I’m not
too proud to decline Wikipedia’s offer of a definition of the avant-garde,
The avant-garde (from
French, "advance guard" or "vanguard", literally
"fore-guard") are people or works that are experimental, radical, or
unorthodox, with respect to art, culture, and society. It may be characterized
by non-traditional, aesthetic innovation and initial unacceptability, and it
may offer a critique of the relationship between producer and consumer.
And we can
take its further elucidation, which is also very useful,
The avant-garde pushes the
boundaries of what is accepted as the norm or the status quo, primarily in the
cultural realm. The avant-garde is considered by some to be a hallmark of
modernism, as distinct from postmodernism. Many artists have aligned themselves
with the avant-garde movement and still continue to do so, tracing a history
from Dada through the Situationists to postmodern artists such as the Language
poets around 1981.
The avant-garde also promotes
radical social reforms. It was this meaning that was evoked by the Saint
Simonian Olinde Rodrigues in his essay "L'artiste, le savant et
l'industriel" ("The artist, the scientist and the
industrialist", 1825), which contains the first recorded use of "avant-garde"
in its now customary sense: there, Rodrigues calls on artists to "serve as
[the people's] avant-garde", insisting that "the power of the arts is
indeed the most immediate and fastest way" to social, political and
economic reform.
In poetry,
there have been many and various ‘avant-gardistes’, including Ezra Pound, Edith
Sitwell, Mina Loy, the ‘concrete’ or ‘sound’ poets of the 1960’s and John
Ashbery. But poetry has perhaps been less spectacularly avant-garde, or had to
try harder, than other genres, being made of words and thus less able to
extricate itself easily from traditional meaning.
In music,
John Cage presented his 4.33, a piece
ostensibly for piano in which no notes are played but we have 273 seconds of
silence, 273 degrees below freezing being absolute zero. He is outdone by
Robert Rauschenberg in art who took a drawing by de Kooning and rubbed it out
thus ending up with less than what he started with. But the avant-garde is not
about absence, it deliberately challenges and usually tries to set itself
against ‘mainstream’ tradition by doing things in radically different ways.
It is
‘experimental’, for better or worse.
For
better, it can be hugely entertaining, as in Michael Daugherty’s Long-Haired Poet in the Dorchester Hotel, which
went something like this,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!!!!! !!!!!
!!!!! !!!!!
!!!!! ? !!!!!
!!!!! !!!!!
!!!!! !!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Or Seven Number Poems by Neil Mills on the
LP Experiments in Disintegrating
Language/Konkrete Canticle (1971) that adhere to rhythmic structures but
use numbers instead of words and thus achieve a minimalist music entirely
without verbal meaning. I’m delighted to find somebody has taken the trouble to
perform them on You Tube.
For worse,
some of the avant-garde seem to go out of their way to try to offend, provoke
or otherwise abuse any other poet from the ‘mainstream’ as part of their
radical agenda. The mainstream mostly doesn’t mind what they do and is happy to
assimilate their best efforts, be amused by others and simply let them be if
they insist on their difference. Auden pointed out somewhere that ‘everything
changes but the avant-garde’.
The full
title of Matthew Welton’s book We needed coffee
but… fills the whole front cover, and is longer than many of the poems in
it but, that point having been made- if it is the point, the book contains
poems very similar to many published in the 1960’s and they first made me wish
that the Vietnam War could be brought to an end whereas most mainstream books
published in 2009 had moved on from the sort of poetry being published in 1969.
Seeing
themselves as new, revolutionary or contrary to tradition, avant-garde poets
are often young and think they are the first generation who were ever going to
overthrow the ‘established order’. But every generation has poets who think
that and all they can hope to do is join the long tradition, not re-invent it.
It is more
plausible to identify Beethoven and Picasso as genuine innovators, who
developed from what went before them and only then broke with established
practice and took major steps forward in their later work. One poet who does a
similar thing is W.B. Yeats, whose early work is radically changed by
Modernism, and Ezra Pound, into something entirely tougher, more rigorous and
provides a model for the generations that came after him.
In a radio
programme, Whatever Happened to the Avant
Garde (Radio 3, 11/12/2016), Paul Morley asked if it’s even possible any
more and Stephen Burt in the poem is you is
probably not the first to refer to the ‘post avant-garde’, which must be as annoying
for them as it was for anybody who thought that their rebellious clothes or
outrageous hairstyle would remain shocking forever.
It might
seem to us that by now every avenue has been explored and we can thank Andre
Breton, Carl Andre (the author of that pile of bricks in the Tate) Bob Cobbing,
Marcel Duchamp, Pierre Boulez and Yoko Ono for all their work. Some of it led
only into cul-de-sacs from which there was nowhere else to go but others, like
T.S.Eliot, David Bowie or Tracey Emin, became part of the mainstream tradition.
Or perhaps we have hardly started yet.
Poetry is
a wide church and all are welcome to make their contribution within it. All you
have to do is ‘be any good’. The long tradition of poetry is much more liberal
and inclusive than some avant-garde poets gave it credit for and is not
offended by new approaches. It is glad of all their contributions but sorry if
they thought they were quite so different. A new hat soon becomes old hat and
there’s nothing we can do about that.
