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.
____________________
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".