Avant

Tonight's Prom celebrates the centenary of John Cage. I might give it a go. Without him being probably among my Top 100 favourite composers, I have some time for him and his like, that is, those 'experimentalists' who contributed something worthwhile to the canon.
It had seemed to me that it had gone quiet on the 'avant' front. It certainly doesn't seem to be the headline-grabbing initiative it was when Carl Andre's bricks appeared in the Tate or, in the smaller world of poetry, Bob Cobbing and his concrete friends made amusing noises to each other's great approval. It had seemed to me that the much-vaunted 'plurality' of poetry by now had allowed us all to accept that anything was possible, that everybody could be allowed to get on with their own projects and the post-avantistes could be allowed to get over themselves.
There was all that, plus the fact that the falling off of interest in the Poets on Fire internet forum meant that I'd heard enough, had my say and didn't feel any further need to ask questions of the self-promoting differentness of post-avant apologists. By all means, they can do their stuff, let nobody stand in their way. If they can interest anybody else in their difference, good luck to them, but we are over 'difference' for its own sake by now. What we'd prefer to see from them is something, anything, that's 'any good'. There's been Mina Loy, Erik Satie, John Cage, e.e. cummings and all but it is over a hundred years old now. I shouldn't have been able to say of Matthew Welton's last book, a couple of years ago, that it made me nostalgic. It was allegedly new and ground-breaking but it only made me wish the Vietnam War could be brought to an end. Come on, ladies and gentlemen, there's more to life than being a retro tribute act.
So, now I'm reading John Fuller's book, Who is Ozymandias, another of those guides to reading poetry by one highly qualified to explain it. The Professor's idea is that poetry presents puzzles to be solved by the reader. And yes, it can. But I wouldn't be reading much of it if that was the point of it. It certainly can be difficult but I don't feel the need to solve the puzzle to enjoy it and, in fact, enjoy the unresolved part of it more in many cases because once everything is explained I worry that some of the magic might be lost. I like the music and the words for their own sake and, quite honestly, so few of us have the range of learning of Prof. Fuller exhibited in his exegeses here that we might as well try to solve The Listener crossword as read a poem.
Fuller's argument hasn't so far convinced me but, interestingly, although convinced that puzzles are the basis of poetry, he only takes a few pages to nod vaguely towards John Ashbery's work before taking only a few more pages to give that deliberately difficult school of poets a badly-disguised ill-tempered dismissal, ending,
There is much that is inevitably eye-glazing about that sort of thing.
And yet, up to that point, the Prof. has been enjoying difficulty.
So, it was long overdue that I investigated the latest pronouncements from one of our more self-promoting avant poets. A bad one, I'll admit, whose name and magazine I won't give the dignity of mentioning here.
He's still banging on about how difficult it is in his line of artistic endeavour. The point of him doing it still appears to be simply that he is different to his betes noirs in the mainstream - and it is Simon and Seamus that seem to annoy him the most. Rather than review work by those poets he admires, he'd rather continue to advertise his own outsider status. Well, you are not outside, matey boy, there is no outside any more. It's a wide church and we are all in it, it's just that you are too far up your own back catalogue.
It is apparently so difficult being him because he often encounters scorn and ridicule from mainstream poetry people who say things like, 'it's just chucking words on a page'. But he rarely takes the trouble to tell us how and why any of his fellow travellers have done worthwhile work. We are just left outside in dismal ignorance of the genius we are not clever enough to recognize. 
What I thought I might do is submit some poems to his magazine, just words chucked down on the page, under a very old nom de plume, and see if they got published but it's an unworthy trick and I can't see if his magazine is still going or not. But, never mind, let's do it here. It won't take long.

From A Sequence

13

forlorn spark-plug,
no gingerbread reticence
intoned against the itinerant
gnomes of the broccoli

syzygies, once vowelless
belatedly exhaust the clock

but madrigals erupt
separately where hydrangeas
; modigliani-
ich bin ein Mülleimer

sputnik grief encouragement
waving like ptarmigan mice

--

I take it all back. It looks like I'm quite good at this. I'm going to be post-avant from now on.