International Avante Garde Lexicon

International Avante Garde Lexicon [site 1]

Dear Team:

Here is the international avante garde lexicon I promised....notice how the global avante garde is unconsciously heralding the advent of the noosphere as regional minds attract, repulse, and fuse into something bigger than themselves. A true Teilhardian miracle....

1900-1950.

Holderin:

Poem as fragment becomes a field of energies. Also a map of thinking and searching. Language swinging among levels. Ancient linguistic roots are tapped. It's from the language of the gods. Many works of the ancients have become fragments. many works of the moderns are fragments the moment they come into being.

Blake:

The poet as prophet, shamanic seer and technician of the sacred. A poetry of oppositions. Energy and reason fusing. Lines that swing wide and open, leaving the bondage of rhyming.

Elias Lonnrot:

Gathering, re-writing, linking, and expansion of individual oral poems into a Homeric-sized collage. Its shamanistic pertformance poetry. Poet and priest become one again. The ancient state returns to the future.

Whitman:

Throws out restrictions of the old line. A vernacular and natural measure. Back to old shamanic functions. Poetry as an ecological survival technique. The shaman poet whose mind reaches easily out into all manners of shapes and other lines and gives song to dreams.

Baudelaire:

Inventor of the prose poem where all values and feelings are put into question.

Dickinson:

Radical approach: exploring the implications of breaking the law just short of breaking communication with the reader. Starting from scratch, habits of standard human intercourse are exploded. The chronological linearity of poetry is cut. No outside editor/robber. Conventional puncuation was abolished to subtract arbitrary authority. Dashes drew liberty of interruption inside the structure of each poem. Words were put in danger, dissolving, only mutability being certain. Sense being found in the chance meeting of words, forcing, abbreviating, pushing, padding, subtracting, riddling, interrogating, re-writing, pulling text to text. Written during the American Civil War, Dickenson's poetry deliniates and declines the Western push to power and in a search for the holy Dickenson's work remains outside the protection of a specific solution.

Klebnikov:

Poetry as incantation and spell. To break through limits of conventional syntax and meaning: a transrational language and poetry which the intellect can make no sense of. The magic in a word remains magic even if it is not understood and loses none of its power and this magic can reflect the enormous power of the human race's collective mind. Wordless northern Russian incantations appropriated.

Hopkins:

Clash of opposites. Christianity and paganism re-aligning. Looking for a new inner vision with the current language being heightened to something beyond itself. Startling effects of word and sound: heightened alliterations, consonances, dissonances, words drawn from dialect or newly coined, new moves with new names: chiming, vowelling, oftening, over and othering, aftering, and so on....a systematic push to a new measure that was the most natural of all rythms. Bringing and binding to language the defining and deepest resonance of a thing or person. Simple intention leading to an accoustically complex surface and to a radical, beautiful and syncopated poetry: Victorian jazz....

Comte de Lautramont:

Powerful images and strange juxtapositions. The language and structure of the unconscious fully exploited and with a systematic violent energy.

Rimbaud:

A poet shaman who burned-out. A rational disordering of all the senses. Seeing visions through a warthful form of meditation even if totally losing them in the end. Ritual death and then channeling of unseen spirits in the urban/industrial wasteland.

Mallarme:

Animation through extreme temporal discontinuity. Given over to changes in time and to accelerations and deaccelerations, to fragmentary stoppages. Language as a spiritual instrument, the orphic explanation of the earth which is going through different permutations until total meaning is in possession of reader/listener. Difference between outside world and inside of book abolished. At the boundary between book and voice, seizing poem visually all at once in an imaginerary space. A new mobility in which another sense of time seems to be announcing itself.

Stopping for a moment:

Ancient poetics and avante garde thrusts fuse into a new " spiritual art. " Poetry involved a changing state of mind, but also new means with which to bring it home. Increasingly discovered in non-western poetics as their resemblances confirmed in the newly arising works of the avante garde.

Futurism:

Art in less developed countries experiencing rapid industrialization. A faith in dynamism and national expansion associated with early capitalism: Russia and Italy. A radical mix of art and life. First great art movement of the 20th century led by poets having words set free. Poetry as an interrupted sequence of new images: a strict net of images or analogies to be cast into the mysterious sea of phenomena.

This freedom of the word which resembled collage and image juxtaposition and which used innovative and expressive typography. Performance poetry scurried off the page in all directions at once. Theory and practise of sound and sight inextricably tied together.

Speed and improvisation as spirit of the present thus moving towards an automatic writing which would emerge in Dada, Surrealist, and Beat poetry later on. Destruction of syntax and glorification of technology would lead to fusion of art with computers, videos, and synthesizers. The freedom of speed....some futurists went to extremes and supported macho militarism which went beyond the leveling of other avante garde movements into a dangerous self-destruction.

Fast flow and multi-directional collage. A kind of automatic writing that fused different arts as it toppled their boundaries....

Expressionism:

Art movement in the German areas. A visionary world defined against bourgeoise values. Involving both a new definition of the spiritual and a new stance towards the urban world. An abstract non-material art where boundaries between arts melt and a new creative freedom is generated.

Compressed word units within an alogical and anti-narrative structure. Sentences were reduced to verbs, nouns, and adjectives. Articles and conjunctions eliminated, prefixes, surfixes, and inflextional endings too. Verbs kept in an infinitive to create an active excited effect....

Reflection of an ongoing " disintegration of reality. " Abstract concepts and hallucination. A distance increasing between instinct and periphery, perception, and concept. Color, and number creating a tension and spark towards annihilation.

Dissolution of artistic boundaries, compressed words without narrative, the amplification of dissonance that expands the psychic space while looking for the spiritual in an urban landscape.

Dada:

An art of spiritual indifference, revolt against solutions and prescriptions for art. Pull-back from solutions based on single means. Being over technique. Collage, performance, new typographies, chance operations and devouring humor. Movement born in Switzerland during wartime. Total assult on powers controlling the cultures of Europe. It spread to Germany and France. A poetic revolt that burned out and became co-opted.

Surrealism:

Challenge and over-turn logic in order to make the poem a debacle of the intellect. Politics led to occultism. Back to collage and poetics of change. A big movement in France. Chance encounter of two distant realities on an unfamiliar plane. The effects of a cultivated and systematic dispacement. Collage as automatic writing closely linked to dreamwork, shamanism, and insanity. Plunging deeper into the mandala. A monologue spoken as rapidly as possible without any intervention on the part of the critical faculties.

A new super-reality drawn from the juxtaposition of dislocated fragments....the poem as an imponderable that can be found in any genre. Collage and systematic displacement jumping deeper into the subconscious, into deeper layers of mind. Rapid trance monologue, expanded vision from displacement and juxtaposition of psychic fragments....

Objectivism:

Movement that was link between European and American avante garde poets. Metaphor replaced by immediate experience and an evolving sense of history. Simultaneous preservation of diverse elements....collage leading to an immediate experience and psychic FLASH....

Negritude:

Poetics of the present with African art and oral poetry. Mix of mineral, plant, and animal life along with African/European themes. Cosmos and mythological transformational activity. A movement that started in the Carribbean before WW2. Shaman word play from Africa mixed with white language.

Book of Origins:

An immersion in the here and now and a scanning of the remote in time and space, to look for new readings and meanings for possibilities that challenge and bring accepted truths by their comparisons. Old worlds brought into the present and viewed as if new. So they can help show us where we are. Poems that leap over continents and cultures, times and places in the human cycle. A re-thinking and re-invigortion of traditional lines of western poetic thought and practise; and yet from the perspective of any final ethnopoetic accounting they remain a meager fraction of the human whole. Immediate experience through collage of old and new from different spacetimes towards a vision that is global and multi-cultural friendly....

Stopping for a moment:

Fast and radical collage that penetrates the mind and expands it symultaneously. Both inwardly and outwardly. Art as puja and teaching. As psychic travel and transformation on all levels at the same time.

Ruben Dario:

First great Spanish-American modernist. The world/universe as a system of correspondences under the rule of rythm. Everything connects and ryhmes. All forms in nature speak to one another. Poet as transmitter of rythm. Not maker. Analogy is the highest expression of imagination. Dario the Latin Walt Whitman. Whitman broke European conventions. Dario then broke Yankee ones.

Alfred Jarry:

Enacter of new and old mysteries....

Rainer Maria Rilke:

Transformation poet that liberated images imprisoned in the heart. A work that exists at the extremes. Squeezing vision out of things. Struggling with and within language. A language of word kernals. Language grabbed in the speech seed. The inner world of an object exhibited. Ecological and shamanistic relations to existences both earthly and beyond.

Andrei Bely:

Creator of modern Russian literature. Non-linear novels. A meeting point of genres: poetry, prose, philosophy, and music.

Guillaume Apollinare:

Big experimental range, an encyclopedic liberty, open verse and verbal/visual calligrams, typography based on " free words ." Collage and synchronicity, conversation poems and letter poems, erotic fantasies, pornographies, new plays and fictions, art criticism. Total freedom of invention. Collage, montage, poetry WITHOUT connectives, cubist poetry. Everyday life pushed into new configurations and perceptions. Non-narrative fragments held together by juxtaposition and a higher logic.

Picasso:

Collage that inserted " real " items into the increasingly abstract surface of cubist workings. A play and clash of materials and textures, but a series of texts that could be meaningfully read.

Kafka:

Uncertainty and doubting of world and self. Digging into areas of mythos and ethnos, experience and lore with a rigor that both reflected and transformed the world. Compact, cool, and intense prose. Parables and fairy tales for dialecticians.

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