Saturday, December 5, 2009

In case you were wondering

I was struck, watching the "cage match" debate between Christian Bok and Carmine Starnino, that Bok's delivery was incredibly smooth and articulate. I chalked it up to him having much more public speaking experience, being a prof and an internationally celebrated academic/poet who's been called on to speak many times. Rob Taylor has pointed out that he was actually just spitting out boilerplate.

5 comments:

Rob Taylor said...

Well, my primary point was that it was pretty entertaining, and my secondary point was that it was boilerplate...

I'm a proud defendant of entertaining boilerplate, or entertaining just-about-anything, for that matter.

Conrad DiDiodato said...

Yes,

Bök's very glib, just too self-assured for my liking, and that comes from a notoriety and acclaim too easily won.

Real avant-gardists have always repulsed the bourgeois mainstream world, never really tasting victory til years after their death. And the true test of avant-garde lies in its 'social & ideological critique structure.Bök's ridden on the coattails of experimentalists before him (Cage, Schwitter, the Oulipo poets in France), and has even adopted a fairly technical (geneticist) language to create a new type of poem that isn't a poem at all. Reducing a potential readership to "1".

Bök works to draw attention mainly to himself, making the most outrageous claims for "experimentalism" that are susupiciously similar to what's been said and done before. And when Governor-General awards aren't forthcoming he cries like a baby. I can't imagine Duchamp, Tzara,Apollinaire and even Breton carrying on like this. Were they comfortable academic poets who won instant notoriety and acclaim in their own day and age? Did any of them win a $50 000 prize for scoping out a dictionary five times for every single univowel word in the English language?

The true avant-gard works from the periphery, throwing barbs at the comfortable mainstream world of art and writing that really hurt and offend!Always reviled, shunned by publishers and most readers, leaving it to a few enlightened disciples to carry their work after them. Bök is kitschy and cute, already: commoditized already in a world where everything's judged by 'sale' value.

Zachariah Wells said...

Yes, Rob, it's a good sound-byte, but like Conrad says, it's too glib. And disingenuous. As a poet friend of mine who happens to be an MD recently pointed out, many, if not most, poets are intelligent and skilled people. I, for instance, know how to evacuate a train in an emergency, can process dangerous goods shipments and load a 727 in such a way that it won't crash on takeoff. I kid; as you pointed out, I'm only in this game 'cause I can't sing. But I can think of a half dozen scientist poets off the top of my head. Lawyers. Archaeologists. Classicists. Mathematicians. Sure lots of "poets" don't know much about anything; they're also mostly not very good writers. Saying that poets are dumb and lazy is a dumb and lazy thing to say.

Rob Taylor said...

Ok, agreed. But I still think it's entertaining, as you did (I assume) when you made the same comment about yourself!

Zachariah Wells said...

Yes, I definitely got a chuckle out of it and the resemblance to my own tongue-in-cheek comment wasn't lost on me. But I get the feeling that Christian's only half-joking and that he doesn't include himself in the indictment. Which may be a misread on my part, I acknowledge, but one really gets the sense that he definitely thinks what he's done and is doing is head and shoulders above just about everything else, for all his pat endorsements of avant-gardism writ large.