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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