"What [Ted] Berrigan's Sonnets granted in some sense was permission -- to cut up and collage diary entries into poems, to cannibalize friends' letters, to collaborate with other writers and artists, to leap remorselessly from image to dialog to signs in the world, to let B-movie icons commingle with literary luminaries, to transpose lines from one poem to another, to use disjunction and disruption as (un)conscious strategies, in short to stuff the stuff of life into the suitcase of art. This influence is felt deeply (though very differently) in the work of [Anne] Waldman and [Anselm] Hollo."
~ Ravi Shankar, "Anne Waldman, Anselm Hollo, and the Authentic Avant-Garde" (in The Quarterly Conversation, Summer 2008)
[via wood s lot]
skip to main |
skip to sidebar
2 comments:
I think this practice should be celebrated, we need to move away from our suspicions about it.
Fortunately (for me, anyway) I'm far enough removed from any real community of poets & critics that I don't often encounter people with these suspicions. And the internet allows each of us to create a virtual cafe society of like-minded others.
Like most blessings, it has a curse on the flip side (all of us huddled in our safe, back-patting enclaves) -- but I'm grateful to escape the confines of my own geographical location. Between the neo-Beat barking about bodily functions and the sing-songy poems about "Mother" or "Jesus" I'd probably give up poetry altogether. :-D
Post a Comment