The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #219: Zak Ferguson
“[I]t is an itch that needs to be scratched. To test. To push. To prove to myself.”
...more
Posts Tagged: avant garde
David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: 21 Poems That Shaped America (Pt. 10): “The Gods”
Poetic contemplation typically is a means to container experience, like a still life.
...moreThis Week in Posivibes: Diamanda Galás
The otherworldly singer performed this weekend for the first time in NYC since she departed the city in 2008, and we can only hope that it is the first of many. Her performance was entitled “Death Will Come and Will Have Your Eyes” for the poem by Cesare Pavese, and took place at Harlem’s St. Thomas […]
...moreWhat We Talk About When We Talk About The Avant-Garde
What are we trying to signal to potential readers when we call a work or its author “avant-garde?” The term is lately used to foreground a studied and even exclusionary difficulty in the writing, but what about its potential as a vector for the strange and the playful, a pushback against the normal and a […]
...moreCanonized Outrage
Can one speak about suffering if one hasn’t experienced it? Kenneth Goldsmith has long been a figure of tension in the literary community: at once a savior for the conceptual intellectualists and avant-garde, and a malicious clown bent on provocation and appropriation. In a profile for the New Yorker, Alec Wilkinson dives into Goldsmith’s humble […]
...moreFolk Poets and Scrambled Eggs
I think that’s avant-garde—the meeting of need and language. Over at Lit Hub, contemporary poetic hero Ben Lerner sits down with contemporary poetic heroine Eileen Myles to talk about vernacular, supercilious labels, the trials and tribulations of a young poet after fame, and a mutual confusion over what a “folk poet” is.
...moreFacebook and the Avant-garde
…our Franzen problems, these days, are pretty minor. We don’t have to worry that Chip Lambert’s hand-wringing is going to reinforce the old, realist modes of romantic reaction. But we do have to worry about what happens to attempts to resist those modes. Power has not merely untoothed the language of the avant-garde, it has […]
...morePoets of Color and the Avant-Garde
In a provocative piece for the latest issue of Lana Turner, Cathy Park Hong takes the self-appointed avant-garde movement to task for its all-too-traditional track record on race and identity politics. Park Hong writes: The avant-garde’s “delusion of whiteness” is the luxurious opinion that anyone can be “post-identity” and can casually slip in and out […]
...moreLast of the Radical Filmmakers
The Believer blog has a great interview with avant-garde filmmaker Nina Menkes. Menkes provides some insight into her creative process, as well as her take on being a feminist filmmaker: I am surely a feminist filmmaker, but not because I set out to become one, or am trying to make any kind of statement. Rather, […]
...moreBeauty and the Beastly Po-Biz, Part 2
You can read Part 1 here. Speaking of clothes, one standout opportunity for the heralded “blockage” or disruption of capital that seems to have been missed occurred at the site of capitalism’s convergence: the White House. Kenneth Goldsmith was invited to read poetry and accepted. Both Goldsmith and Place report the specifics online at length. […]
...more