Writing and Failure (Part 4)

Thanks again for the ongoing comments in response to some of my thoughts. A few of you have suggested that, because no one can really know the standards by which a future reader might judge our achievements, the avant-garde makes “unanswerable” claims about the merits of its own experimentation. I propose, however, that the avant-garde still warrants an “answer” to its claims, insofar as they almost always test the degree to which critics of poetry can actually do their jobs. A modern critic who argues that we cannot test the merits of the avant-garde merely absolves themselves of any duty to confront the problems posed by such work; hence, the critic can evade any need to refashion his or her own standards of judgement—and by refusing to make any committed arguments on behalf of the new, the critic never has to risk being wrong about its value….

4.
Critics who dismiss avant-garde poetry often object to the temerity of these investigations because such experimentation can cast doubt upon any reliable standard of value for excellence, leaving the field open to a permissive, if not nihilistic, attitude, in which “anything goes.” Critics thus perceive such experimentation as galling, because it is “unseemly”—when in fact it is more likely to be “untimely.” Failure in the avant-garde almost always seems to coincide with the notion of being out of step with the pace of history, the poet arriving on the scene either too soon or too late to feel at ease in the modern milieu. The avant-garde almost always fails because of this untimeliness, either by being “before its time,” addressing an, as yet, unforeseen, future audience (doing so from a modern viewpoint in a tone of historic anticipation), or by being “beyond its time,” addressing an as yet, unawakened, modern audience (doing so from a future viewpoint in a tone of historic renunciation). The avant-garde adopts a stance, both unfashionable and noncomformist—“unmodern” in the sense that it does not abide by the contemporary determinants of success. The avant-garde prefers instead to experiment with paradigms that produce critiques and surprises rather than accolades and lullabies. Such poets see that the acceptable conditions for success in the modern milieu can no longer generate innovation, because such success, by its proven merits, always spawns imitatable repetition, which in turn reiterates what we already know in a tone of historic reassurance—and thus such success must be repudiated or overhauled, if the poet expects to make any further epistemological contributions to an understanding of poetry itself.