And it gave me a little thrill.
I love watching his YouTube videos and I love his elevation of Internet Poetry over the page.
I also like a lot of his own poetry, both his older more straightforward textual poems and his newer explorations of textual visuality and the poem-as-YouTube video.
It's clear he's aware of the tradition of verbo-visual poetry in America and elsewhere (The Futurist period in Russia!)
A tradition that has, sadly, been so ghettoized by literature.
Here's to hoping that the net can be the exception to that general rule of ghettoization.
I don't think it's just his haiku that remind me (duh--they're haiku) of Japanese sensibility when it comes to appreciating the poetic qualities of the quotidian.
Some of his other forays into textual/font magnification with subject matter de-emphasis also echo ideas intrinsic to many traditions in Japanese art (and not just Japanese poetry).
And then there's the whole conceptualist New Yawk thing with text as painting. I won't even begin the litany of names.
Jenny Holzer has influenced everyone. And most of her life has been dedicated to anchoring texts in different forms, from the ephemeral (posting xeroxes on city walls or with band announcements) to forms which mock or ape advertising, L.E.D. crawls, civic monuments etc. Poems engraved in park benches. Poems projected as images on the sides of buildings at night.
She seemed least interested in the incarnations of her works as paintings or in having her works painted or stenciled on museum walls.
It seemed much more right to encounter her Truisms on the sides of pencils and other marketable items.
But then we are supposed to be post-irony and Holzer is all about irony. Her work is still pungent and relevant but it also smacks of the 80s every bit as much as Longo's or Sherman's work does. It's only after a few decades have passed that you can see how similar everyone in a given period generally is.
I would stress that I think Holzer's work differs from the work of the other artists I just mentioned, who became famous at roughly the same time she did, and who who share her love of irony. The impetus in Holzer's work (especially the Truisms but other works as well) strikes me much more as insurgency. I consider her much more of a freedom fighter than the others I mention, whose work cannot really achieve much besides acclaim, reproducability and status.
Holzer's work moves in the opposite direction of status. Because of the nature of its medium (language) it is freely given and freely reproduced. You can choose to pay twenty bucks for a pencil with a Holzerism on its side, but you don't need to. The work is clearly agit-prop and activism. It's because we have activist Jenny Holzer that artist Jenny Holzer seems slightly less real.
And yet I consider her as more important than the other artists I mention above. Not her. What she did. The things she said. That's the difference. Artists moving away from art while continuing to use it. What could be more of a step away from capitalism than that.
But is this a liminal thing? Can this only exist where artists work in words? I don't think so. I think the images of a guerilla artist like Peekasso function in the same way. He's less interested in marketability than in communication.
But to return to the idea of American haiku or American verbo-visual poetry. These tend not to catch on in American culture. Or even minimalist forms or ideas, in general. I think early William Carlos Williams is a notable exception. Americans (and everyone else) clearly understood what Williams was doing in that period. Okay, not clearly understood since clear understanding is not really the point. They were troubled enough by the work to keep it alive. Those poems have never gone away since they arrived.
And the young poet also mentions Cummings.
I'm glad Cummings is no longer on the literary shit list.
As much as I loved language poetry (and still love a great deal of it) it was such a swing from the Dionysian back to the Apollonian, that a lot of affective-based art was ghettoized in the process.
"Emotions are cliches."--Lyn Hejinian.
The emotions were sort of Verboten for a while.
Well emotions cannot be totally absent from a work of art. I guess I mean the emotions allowed to exist in the form of a transposed identity or ego that has somehow survived its being beamed up into a work of art.
I could make an argument that the fundamental difference between avant-garde poetry (soi-disant) and mainstream poetry (soi-disant) is that ultimately the avant-garde has conceptualist underpinnings and sees distancing moves as essential. The more synonymous the art is with its creator, generally, the less avant-garde the work is considered. The more you let go or allow the work to be multi-locational and non-egocentric, the more you are moving towards the avant-garde. Not that I mean sensibility ever goes away. But there must be allowances for the multivalent and a lack of authority which (paradoxically, funnily) means more street cred.
And in the more radical forms of the avant-garde, there is often what I want to call the anarcho-aesthetic impulse. This is the "acting inappropriate" part of the art. Whether it's the Dadaists disrupting the fabric of European society with the violence of the irrational (or their idea that even things such as suicide could be playfully enacted) or Khlebnikov's transrational Zaum language or Yoko Ono's screaming, there are lines crossed. Hatred and ridicule are appreciated by the artist in this zone--if consciousnesses are elevated, great; if not, fuck it.
This element is much rarer today. We still get it, but more often we get pallid imitations of it. Often these imitators are academics dressing up in Dadaist costumes in between popping in at the Whitney to give a reading and then go torture a bunch of upper middle class kids by talking about their own "historicity" with much pomposity leading to greater boredom.
The avant-garde generally defines itself by its difference from art it considers expressivist, author-based (or author-mired?) and ideas of "authenticity" which it views as damaging to art.
This War has gone on and will probably continue forever.
No point in it being a war but it probably will remain so simply because of the nature of the marketplace of competing ideas, capitalistic marketing needs, literary coteries and niches, and the rather limited audience for art located at either pole (or anywhere in between).
But it's not really a war.
That's just the sounds of mortal people dying.
The sound of the art is much more confident than that.
Above is the cover of I Love Music, a collaborative, epistolary chapbook written by Steve Roggenbuck and Stephen Tully Dierks.
Don't get the wrong idea by the cover. Or go ahead if you want. Get the wrong idea and enjoy it.
But the book is about friendship.
It's more a bromosexual work. These are clearly two flaming bromosexuals.
Homosocial.
And friends can do that.
Sure they can.
It reminds me of so many old record covers I've seen at Goodwill.
So it looks completely hetero-normative to me. ;-)
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