There's also the idea that there's only a certain amount of avant-garde to be had (in the national strategic avant-garde reserve?). Once that's used up, poof, everything else is mere repetition. People who believe this also subscribe to Bloom's theory that a few strong poets around 1800 sucked all the oxygen out of the air once and for all, leaving all subsequent poets to a state of fretting anxiety for the next 209 years. In truth, the Language Poets do not really resemble Stein very much, any more than Ashbery is simply Stevens who is Emerson who is Wordsworth. Bolaño is conscious that Kerouac came first, that's part of what he's examining in his novel.

Avant-garde poets aren't really allowed to have influences, after all, that means that what they are doing "isn't really new."

People still have hysterical reactions to flarf. I find the fever, end of Western civilization, pitch of those reactions extremely revelatory. I'd understand it from Jacques Barzun, maybe, but most people attacking it suffer from the narcissism of small differences. They have some other, also satirical and also quasi-avant-garde schtick they want to promote. They hate flarf because they are close to it, not because they are far from it.

One persistent critique of avant-garde movements is that they are merely repetitions of previous avant-garde movements. It's the question of "didn't Gertrude Stein already do that?" To call a new movement "old hat" in this way is to deny it its vitality.

Yet this critique tends to be profoundly disingenuous, since it seems to imply that there is something better to do than repeat the avant-garde gesture. What would that be, exactly? Usually, it means falling back on some previous institutionalization of another historical avant-garde. For example, when Stanford's English department wanted to hire Marjorie Perloff, Denise Levertov had a cow, leaving a letter in all the mailboxes of the department denouncing Perloff (she had read the paper on postmodern poetry and the return of story, from The Dance of the Intellect, I believe) because Perloff had taken the language poets seriously, I think. I remember it well because I was at Stanford at the time. So for DL, the WCW-derived avant-garde was legitimate, but not the "Gertrude Steinlets" of LP. Another example is the conflict between Octavio Paz and the poets of the Belaño group of infrarrealismo, dramatized in The Savage Detectives. Paz had been a surrealist but basically fell back onto an institutionalized high modernism, with himself as high priest and gate keeper. How dare these young poets emulate the American beat generation! After all, Ginsberg and Kerouac had already done that. (I'm relying here a bit on some papers by Heriberto which he has shared with me, and which I am reading as I read Belaño's novel.) Belaño also makes the connection between the "realismo visceral" of his own group and an earlier Mexican avant-garde movement, estridentismo. It's not like he wasn't aware that there had already been an avant-garde. The problem is that there is not position outside the avant-garde. Il n'y a pas de hors avant-garde. Well, there is, but it tends to be the attitude that we can pretend it never happened and get back to what poetry was supposed to be like before.

My "Harold Land" pandora station gives me a lot of great tenors like Gene Ammons, Sonny Stitt, and Stanley Turrentine. I tend to exhaust the possibilities of any one station after a while: the albums repeat and the more mediocre tracks grate on my nerves.

I like the supposedly second line players of the Harold Land type. They aren't really second rate, despite not being Coltrane or Rollins. I used to be much more in the "genius" mode, where I only wanted to hear a few canonical figures. Now I listen much more in a bottom up mode, focusing on the drums and bass and the overall groove and appreciating the soloist for what they are.

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Cannonball Adderly. Somethin' Else.

This has Miles on trumpet, with a classic rhythm section of Hank Jones, Sam Jones, and Art Blakey. (Sam is no relation to Hank, though of course Hank is the brother of Elvin and Thad.) It was recorded by Rudy Van Gelder. Tracks include Autumn Leaves, Love for Sale, and Somethin' Else.

The 50s was the golden age of the saxophone, with Cannonball, Coltrane, Rollins, Getz, Pepper, Mulligan, Land, Desmond, Stitt, Konitz, Carter, Hodges, Hawkins, all active. That's extraordinary depth, when the sixth or seventh greatest saxophonist alive was someone like Cannonball Adderly!

1. I was visiting New York. I went into a large room at the MOMA where there was going to be a poetry reading. I was greeted very warmly by Drew Gardner and Nick Piombino, and it seemed that others were waiting in the wings to greet me as well, probably Gary Sullivan and Jordan Davis and David Shapiro (though Nick in my dream did not look like the real life Nick at all; he had a beard for one thing). I was kind of overwhelmed by all the attention and went into a back room that was identical to the room I had just been in. I felt dizzy and explained to some of my New York friends who had followed me to the second room that I wasn't used to seeing people and couldn't handle talking to so many people at once.

2. I was living in an apartment of some kind with two women, though I wasn't sexually or romantically involved with either of them. They were more like cousins of mine, somehow. I had to move out and wanted to explain myself, so I talked to my younger cousin for a while, then called into one room, "Vanessa!" But Vanessa, presumably my older cousin, did not answer. So I wanted to write a note on a steno pad. I was looking for a clean sheet, but most of the pages in the pad were already covered with writing. When I did find one that wasn't, I noticed a grease stain on it, and so on... Everytime I thought I had found a suitable piece of paper, I found writing or grease on it...

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María del Carmen Pallarés. Luces de travesía. 1989. 57 pp.


This poet never quite lets herself loose. I felt the need for a little more of something. I've known about her for a while, but never was totally convinced. Maybe I'll go back and read La llave del grafito.

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Odes of Roba 1991. 158 pp.

This one took me an awful long time to get through. I skimmed over a couple of longer poems toward the end too--that after reading about 50% aloud to myself over the past weeks. Overall it's just not on the level of Own Face or Crystal Text. The problem, once again, is a kind of garrulousness. I feel like I'm Coolidge's biggest fan, so if I feel this way, I'm sure I can't be the only one. Now it's back to reading Flow Chart, which I've also been doing for more than a few days.

It does help when reading CC to have his specific voice in my head. I'll listen to a bit at PennSound before reading and try to hear the poems with that particular emphasis and intonation.

I heard Emanuel Ax play with the St. Louis symphony on Saturday. He had a very nice musical rapport with tympanist Richard Holmes on the Strauss Burleske in D Minor (Holmes is one of my favorite musicians in the SLSO--I love his tact and his economy of movement) and played as an encore a movement from a Schubert sonata. I was thinking there were two ways of thinking about his playing. You could view the music as a privileged glimpse into another world, one that completely transcends our own. Or: this music is, precisely, the music of our own world, and of no other. The second formulation is no less magical then the first.

Another symphony musician told me the next day that Ax is a very nice person as well.

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*The Crystal Text. 1986. 1996. 152 pp.

What can I say about this? Although I tend to prefer concise writers over verbose one, Coolidge is an exception. No, not really, since what I tend to prefer about him are his concise bits rather than his "plethoric mode." This is some of the best writing existent in English, especially in some of the briefer fragments toward the end.

I don't like reacting to the death of writers. If I don't particularly care for the writer, or am not an expert, then I don't have much to say or much that I particularly want to say. If I do admire the writer, then I don't like mixing the emotion of the death in with my feelings about the work. I see those two things as different categories. So I didn't comment on the passing of Montejo last summer, for example.

With John Updike, I am in the position of having read many of his works before I turned 20--and very few if any afterwards. I basically read every Updike book as it came out in the 1970s, and also every paperback my parents had lying around. I liked The Centaur a lot, and some of the short stories. I also tended to read every story in every issue of the New Yorker. At a certain point--whether in my own reading of him or in his actual writing as he aged--his prose started to grate on my nerves and I lost my capacity to read his new work. So it's safe to say I've never read Rabbit Kicks the Bucket, or Memoirs of the Grant Administration, or Argentine Languors.

The fallacy of the Updike style is in not thinking that if a little bit of "fine writing" is a good thing," a whole lot more of it is even better. The "better" his writing got, the worse it actually was. He didn't know when to stop. As subtle as his style was, it was a "crude" instrument in the sense that it no longer had any relation of aptness to a subject, of being fit for a particular purpose. This created an odd kind of tone deafness, as in his ornate description of the towers coming down.

It's also true that Updike is part of the formation of my mental image of the writer. For me, a real writer appeared in the New York Review of Books and the New Yorker and wrote about sophisticated adult themes. Updike was my chief source of pornography until I discovered Henry Miller.

The best Pandora radio station I have invented so far is "Lee Konitz." After Konitz himself, it gave me Coltrane, Rollins, and Charlie Haden, before going back to the inimitable Konitz again. This is even better than what "Sonny Rollins" gave me.

And why does it think that if I like Sarah Vaughan I will like Blossom Dearie? That's an illegitimate inference.

And if you put in "Morton Feldman," it will not actually give you any music by Morton Feldman. Everyone but him.

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*David Huerta. El azul en la flama. 2002. 94 pp.


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*David Huerta. El espejo del cuerpo. 1980. 75 pp.

This is a series of untitled poems about the dance (the mirror of the body) by Mexican poet Huerta. I also read a 2002 collection by Huerta. One of of looking at poetry is as mere writing. From this perspective, Huerta is one of the best, within this Octavio Paz tradition of Mexican poetry that also includes Coral Bracho.

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Miguel Casado. La condiciíon del pasajero. 1990. 26 pp.

This is a very short book of very quiet, descriptive poems.

My world famous writing experiments, back by popular demand.

I didn't even have a copy of them but thankfully someone else had them up on the WWW:

1. Make a list of writing experiments.
2. Write a poem in which you include some reference, explicit or implicit, to everyone you know who has committed suicide.
3. Write poems designed for a particular magazine (a la Jack Spicer), even if this magazine doesn’t publish poetry. Send the poems to the magazine as you write them until they either publish you or tell you to stop.
4. If you are an academic, give an academic paper composed entirely of heroic couplets. Don’t tell anyone what you are doing.
5. “Ghost-write” poems for politicians or celebrities.
6. Write non-stop for 6 months, in every waking hour not devoted to any other necessary activity.
7. Compose a poem employing as many metaphors or examples as possible derived from Wittegenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.
8. Read only poetry written before 1800 for a year. See if your writing has changed. If it has changed for the better, do the same with 1700.
9. Take a book of poetry by someone else and compose poetic responses to every single poem. Try this with a poet you hate and then with a poet you love. Try writing your poems directly in the book, if you can stand to deface it.
10. Invent “heteronimos” a la Pessoa.
11. Compose a “Japanese Poetic Diary”
12. Write an autobiography, but including only events having to do with particular “subjects” (cooking, jazz, landlords, shoes).
13. Write the eleventh “Duino Elegy.”
14. Write a book of poetry in which the letter B never appears. See if anyone notices.
15. Parody your own style.
16. Stage elaborate contests (sestina contests, memorizing contests, rhyming contests).
17. Invent multiple ways of “gambling” on poetry (e.g. on the contests devised above).
18. Create a “neo-classical” style that is as regular and normative as Racine. The vocabulary should be fairly limited, the syntax limpid, the versification utterly smooth. Use this style as your normal mode of communication as much as you can get away with.
19. Try to get non-poets to collaborate with you on grandiose poetic projects. Test your persuasive powers.
20. Convince famous painters to illustrate your work or paint your portrait, or composers to set your poems to music.
21. Practice thinking in complete sentences. Do not write these down.
22. Be a Platonic “name-giver” of the type described in the Cratylus. Work at giving things their exact or “proper” names. Then practice with “misnomers.”
23. See if Wittgenstein was right: try to invent a “private language” for your sensations.
24. Adopt a variety of social “identities” in your writing (race, ethnicity, class, sexual identity). However, avoid any explicit “identifying” reference in the poem itself (e.g. don’t use the word “barrio” in your chicano poems).
25. Invent a private slang (a la Lester Young); attempt to get as many people as you can to use the words you coin. Don’t use these words in your writing; rather, conceive of the invention of this language as an independent poetic activity.
26. Write “vocalese lyrics” to a recorded jazz solo.
27. Practice speaking in blank verse as “naturally” as possible.
28. Create your own avant-garde movement; make sure you officially dissolve the movement after 6 months or a year.
29. Invent an imaginary city, complete with geography, history, architecture, prominent citizens, etc… Keep a sort of “bible” of all the information you compile. Then write poems set in this city.
30. Write nothing but sestinas and pantoums for a month. Then “cannabilize” them, using the best lines to write other poems.