(no subject)

[Prsamsa at aol.com]

<<What is it that makes avant-garde writingavant-garde?>>I think the term is 
meaningless, a perhaps once-usefulterm that no longer has currency except in 
historicterms; e.g., in speaking of what was once consideredavant-garde.As a 
general, non-specific term for what might be newand different it seems now 
precious, even ludicrous.  It certainly doesn't describe any specific movement 
ortrend I know of.   


Xcuse me, but that sounds like post-modern doubletalk to me.  Podner, who 
determines what terms have meaning and not, today?   Certainly not a certain
little pee-list.   Then:   William Gibson wasn't avante-garde?  Or Burroughs?
Or Coupland, or Zappa, or the
director of Slacker, or Poppy Z. Brite, or BEEllis with "American Psycho?"
    Fair, you say, this is putting a name on something historical.  I'll buy 
that.
    But so you assume you know of sufficient trends and genres to make a 
judgment.
Back in the day (tap-tap--just a minute) little magazines like Angel Hair and 
Floating
Bear and UnMuzzled Ox, or BETWEEN C&D, later, probably had a readership in 
the hundreds more than thousands but they were smiling and savvy hundreds.  I'm 
just savoring a book called "The Last Avante-Garde" by David Lehman that talks 
about
 the precursors to Language Poetry, Personal Poetry, Funny Poetry--O' Hara, 
Ashbery and later Ted Berrigan and those guys.  Why write if it's not gonna be 
original?   They wrote in the key of joy.  For 'Eliotic', Lowell-heavy 
American
poetry, that was a revolution.  
      How witty were they?   Kerouac, drunk at a reading, once commented,
"You're ruining American poetry, Frank, (O'Hara)"
       Frank shot back:   "that's more than you could ever do."  
      You just sound tired, Mal;   maybe I am too.   Seems like GR is about 
the 
abuse of rationalism--just another ism in the end.   Stay cool but care, 
since I can't whistle Mile's "Sketches of Spain" over the PC--I'll quote ya from 
Berrigan's
Sonnet LII:

It is a human universe:  & I
is a correspondent. 

Perry (still tapping my feet waiting for weapons of mass destruction) Sams.