond what Protestant dourness think necessary to moral
elevation, and it seems to me that the beats and their friends,
unwittingly perhaps, were co-opted by the same need for vicarious
experience that made television a little electronic window on starry
nights and mammoth hunts. All part of becoming modern: the debeaking
machine, the food conveyors.
And the beats were there at the start of the hippie movement, which, I
think, was another stage of the same thing, one that more obviously
affected the nation because reaction against the war led many to turn
away from the establishment and embrace the alternatives.
> Of course, it stands to reason that a TRUE
>avanmt-garde will always be surprising, so we probably cannot predict
>when, how, or if such a bloom will happen again.
Exactly. The one thing we can know is that it won't, by definition, be
more of the same.
> > My sense of it is that the avant-garde long ago became the
> > establishment in art, accepted by the universities and critical
> > establishment and no less a part of the social structure than the
> > school of David. That's why it no longer shocks.
>
>Well, the OLD avant-garde has, but that's in the nature of ALL ideas;
>they become mainstream and safe.
Sure. It really shouldn't be called the avant-garde at all -- the
genuine avant-garde is off making cultural pipe bombs in a basement
somewhere. The fact that it does call itself the avant-garde rather
than the more appropriate devant-garde is I think a manifestation of
that same canonical hierarchy that some here profess to abhor: the
ethic of change that has, since the Renaissance, been an integral part
of European culture has progressed to the point where even the least
inspired regurgitator feels that to achieve validity he has to be an
aesthetic Edison, and so the artist of today, however banal,
conventional, safe, and uncreative, sticks a duck's beak on a
refrigerator and proclaims that, because no artist has ever quite
stuck duck's beaks on refrigerators before or in fact done anything
more profound in that line than putting raccoon paws on steak knives,
he is newer and more improved than All-Temperature All.
> > Works like Ulysses challenged society at many levels. Today they're
> > taught in school. It's precisely because I think that modernism has
> > become as doctrinaire as the romanticism it replaced and is
> > increasingly as obsolete that I've chosen to work in and search for
> > other forms.
> >
> > Modernism is DDT and SUV's; I want something else, a new synthesis of
> > potential and need.
>
>Capitalism fills many aching holes with fake promises.
Sort of the key to the whole thing, isn't it? Once one satisfies
certain basic needs, that is.
> >> Wrong again. It's not a gimmick and it's certainly not 'cute'.
> >> Personally, though, I also doubt if it's truly in the spirit of
> >> Cage. I think, rather, it's a very German type of take on history
> >> and it's rather audacious.
> >
> >
> > On this I think we'll have to disagree: you seem to place a high
> > value on conceptual art, while my interest in such things waned with
> > the sixties.
> >
>For me conceptual art grew wings and flew off after Duchamp got his
>ironic hands all over it. Since then it has fallen into sad repetition
>and museum presentations. The "children" of Duchamp now somehow include
>the likes of Yoko Ono, who has so awfully combined "performance ideas"
>with rather a banal "politics of sentiment." Her meanings are all too
>obvious (though she will go to great dull lengths to explicate them
>anyway), and all the marvelous humor Marcel found in guying the art
>world, now lies dead in the hands of hungry curators.
>
>Even Duchamp suggetsed that the only recourse left to artists in a
>corrupted atmosphere was to basically go underground. I suspect much of
>what is still interesting in art is happening in people's basements.
>After all, such fantastic personalities as Joseph Cornell could as
>easily have gone by without any notice at all.
My thoughts exactly.
--
Josh
Samuel Vriezen
>>Of course, it stands to reason that a TRUE
>>avanmt-garde will always be surprising, so we probably cannot predict
>>when, how, or if such a bloom will happen again.
>
>
> Exactly. The one thing we can know is that it won't, by definition, be
> more of the same.
And it won't be instantly recognised by everybody either. In fact, the
surprising doesn't as a rule get much airplay.
For many, Joyce & Duchamp &c have filled the niche well enough already -
they don't need surprising things any more!
Dale
Of course, self-co-option is the greatest invention of capitalism, and
is usually what passes as freedom nowadays.
.
>They're like those guys who admit that they grew their
> hair long to get in on the free love.
Can't blame them: a rather high reason, I would say. But I grew my hair
long for whatever the best reasons might have been, and somehow that
didn't do it either!
>
> I've long suspected that Christo was of that ilk -- his doings seem
> calculated to achieve notoriety -- and that's why I compare him to
> Andrew Lloyed Webber, who improbably commercialized Jesus Christ and
> the counterculture simultaneously and went on to hawk talentless
> pretension to tourists, or that sublimely ungifted mockery Madonna,
> whose genius for self-promotion led her to make art out of
> self-promotion. (Though not being overly familiar with Christo's work,
> I'm open minded to the possibility raised by Samuel that he has
> genuine talent.)
I don't know. Christo's art doesn't precisely make me want to wet myself
in pure joy, but I did once see this documentary on his Running Fence
project, and it was fascinating watching him talk to small farmers and
the like, attempting to convince them they were part of something
worthwhile. The process - at least - seemed interesting, although I do
find art that is best viewed as a documentary to be somewhat dubious:
but that's the modern world I suppose, that "video distance" and - if
artists are supposed to reflect their own times in some way, I could say
that he is - at least - more relevant to his times than I am to mine.
>
>
>>But I think it
>>is necessary to conceive of any possible avant-garde in terms of groups:
>>Giotto - no matter how radical his notions might have been - is hard to
>>fit into the general notion we now think of as avant-garde. One man
>>isn't a front-line.
>
>
> Giotto was a member of a broader proto-Renaissance movement that
> included Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, and apparently had within the
> art for which he's best known (he was also a poet and composer)
> followers and imitators.
Fair enough.
>Hegel would, I think, have referred to him as
> a world-historical individual, one of those who most embody the
> zeitgeist -- and such people are I think by necessity part of
> movements. I suspect that Giotto seems to us a more isolated figure
> than he otherwise would in part because of the period of reaction that
> followed the plague of 1348 and separates him and his contemporaries
> from the rest of the Renaissance.
>
>
>>But it appears your idea about stability is (at
>>least in part) correct: witness the growth spurt in such ideas which
>>occurred in Europe just following WWI, with Dadaism, then Surrealism,
>>and a score of other Isms, such as the fascist Futurists. The same can
>>be seen in the hippie movement during the Vietnam war, and Modernism
>>after WWII. But didn't the Beats develop out of the relative stability
>>(to the point of boredom) of 1950s America? So I think it possible too
>>much stability (which is after all a matter of control) can prompt
>>similar reactions.
>
>
> I think you're right about that.
>
> And really, while we look upon the fifties as a period of comfortable
> stability, wasn't that stability itself a revolutionary change of
> sorts?
True.
>The factory-farm comforts of Levittown, television -- something
> between a boon and terminal enervation, the germination of today's
> designer sneaker shopping mall sensory deprivation tank suburban
> culture.
>
> Either way, I agree that the beats developed as a reaction to that
> stability, that it's no accident that as Beaver Cleaver came to occupy
> the national consciousness, the beats, film noir, rock 'n roll, and
> even horror movies emerged as a necessary corrective.
Good stuff that: film noir is absolutely central to America's psyche:
dark, cheap, ugly, ambiguous, and violent.
>
> And it seems to me that that corrective consisted not just of a
> reminder that Sue had to drink from a different water fountain, Nikita
> had missiles, and Mom was drinking, popping diet pills, and sleeping
> with the repairman, but as a means of repairing the damage done by an
> absence of trees and sex.
Which we've all become used to!
>The suburban teenager, who otherwise had to
> content himself with prolonged infantilization, could read Kerouac and
> dream he was getting some, even as he did his homework and plotted to
> acquire the keys to the car, and, as such, there was something
> vicarious about what the counterculture had to offer.
>
> There's always something vicarious about art, a guilty pleasure above
> and beyond what Protestant dourness think necessary to moral
> elevation, and it seems to me that the beats and their friends,
> unwittingly perhaps, were co-opted by the same need for vicarious
> experience that made television a little electronic window on starry
> nights and mammoth hunts. All part of becoming modern: the debeaking
> machine, the food conveyors.
Of course, their were artists (i.e. Baudelaire, Guillaume Apollinaire,
the Futurists) who embraced modernity and (especially Baudelaire)
abhorred the natural.
>
> And the beats were there at the start of the hippie movement, which, I
> think, was another stage of the same thing, one that more obviously
> affected the nation because reaction against the war led many to turn
> away from the establishment and embrace the alternatives.
>
>
>>Of course, it stands to reason that a TRUE
>>avanmt-garde will always be surprising, so we probably cannot predict
>>when, how, or if such a bloom will happen again.
>
>
> Exactly. The one thing we can know is that it won't, by definition, be
> more of the same.
The difficulty is even imagining what it CAN be. One can assume it WON'T
be anything sexually shocking, as that seems to have been mined down to
the gonads. Unless bestial necrophilia becomes a field for artistic
expression, and - god knows - it might already have been done. At this
point, it could even be a radicalized fashion of returning to pure
beauty (ala Mallarme), or some extreme form of "pure demure." Or we
could classify the rising tide of home invaders as performance artists,
and start using people's detroyed houses and families as museum
displays: "Sally - multi-media: beaten, tied with duct tape, and raped
in front of her four children. Misses her valuable Hummel collection."
>
>
>>>My sense of it is that the avant-garde long ago became the
>>>establishment in art, accepted by the universities and critical
>>>establishment and no less a part of the social structure than the
>>>school of David. That's why it no longer shocks.
>>
>>Well, the OLD avant-garde has, but that's in the nature of ALL ideas;
>>they become mainstream and safe.
>
>
> Sure. It really shouldn't be called the avant-garde at all -- the
> genuine avant-garde is off making cultural pipe bombs in a basement
> somewhere.
The very fact something IS labelled "avant-garde" (the term makes me
squirm) is probably as good a reason to think it's not.
>The fact that it does call itself the avant-garde...
I don't think IT calls itself anything much: most of these art terms are
created by critics;i.e. Impressionism, Cubism. Dada named itself, as did
Surrealism, or they might both be called "Oddism."
>...rather
> than the more appropriate devant-garde is I think a manifestation of
> that same canonical hierarchy that some here profess to abhor: the
> ethic of change that has, since the Renaissance, been an integral part
> of European culture has progressed to the point where even the least
> inspired regurgitator feels that to achieve validity he has to be an
> aesthetic Edison, and so the artist of today, however banal,
> conventional, safe, and uncreative, sticks a duck's beak on a
> refrigerator and proclaims that, because no artist has ever quite
> stuck duck's beaks on refrigerators before or in fact done anything
> more profound in that line than putting raccoon paws on steak knives,
> he is newer and more improved than All-Temperature All.
Well - true enough. I think avoiding both the canon and the
anti-canonists is as fine a way to stay clean as any. For instance, (as
manifested in Mpls just a decade or so ago) there was the Academic
poetics and the Street (slam) poetics, which were supposedly
anti-ethical, BUT I found them both unpalatable, because it struck me
that the "I woke up and grabbed a beer" poets were reacting against the
WRONG elements of their bete noir, and using their "tavern" status as a
cover for insecurity and Philistinism: "it ain't that I can't good, it's
just that I'm a savage force of nature." And yet I find most of that
work as tepid as the University lunchroom vending machine tea. There's
technical grace (which many of the Academics miss badly at any rate) and
there's natural force, and both have merits, but above all there is some
variation of sheer beauty (even for beauty's sake), and that is too too
often entirely forgotten in the rush to either be relevant to liberal
ideals of meaning, or to immediacy. Bukowski isn't Homer, but I find
both of them to be stultifying (at least as the Homer of The Iliad is
concerned, another work that seems to require a documentary layer to
make it valuable to the observor).
I'm sucking up to you, and you're sucking up to me! Martijn's take on
conversation...
dmh
Samuel Vriezen
> Well, that's just apathy of course. Understandable perhaps in light of
> the last brutal century (and the brutal beginning of another). But art
> ALWAYS needs something surprising, or it's just ornament.
Indeed.
> What that
> might be is impossible to say because then it wouldn't be surprising. I
> think it might come from people who aren't trying quite so hard to be
> surprising.
Why not? If as you say art has to be surprising, it follows that people
who are serious art are serious about being surprising.
I think the 'tradition' of avant-gardism is still good for some
surprises, even if they are small ones, such as the Linh Dinh piece I
posted - which Josh immediately was offended by. A modest little
re-enactment of the Sacre scandal?
Josh Hill
I think I was bothered both by the dogmatic culture wars aspect of it,
and by the de rigeur coarseness. It's certainly not the coarseness in
and of itself -- I compare people to dogs on Usenet all the time, and
vice-versa (with grave insult to the dogs, I might add). But the poem
reminded me of the blood and guts in modern horror movies: the trickle
of blood in the shower scene in Psycho chills me, but today's sausage
and stage blood gore makes me laugh. It's cheap commercialism rather
than art. I don't think this poem is completely lacking in art, but I
think that he's used gimmickry to make up the gap between the art that
it has and the art that it should have.
>As to Ofili, I think that was typically a fabricated scandal. Everybody
>interpreted it as an assault on the holy and nobody took the idea that
>elephant dung could be painterly material, an expression of beauty,
>seriously.
I thought that was supposed to be some kind of African tradition? And
having seen the conservative reaction to art here, I wasn't surprised
by Giuliani's I think genuine reaction. (I didn't see it as an assault
on the holy myself, and disagreed strongly with his attempt to
suppress it. I did think it was bad art, and that the museum shouldn't
have been wasting money on it.)
--
Josh
Josh Hill
<sqv.do.not.spam@xs4all> wrote:
>Josh Hill wrote:
>
>> I question your association of the avant-garde with capitalism.
>> Leninist Russia gave birth to a flourishing avant-garde,
>
>In a book by Ron Silliman that I read recently, he was calling that
>system 'state capitalism'. But it's of course a phenomenon that will
>appear anywhere where there is an oppressive normality; since the demise
>of the Soviet Union, capitalism has had free reign and it's I think in
>sore need of alternatives to compete with. I think it's the lack of
>competition - not for consumers, but for social credibility - that is
>threatening to turn capitalism into not merely a system but really an
>institution of oppression. I think the USA has in recent years made
>significant advances down the road to becoming a capitalist banana republic.
I'm afraid your right -- I fear what has happened to the Republican
Party, and I fear the increasing concentration and cowardice of the
media, the growing ignorance of the public. But, at the same time, I
don't want to play Chicken Little here -- someone could have said the
same thing during, for example, the McCarthy period. The main problem
with the government in the US today is, I think, that most people have
had it so good for so long that the decisions of the parties no longer
affect their lives in a way so obvious that it bypasses the
increasingly devious spin. So increasingly, elections are decided on
an essentially random basis. If things get bad enough, that will
change and democracy will be renewed, as it did during the Great
Depression, the Vietnam war, and Watergate -- as long as the
Republicans don't achieve so much power that they fatally damage the
institutions that enable the voters to react to such events.
>> And is the avant-garde really so new? Was
>> Giotto, say, any less avant-garde than Picasso?
>
>There are many ways of thinking about the avant-garde. In music for
>example you often hear the idea that the 14th century Ars Subtilior was
>avantgarde. Now it certainly had an experimental side, but it was not
>disruptive.
>
>I would say there's a historical notion of avantgarde which according to
>Calinescu can be traced back to the positivism of Saint-Simon, but which
>became more associated with assertive movements that championed contrary
>esthetic ideals. From there, it became associated with experimentation.
>So you have to be careful which avantgarde you're talking about.
I think I'm probably stretching the term a bit, seeking its essence
and broadening its application to make a point.
>> As I think about it,
>> it seems to me that the prime requirement for the existence of an
>> avant-garde is social change, that art changes only gradually if at
>> all during periods of relative cultural stability, but at a breakneck
>> pace when cultural paradigms shift.
>
>That may be true. Both world wars spawned accelerated experimentation in
>their wakes.
Sure. The pressures, I think, were already there -- the foreshadowing
of modernism forex apparent in impressionism and other movements of
the late 19th century, true modernism appearing in the transitional
Edwardian period -- but WW I broke the dam.
>> My sense of it is that the avant-garde long ago became the
>> establishment in art, accepted by the universities and critical
>> establishment and no less a part of the social structure than the
>> school of David. That's why it no longer shocks.
>
>It's partly true. But whereever there is an establishment, and if there
>is still some freedom left, you get this contrary impulse. Establishment
>categories have fed off avantgarde notions all the time. But that's not
>enough to kill the zest for avantgardism. Nowadays, the aesthetically
>radical is probed sometimes within institutions - though it's not always
>easy to avoid compromise there - and sometimes in margins.
Sure, but I'd argue that the avant-gardism within institutions has
merely been coopted, become a norm far more ruthlessly enforced than
its predecessor avant-garde (the new criticism of modernism, say, as
opposed to post modernism and its offshoots). For that matter, even
true avant-gardism has a totalitarian side, as representational
painters and tonal composers found to their dismay.
>Shock value really has very much to do with the willingness of people to
>make a scandal out of something. The prime example of scandal was the
>Rite of Spring, and this was very much a society thing and possibly
>partly a marketing ploy. But there have been 'scandals' that are much
>more subtle:
>
>> Works like Ulysses challenged society at many levels. Today they're
>> taught in school.
>
>But what about the Gertrude Stein of Stanzas in Meditation? Or why is it
>that nobody seems to read The Making of Americans? I hold those works to
>be more radical and confrontational than Joyce, but somehow they never
>became scandalous - perhaps because of the absence of obviously
>scandalous, e.g. 'pornographic' content? But I think her dismissal of
>the noun, for example, is still a very radical position and it will
>always be so, because it questions the normal use of language which is
>one foundation for everyday experience of reality.
I don't know that degree of innovation is the only significant
parameter here (although I'd question whether Stein was more of an
innovator than Joyce). Joyce was a towering figure for artistic
reasons, not just because he was an innovator or because Ulysses was
banned.
>>>>>Do you realize that so far, every new note in the 639 year Halberstadt
>>>>>performance of ASLSP has been world news?
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>Sounds like a gimmick to me, albeit a cute one.
>>>
>>>Wrong again. It's not a gimmick and it's certainly not 'cute'.
>>>Personally, though, I also doubt if it's truly in the spirit of Cage. I
>>>think, rather, it's a very German type of take on history and it's
>>>rather audacious.
>>
>>
>> On this I think we'll have to disagree: you seem to place a high value
>> on conceptual art, while my interest in such things waned with the
>> sixties.
>
>I think all art is conceptual and has an ideological dimension but a lot
>of the garden variety lyrical art you get tries to hide its
>conceptuality. I also think it's wonderful that you can go to hear a
>tiny fragment of a 639 year concert, like visiting a shrine to time.
>It's not just good because it's conceptual, it's good because the
>concept is very strong.
I think I see it the other way around -- concept without art is less
important to me than concept with art. Perhaps that's an expression of
my own prejudice, of the fact that my affinities are with innovation
rather than working out (which is the opposite, I know, but it's a
grass is greener phenomenon).
--
Josh
Josh Hill
>Josh Hill wrote:
>>
>> Exactly. Worse, I think that the putative representatives of the
>> avant-garde have in many cases seized on that, have commercialized
>> themselves.
>
>Of course, self-co-option is the greatest invention of capitalism, and
>is usually what passes as freedom nowadays.
Sure, but then, I'm not sure it's an invention of capitalism -- just
look at the behavior of courtiers.
.
>>They're like those guys who admit that they grew their
>> hair long to get in on the free love.
>
>Can't blame them: a rather high reason, I would say. But I grew my hair
>long for whatever the best reasons might have been, and somehow that
>didn't do it either!
I grew it long because it meant I didn't have to get a haircut . . .
>>The factory-farm comforts of Levittown, television -- something
>> between a boon and terminal enervation, the germination of today's
>> designer sneaker shopping mall sensory deprivation tank suburban
>> culture.
>>
>> Either way, I agree that the beats developed as a reaction to that
>> stability, that it's no accident that as Beaver Cleaver came to occupy
>> the national consciousness, the beats, film noir, rock 'n roll, and
>> even horror movies emerged as a necessary corrective.
>
>Good stuff that: film noir is absolutely central to America's psyche:
>dark, cheap, ugly, ambiguous, and violent.
It's part of it, but I think only part. There's the churchgoing
puritan idealistic Drive-A-Matic part as well, and the country seems
to thrive on the curious tension between them.
>> And it seems to me that that corrective consisted not just of a
>> reminder that Sue had to drink from a different water fountain, Nikita
>> had missiles, and Mom was drinking, popping diet pills, and sleeping
>> with the repairman, but as a means of repairing the damage done by an
>> absence of trees and sex.
>
>Which we've all become used to!
I can do without trees . . .
>>The suburban teenager, who otherwise had to
>> content himself with prolonged infantilization, could read Kerouac and
>> dream he was getting some, even as he did his homework and plotted to
>> acquire the keys to the car, and, as such, there was something
>> vicarious about what the counterculture had to offer.
>>
>> There's always something vicarious about art, a guilty pleasure above
>> and beyond what Protestant dourness think necessary to moral
>> elevation, and it seems to me that the beats and their friends,
>> unwittingly perhaps, were co-opted by the same need for vicarious
>> experience that made television a little electronic window on starry
>> nights and mammoth hunts. All part of becoming modern: the debeaking
>> machine, the food conveyors.
>
>Of course, their were artists (i.e. Baudelaire, Guillaume Apollinaire,
>the Futurists) who embraced modernity and (especially Baudelaire)
>abhorred the natural.
One can, I think, draw a pretty neat line between romanticism, which
was a reaction against modernity, and modernism, which embraced it.
But of course there are exceptions on either side.
>> And the beats were there at the start of the hippie movement, which, I
>> think, was another stage of the same thing, one that more obviously
>> affected the nation because reaction against the war led many to turn
>> away from the establishment and embrace the alternatives.
>>
>>
>>>Of course, it stands to reason that a TRUE
>>>avanmt-garde will always be surprising, so we probably cannot predict
>>>when, how, or if such a bloom will happen again.
>>
>>
>> Exactly. The one thing we can know is that it won't, by definition, be
>> more of the same.
>
>The difficulty is even imagining what it CAN be. One can assume it WON'T
>be anything sexually shocking, as that seems to have been mined down to
>the gonads. Unless bestial necrophilia becomes a field for artistic
>expression, and - god knows - it might already have been done. At this
>point, it could even be a radicalized fashion of returning to pure
>beauty (ala Mallarme), or some extreme form of "pure demure." Or we
>could classify the rising tide of home invaders as performance artists,
>and start using people's detroyed houses and families as museum
>displays: "Sally - multi-media: beaten, tied with duct tape, and raped
>in front of her four children. Misses her valuable Hummel collection."
This has in fact guided my own excuse for an artistic development. I
can't think of anything more radical at this point than a rejection of
modernism, and a rejection of modernism means accepting what modernism
rejected, viz., everything that came before. Though in fact, I think
we need a new synthesis, the same new synthesis that we need in our
lives -- something that embraces the changes that have occurred and
will inevitably continue to occur while doing a better job of
addressing their excesses. Hopeless, of course, which is why I've
never been able to find a suitable form.
>>>>My sense of it is that the avant-garde long ago became the
>>>>establishment in art, accepted by the universities and critical
>>>>establishment and no less a part of the social structure than the
>>>>school of David. That's why it no longer shocks.
>>>
>>>Well, the OLD avant-garde has, but that's in the nature of ALL ideas;
>>>they become mainstream and safe.
>>
>>
>> Sure. It really shouldn't be called the avant-garde at all -- the
>> genuine avant-garde is off making cultural pipe bombs in a basement
>> somewhere.
>
>The very fact something IS labelled "avant-garde" (the term makes me
>squirm) is probably as good a reason to think it's not.
Heh, yes. Like buying something that says "professional" on it, it's a
sure guarantee that it won't be.
>>The fact that it does call itself the avant-garde...
>
>I don't think IT calls itself anything much: most of these art terms are
>created by critics;i.e. Impressionism, Cubism. Dada named itself, as did
>Surrealism, or they might both be called "Oddism."
True.
Sure. What is most missing, I think, is the sublime combination of
story telling/poetizing delight and depth that characterizes the best
works. It would have come as news to Shakespeare that you shouldn't
cut off a head or two. But the academics don't want to cut off heads,
and the slammers want to cut off the heads without implication or
grace.
> Bukowski isn't Homer, but I find
>both of them to be stultifying (at least as the Homer of The Iliad is
>concerned, another work that seems to require a documentary layer to
>make it valuable to the observor).
Though I imagine it was more interesting to the Greeks, for whom the
battles and personae were presumably as interesting as those of WW II
are to us. And the Odyssey is a great story!
>> My thoughts exactly.
>
>I'm sucking up to you, and you're sucking up to me! Martijn's take on
>conversation...
Hey, then, I should have done a Martijn: You've always seemed a bit
slow to me, Dale, a sort of artichokepoet whos also a stargazing
mammal.
--
Josh
Samuel Vriezen
> I think I was bothered both by the dogmatic culture wars aspect of it,
> and by the de rigeur coarseness. It's certainly not the coarseness in
> and of itself -- I compare people to dogs on Usenet all the time, and
> vice-versa (with grave insult to the dogs, I might add). But the poem
> reminded me of the blood and guts in modern horror movies: the trickle
> of blood in the shower scene in Psycho chills me, but today's sausage
> and stage blood gore makes me laugh. It's cheap commercialism rather
> than art. I don't think this poem is completely lacking in art, but I
> think that he's used gimmickry to make up the gap between the art that
> it has and the art that it should have.
Oh, I didn't even think of the whole thing as coarse. Linh Dinh often
does use gory and deviant imagery, but I feel it's never mere ornament;
and yes, it's often very funny, too.
As to the splatter movie, I would say it usually has more to do with
slapstick than with suspense. Doesn't mean those movies are without value.