Trevor, I forget to mention that I went down to down to Dark Horsey bookshop at the Experimental Art Foundation (EAF) yesterday and spoke to Ken Bolton about the literature questions you introduced.
Why Ken? Well, I'd recoiled from an autonomous modernist poetics disconected from lived experience in everyday life. I'd found the turn to Literature by liberal humanist philosophers, such as Richard Rorty and Martha Nussbaum, too culturally conservative. I accepted their main points. Rorty says that the novel represents the world of appearances in opposition to a materialist science. Nussbaum says that the novel (eg., Dickens) deals with our emotional life and the ethical questions about human beings living flourishing lives.
Fine. I'd always accepted that literature is, and should be, oppositional to the new ascetic priests who wear the mask of utilitarian economics, and worship utility as a deity. Romanticism was alive and well and more than inward-looking subjectivity. Fair enough.
I was looking for connections to more radical material online that I could introduce into this conversation. A form of writing that breaks the old distinctions of poetry and prose, the old conventions of language and functions in terms of a critique of society. It would be a poetics that would challenge the glossy surface commodity language of the society of the spectacle. And, I guess, we should now add the increasingly militarized language of the national security state.
However, I'm not even a tourist in the literary institution these days and I do not know which avant garde sites to visit for a quick look and see.
I had heard of John Trantor's online Jacket, but I'd never got around to reading it. I had started to read Adorno's essay, 'On Lyric Poetry and Society', but I did not even know what the label 'lyric poetry' meant.
Hence my turn to Ken Bolton. Ken is the editor of Otis Rush and a poet. There is some writing from the back issues online
Ken recommended looking at Ron Silliman's Blog. One of his poems is here
Silliman's blog discloses a whole other world that I did not even know about. Ken also mentioned Charles Bernstein and Lyn Hejimian. So Ken has pointed me---us---to a pathway that leads to Language School of contemporary poetry/writing. Ken talked this "school" as a network that is largely independent of the defining process of academic criticism that operates in terms of what Hegel called the understanding. So we have the dead academic hand standing above the individual existence of what it is talking about, does not see it, and only labels it.
That was my signpost as sketched by Ken. The sketch implies that this network is concerned with the politics of the use of language.
Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.
Posted by: Espinola Steve on January 10, 2004 01:40 AM