EXPERIMENTAL POETRY: Some Thoughts
 
    Harry Polkinhorn
 
 1
These days experimentalism is identified with the rampant exploration of purely personal authority or "expression," the erosion of facts, imbrication of poetry with other forms ofdiscourse both textual and non-textual, obsession with communications technology and mass media, and sublime (or ridiculous) confusion, with more than a dash of madness thrown in.  Why were theory and practice separated? What is the quality of their antagonistic relations which has confused some of our best thinkers? Why is it almost always the case that those who say how things are (critics as theorists speaking in the abstract voice of Truth, beyond preconception) occupy university positions, whereas most of those who produce so-called experimental poetry do not and in fact have little or no social or cultural status? Why is there no identifiable movement of experimental poetry in the U.S.? Why, with very few exceptions, are there no established journals, reviews, or magazines dedicated to experimental poetry here? Why, with very few exceptions, are there no sound-poetry, video-poetry, or intermedia poetry festivals in this country, no tradition of formal or informal support for this cultural activity? Why do those people who think about these things at all ignorantly and narrowly identify poetic experimentation almost exclusively with one or two self-defined "movements" whose adherents have spent almost as much time proselytizing (under the guise of theorizing) as producing fresh work?
 

2
On the formal level, experimental poetry is that moment of the material which manifests the urge to exceed either itself or its perceptions of its antecedents. It wants to go beyond, to surmount, to venture forth, to become lost again by leaving behind the conventional, the comfortable, the already understood, the traditional, the accepted. Although sometimes the case, this is not solely a retreat to pre-Freudian libido but includes going beyond its own achievements, continually redefining itself through staking out expanding, temporary boundaries beyond which to strive in subsequent incarnations. Sexual love goes backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, until direction becomes irrelevant. The result? No formal definition of the object is possible. Eros of course is the deity who presides over just such energies. My argument, then, is that experimental poetry, insofar as it manifests this expansiveness, can be usefully approached with the classical model of sexual love, especially in its manic phase in which self and other are con-fused (thrown together), in the interest of preservation of the self through a process of changing the self.
 

3
Some people, including some poets, of course, hate change. They would prefer poetry to stay the same from one generation to the next, just as they would prefer poets to repeat themselves. These consumers espouse "standards of value," which they call "quality." They like to measure everything against what they already know, and any deviations from this they usually reject as manifestations of lesser quality, invoking an unexpressed and ultimately inexpressible, elitist and hierarchical standard which then saves them from the logical embarrassment of trying to defend their choices and manifold exclusions.  When it comes to disporting in the vast fields of the experimental, I find that other forms of writing than theory are much more sophisticated and satisfactory. There are not several poets whose work could have been brought as examples, but hundreds, if not thousands of experimental poets active throughout the country. Anyone who has seen Factsheet Five or Len Fulton's International Directory or Sound Choice comes away bewildered and exhilarated by the intensity and variety of poetic explorations being carried on in this country, almost all of which is beneath notice by the academy, needless to say. Thus, experimental poetry as we see it today does not mark "the end of literature," but through its irrepressible libidinal expansiveness it highlights the fact that a responsible criticism has never been born.

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Poeta/artista experimental, mais de 30 livros em prosa e poesia, Professor de Literatura Comparada da Universidade de San Diego (Califórnia), onde também é diretor da Editora Universitária. Organizador, com Carlos Espinosa, de "Corrosive Signs - Essays on Experimental Poetry".

 
 
 

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