* Throughout December, I am reposting some of the more ‘popular’ poems and articles that have appeared on my blog over the past year. This article and short poem provides a more personal take on the role of the avant-garde in contemporary English poetry.*

One of the most interesting features of this process of posting poems online is to be able to observe which receive a lot of welcome attention from fellow poets and fellow bloggers and which do not. Blogging, like poetry, is a necessarily Narcissistic activity. I have been pleasantly surprised that poems I imagined to be slight or somewhat offensive have garnered so much positive feedback and online support.

My poems have many not necessarily mutually compatible facets and I like to work in a variety of styles. One of these is an avant-garde Dada-inspired manner that challenges conventional notions such as self-expression, internal consistency, and authorial control. It is interesting that these have generally received the least positive response or simply gone unnoticed by my peers, although my most liked and commented on online poem so far is (much to my surprise) “Stuff stuffed in a Drawer,” https://oudeis2005.wordpress.com/2015/03/04/writing-201-poetry-task-8-drawer/ which combines Dadaist dogma with apparent personal revelations.

I started experimenting with such poetry in the late 1980s, inspired by Tristan Tzara’s ‘How to Write a Dadaist Poem’ http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88v/tzara.html and the largely defunct but much mourned do-it-yourself punk ethos in popular music. I aimed to extract material from a wide variety of sources—children’s school projects (Drawing Maps), jurisprudential records (Knee Damages), and even a Jane Austen novel (Emmagrams). These early experimental poems were deliberately lost, by leaving the original on a photocopying machine and frivolously gifting all remaining copies in my possession to fleeting lovers and seeming friends. At the time, I, somewhat pretentiously, felt this to be an interestingly self-deconstructive act.

I was interested, back then, in remaining broadly faithful to Tzara’s arbitrary method, but also adding a degree of form, derived from Hebrew acrostic poetry and the unintended poetry of the alphabetical arrangement of items in a catalogue—I was working as a librarian and compiling indexes for a publishing company at that time. I was also interested in assuming some degree of authorial control. I selected the fragments of text, not entirely randomly, but as I pleased, like someone picking blackberries from a hedge, and I deviated at times, although not often, for aesthetic reasons, from the self-imposed formal rule of arranging these snippets in strictly alphabetical order.

In the late 1980s, this was a painstaking process—a thankless labor of love. No software eased the path. I teased the text out from physical books, organized it into alphabetical order in notebooks, and typed the final version up haltingly on an old Remington typewriter I had inherited from my wannabe novelist mother, through ink-drenched ribbons that were forever wearing out and becoming increasingly difficult to acquire. I was especially interested in the fact that such creations depended more on manual labor than inspiration and was spurred by the thought of the digital drilling my mother must have been forced through, in the 1950s, as one young woman among many in a typing pool.

I stopped producing this kind of writing for various reasons, some personal, some practical, some historical. My acrostic Dadaist poems were routinely dismissed in the poetry workshops I attended, while even slightly more confessional work received great praise. I eventually gave up on it altogether and retreated into a more confessional conventional mode.

The kind of avant-garde poetry that I had been trying to create in the late 1980s had, besides, become much easier to produce, almost throwaway, with the advent of the word processer, macros, hypertext and the Internet; word clouds, corpora and chic data presentation software. My modest Dadaist project was at once cowed by this and spurred by a realization that this aestheticization of text and fetishization of technology was not the direction in which I wanted to go.

Google has perhaps come to my rescue in this regard.

Google attempts to anticipate your search by filling in the first letters or words you type, helpfully or not, with those that have been keyed in most prevalently by people around the world. I find this both creepy and inspiring. It combines, at a keystroke, seemingly magical high-tech with a punk-like shift to the vernacular and re-evaluation of poor taste.

Taking Google’s ‘cold reading’, akin to that of a cheap psychic, and combining it with personal choices, a formal framework, and aesthetic judgment, I am now trying to use this resource to produce avant-garde poems similar to some extent to those I labored to create in an age before we were all jumbled up online. I have already posted one such poem on this blog https://oudeis2005.wordpress.com/2015/03/15/burning-questions/

The following poem takes up Andy Townend’s ‘couldn’t’ prompt for this week’s Poetry Rehab https://wordpress.com/read/post/feed/31982590/775617764 to produce a pseudo-random take on the theme. The tag ‘couldn’t’ preceded by a variety of pronouns was searched on Google and the most commonly occurring phrases recorded by autocomplete, with a certain leeway for the poet, noted and arranged in alphabetical order, according (first) to the pronoun and then the verb following the modal ‘couldn’t’. See also my ongoing research on the history of English modal verbs https://oudeis2005.wordpress.com/2015/03/22/modal-verbs-over-time/

This at once laborious and flippant process I like to think produces interesting aesthetic effects. But that is for others to tell.

Couldn’t

He couldn’t get it up

I couldn’t agree more

I couldn’t ask for more

I couldn’t become a hero

I couldn’t care less.

*

It couldn’t be better

It couldn’t be done

It couldn’t happen here

It couldn’t just happen.

*

She couldn’t change me

She couldn’t say no

The one who couldn’t love

*

They couldn’t organize a piss-up in a brewery

We couldn’t create a new partition

You couldn’t see me.