Tim Yu responds to some of my recent postings.

My position on 20th-century avant-gardism and its inheritance is that it displaces, programmatically, any lineage but its own. That Ron Silliman et al. debate their own genealogy within that movement is not evidence to disprove my argument : that the project of revolutionary novelty displaces the poetic process itself. Tim writes:

"I'm most bothered by the statement that avant-gardism is simply "a displacement of the most basic aspects of poetic making with technical novelty." Nobody believes in mere "technical novelty"; to say that of a poem is simply another way of saying that it's silly, pointless, or boring. In fact, it seems like it's been the task of the avant-garde over the past century to pursue novelty with a purpose--precisely with the goal that Gould describes: a better "verbal response to reality." It just depends what reality you think you're responding to.

The labels "innovative" and "experimental" are occasionally annoying for this reason--that they suggest just fooling around with techniques with no purpose or direction, innovation for innovation's sake. "

It seems to me that Tim somewhat undercuts his own position in this last sentence. Where do these labels come from, if not from the programmatic commitment to "pursuit of novelty for a purpose"?

As I think my original posts made clear, I'm certainly not opposed to reform, re-assessment, renovation of existing decadences of style and rhetoric. My point is that "avant-garde allegiance" is fundamentally a form of intellectual conceit and self-delusion; it short-circuits the poetic process by means of historical narratives of literary progress, by partisan commitments to collective "movements" which take the place of individual perception and composition.

My object in these criticisms is not criticism for its own sake. I want to focus on those aspects of the poetic process which are perennial, not subject to polemics and tendentious literary politics. I think that's the best way to clear the air, to discover our real affinities and opportunities.