POETRY
PhillySound Poets
/ Thom Donovan
06.21.08
My friend Michael Hennessey recently showed me a paper he had written titled "Towards a True Avant-Garde Poetics," framed with some ideas of Peter Burger's. Let me share:
While conventional notions of the avant-garde suggest work which is groundbreaking, confrontational and even impenetrable, this panel seeks to investigate poetry and poetics which adhere to a narrower sense of the term—namely, Peter Burger's conception of the avant-garde as work which "demand[s] that art becomes practical once again," or returns art to the praxis of everyday life. Understood this way, Burger's avant-garde aesthetic changes the ways in which an audience interacts with art, calling for personal action, and provides new, democratized inroads to the creative process.
This reminds me of something Kaia Sand said a few years ago in an online conversation with Carol Mirakove after Mirakove asked Sand about the creation of her panel "Women in the Avant-Garde":
I chose the term "avant-garde" over "experimental" because "avant-garde" implies the social side of the work. There are a lot of ways to pitch in with an avant-garde movement––this is an inclusive frame. So many artists have shown us that if you want to extend what's possible, you need to build the ground to walk on––and that's collective action. Such ground is established by chapbooks, readings, meetings ... If, on the other hand, one strives to be an author who works individually and is lauded and published by HarperCollins, one is striving, generally speaking, to gain acceptance from social elites who uphold established conventions. One simply succumbs.
This Kaia Sand quote is something I often cite, as I am constantly inspired by her ideas, and now I know I'll also be quoting Hennessey and Burger just as much for the same reasons. The fortunate are those who can grasp that poetry and art are no longer held by the elite, that we are in some sense returning to a more ancient knit, creating because we are all creative. It's our world, and our world needs no authority to dictate whether or what we create. PhillySound is a community of poets and friends with shared aesthetics, living within the Philadelphia map. An old friend from California was just telling me the other day that she intends to gather artists she knows and loves and settle on a farm to start a community. While I wish them the best of everything, I’m not interested in an excluded environment for myself, especially one based on being creative, as this world needs as many of us being as creative as possible to encourage everyone’s abilities, and to change this disintegrating world.
Here in Philadelphia there is a wealth of stimulation for poets, and we are in this world, not removed from it, and very much in this world with our poems. PhillySound is named after the vernacular Philly of Philadelphia after all. We are HERE and writing and very much alive in that, and don't even mind when others glean off our community, even the big wigs at the ivy league schools like Penn. PENNSOUND follows PhillySound's lead after all in name, but hey, we're all in this together, SO WHY NOT!? Imitation is not folly. Imitation is when someone SEES a good thing, and wants to join in the party, so, I repeat, WHY NOT!?
I feel community within PhillySound and Philadelphia's creative collective conscience. And community––in the best sense––is where, while there may be competitiveness, it's competition which spurs its members into stronger and wider creative potentials, while leaving room for everyone to be themselves at any given moment. We're living in a rich new world where poetry's writing, reading, and publishing is opening up to everyone. Ezra Pound was horrified in his own time with the advancement of easier publishing, but the fear of everyone being creative is nothing more than the fear of no longer being exclusive and special. As we transition into the everywhere of art for everyone, I'm happy to do my part horrifying the ghost of Pound, living within this city of many poets, and with my friends whose poems constantly inspire and ignite!
To those unfamiliar with PhillySound, welcome! You are very welcome! Many thanks to FANZINE for this opportunity to share with you some poems by those who wake me up and keep me awake! Much gratitude!
––CAConrad
*important editor's note concerning browsers: If on a PC running Windows, some pages are cut off on the right margin when using Internet Explorer...sorry folks, you'll have to use Firefox for Windows or Safari for Windows. For Mac users, Safari or Firefox work naturally. Download Safari here. Or download Firefox here. You can get the applications for either Macs or PCs free at those links.
While conventional notions of the avant-garde suggest work which is groundbreaking, confrontational and even impenetrable, this panel seeks to investigate poetry and poetics which adhere to a narrower sense of the term—namely, Peter Burger's conception of the avant-garde as work which "demand[s] that art becomes practical once again," or returns art to the praxis of everyday life. Understood this way, Burger's avant-garde aesthetic changes the ways in which an audience interacts with art, calling for personal action, and provides new, democratized inroads to the creative process.
This reminds me of something Kaia Sand said a few years ago in an online conversation with Carol Mirakove after Mirakove asked Sand about the creation of her panel "Women in the Avant-Garde":
I chose the term "avant-garde" over "experimental" because "avant-garde" implies the social side of the work. There are a lot of ways to pitch in with an avant-garde movement––this is an inclusive frame. So many artists have shown us that if you want to extend what's possible, you need to build the ground to walk on––and that's collective action. Such ground is established by chapbooks, readings, meetings ... If, on the other hand, one strives to be an author who works individually and is lauded and published by HarperCollins, one is striving, generally speaking, to gain acceptance from social elites who uphold established conventions. One simply succumbs.
This Kaia Sand quote is something I often cite, as I am constantly inspired by her ideas, and now I know I'll also be quoting Hennessey and Burger just as much for the same reasons. The fortunate are those who can grasp that poetry and art are no longer held by the elite, that we are in some sense returning to a more ancient knit, creating because we are all creative. It's our world, and our world needs no authority to dictate whether or what we create. PhillySound is a community of poets and friends with shared aesthetics, living within the Philadelphia map. An old friend from California was just telling me the other day that she intends to gather artists she knows and loves and settle on a farm to start a community. While I wish them the best of everything, I’m not interested in an excluded environment for myself, especially one based on being creative, as this world needs as many of us being as creative as possible to encourage everyone’s abilities, and to change this disintegrating world.
Here in Philadelphia there is a wealth of stimulation for poets, and we are in this world, not removed from it, and very much in this world with our poems. PhillySound is named after the vernacular Philly of Philadelphia after all. We are HERE and writing and very much alive in that, and don't even mind when others glean off our community, even the big wigs at the ivy league schools like Penn. PENNSOUND follows PhillySound's lead after all in name, but hey, we're all in this together, SO WHY NOT!? Imitation is not folly. Imitation is when someone SEES a good thing, and wants to join in the party, so, I repeat, WHY NOT!?
I feel community within PhillySound and Philadelphia's creative collective conscience. And community––in the best sense––is where, while there may be competitiveness, it's competition which spurs its members into stronger and wider creative potentials, while leaving room for everyone to be themselves at any given moment. We're living in a rich new world where poetry's writing, reading, and publishing is opening up to everyone. Ezra Pound was horrified in his own time with the advancement of easier publishing, but the fear of everyone being creative is nothing more than the fear of no longer being exclusive and special. As we transition into the everywhere of art for everyone, I'm happy to do my part horrifying the ghost of Pound, living within this city of many poets, and with my friends whose poems constantly inspire and ignite!
To those unfamiliar with PhillySound, welcome! You are very welcome! Many thanks to FANZINE for this opportunity to share with you some poems by those who wake me up and keep me awake! Much gratitude!
––CAConrad
*important editor's note concerning browsers: If on a PC running Windows, some pages are cut off on the right margin when using Internet Explorer...sorry folks, you'll have to use Firefox for Windows or Safari for Windows. For Mac users, Safari or Firefox work naturally. Download Safari here. Or download Firefox here. You can get the applications for either Macs or PCs free at those links.