Quietude

For soem reason I can't post on Ron's site. So here's my response to his recent discussion of Graham Foust:


Apollinaire coined the term Surrealist before Surrealism existed as a movement. The Surrealism of Breton &tc did get the term from Apollinaire. Goll also to use the term in a more general way, but the Breton crowd beat him to it so to speak. Apollinaire was *never* part of the Surrealist group (he was dead by then).

The important part in Seth's comment is not surrealist or not surrealist, but rather than the influence comes from the European and Latin American avant-gardes. I think it's important to emphasize the role translation (and specifically of foreign avant-garde writings) played in the change that took place in American poetry in the 50s and 60s. I think it's fair to say that Bly and Merwin got more from European and Latin American writers than they got from the New Americans (and from the act of translating, perhaps most important of all - the act of translating ruins all illusions of "the wellwrought urn" - see my essay in the recent issue of the online journal Nypoesi).

This influence seems to have been important for the New Americans as well - I have a hard time imagining Ashbery, Koch, O'Hara without the euro avant-garde, specifically Motherwell's antology "Dada Poets and Painters" (which caused both Ashbery and Berrigan to start cutting up texts).

As for quietude: it's important to consider it not as a purely aesthetic phenomena (though the aesthetics play an important part), but as a sociological phenomena. Jed Rasula's book "The American Wax Museum" is the best attempt I know of trying to understand this.

A brief note: I just saw that Omnidawn published Bin Ramke's new book. They have also published Lynn Hejinian and Rosemarie Waldrop, as well as perhaps the most quietist poet of all - Donald Revell. Ron has been published by Salt, which also publishes a number of poets you'd be hard-pressed to say have anything to do with any kind of avant-garde.

This seems the best example of Ron's term "third way" as a mere melding of traditions. But this term doesn't take into account influences that come from outside of the cold-war dichotomy of new american vs quietude. While Omnidawn may be "third way", I have a hard time thinking of Ariana Reines or Lara Glenum as "third way," or as having much to do with either camps.

However, I want to end this long no doubt unreadable email by saying that I think quietude is an important concept to keep in mind. It just needs to be expanded.