It's interesting that Ron Silliman, in his blog yesterday (December 3) says that for the avant-garde poet, there is no hiding allowed, that it is immediately obvious if someone is faking it or hasn't done the ground work. I agree with this completely. What struck me, though, was that this idea is contrary to the popular notion that avant-garde art is quite easy to fake, requires less work and skill. We've all heard these clichés: the abstract painter doesn't know how to draw, anyone could write poetry that doesn't make sense, etc... It's the New Yorker cartoon of a middle-aged couple in an art gallery, the wife says to the husband...

Years ago I used to read aloud poems at random from the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry to an intelligent reader not familiar in detail with contemporary poetry. She would say: it's in a conservative tradition, but the poet has talent. Or, it's in the experimental tradition, but without a lot of talent. Of course, she could also identify experimental poets with talent and conservative poets without it! She was inevitably correct. Guillermo Carnero (Spanish poet) has four categories of judgment also. "Me gusta y me interesa. No me gusta y no me interesa. Me gusta pero no me interesa. Me interesa pero no me gusta."

F O'H has a line somewhere in his Art Chronicles: sometimes the Philistines are right. Even when they are right, though, they get it wrong.

O'Hara's art criticism is actually quite perceptive. He has a way of writing meandering sentences that are somewhat hard to follow, ending in somewhat zany comparisons. But the wit and intelligence are incredible.


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I've always associated Larry Rivers visual style with Kenneth Koch's poetry, because of all those great Rivers book covers, beginning with "When the Sun Tries to go On."