The goods of the intellect are communal.
– Robert Duncan1
Robert Duncan often called himself a derivative poet, a fact usually glossed over as mere cleverness. But perhaps he affords the most lucid critique of originality among poets writing during the second half of the twentieth century. Implicit in such an idea is a notion of aesthetic production forged relationally among a community of others who copy and extend, mutate and redirect the material of a collective practice. One may object that in defining a practice we regulate its aesthetic principles and police its transformation. Certainly this can and does happen. Yet the alternative is rarely preferable. To suggest that one is simply an individual writer without allegiance to a tradition is to abjure the influences and ideological principles that frame all aesthetic activity; it is to ignore the community of those who enable one’s own creativity. At the very least, the author who self-identifies with a common noun acknowledges that her poetry is always situated within traditions and modes of writing, shared methodologies, and common ideas. From this point of view, the poet participates in and contributes to a practice of writing that is never entirely one’s own, insisting, as Duncan does, that the “goods of the intellect are communal.”
Yet one still frequently hears the complaint: to what extent can a poet’s writing change things? What political consequences arise from the alternative practices of community that these poets imagine? This is a valid question, but I suspect that it is made with certain fallacious assumptions in mind; in particular, one should remember that it virtually never occurs that a single individual implements radical change (nor would we likely want this to be the case). This claim is in no way a declaration of nihilistic entrapment, but simply an acknowledgment of how power, agency, and culture operate. If one agrees with theorists like Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, and Judith Butler that power is diffuse and multifaceted, then it makes sense that change always requires a collective will of singularities that act in common. One might reformulate rather than reject Shelley’s claim that the poet is “the unacknowledged legislator of the world” (“Defence” 508). Instead, one should ask how this legislation is collectively written and rewritten by the authors of a culture, how literature participates in this multiform conception of agency by constituting one element of a broader aesthetic network, which in turn is part of an even larger socio-economic one. The role of art, from this vantage point, is the permeation of an egalitarian ideal prescribed, incorporated, and dispersed into the body of all cultural activity.
In this sense, the succinct expression Eternal Network articulates an underlying theme of this book. The word “network” evokes the many participants who create art and their channels of distribution; networks remind us that the world is composed of difference and multiplicity. Any action, text, or principle bears the trace of a heterogeneous collective that labours in its creation. But what does one make of the other term, “eternal”? This word seems strangely out of place amid a consortium of mid-century avant-gardes for whom the demotic, the impermanent, and the ephemeral are said to constitute their central traits. Filliou and Brecht translate this word from the French, permanent, to render a lasting attention to the networks on which we rely for our existence, wishing to transmit this commitment “everywhere and everytime a mutation can be accomplished” (“La Fête est Permanente” 204). In calling community eternal, an axiomatic claim is never universally applicable to every situation, but it is universally transferable to any situation in which an ensemble of participants chooses it as their own. Political experience is singular and local, but the wealth of their intellectual and artistic production is infinitely renewable (“mutation-al”). We choose to establish an axiomatic claim: the right, say, for local autonomy, or that racism is violently oppressive, sexism is equally oppressive as racism, ideas belong to everyone, and so on. We need not believe a universal claim is discoverable in human nature or metaphysically anterior to human knowledge. We need only to declare it, commit to it, to become such a claim – just as so many individuals in Brathwaite’s Arrivants come to embody the principle of emancipation represented by revolutionary figures. Badiou calls this “the local construction of the True” (Communist 255). We could easily extrapolate from the case studies in this book a set of prescriptive axioms: (1) the BMC Axiom: like the elements (Olson calls them “participants”) in a poem, all subjects in a just society must count equally. (2) The CAM Axiom: all political action is local, but such actions are infinitely transferable to other localities. (3) The WLM Axiom: there are different identities, cultures, and so on, but the world we share must be singularly accessible and common. (4) The TRG Axiom: cultural production, like any other form of production, must aspire to the ideal of freely associated labour.
Given the sheer volume of studies addressing early twentieth-century avant-gardes, it is striking that so few critics attempt comparative studies of literary movements in the contemporary era. Recalling Raymond Williams’s poignant observation, “we find histories of particular groups, but little comparative or analytic history” (“Bloomsbury” 148). Indeed, what we find is suspicion, even embarrassment. If the phrase “avant-garde movement” resonates with the recalcitrant ideologies that earned high modernism the unenviable subtitle “Age of Isms,” then most studies of post-1945 literary movements highlight the heterogeneity such groups are said to celebrate. The poetic communities discussed in this book are variously structured through a combination of avant-garde formations, activist collectives, African communitarian models, laboratories, workshops, and communes. Yet such valorizations of diversity as such fail to explain the particular synthesis of social models, philosophical principles, and aesthetic practices that a group adopts. CAM’s synthesis of West African religion, creative uses of Caribbean dialect, and Marxist theory consists of a specific assemblage solidifying its challenge to race subordination and the colonial logic of market capitalism. The WLM’s synthesis of open form tactics and consciousness raising simultaneously appropriates and contests the New Left’s artistic and political projects. Like CAM, their most radical gesture is not only a defiant act of self-definition, but also an act denying male culture the exclusive right to define their own traditions. This is the central function of Rich’s “writing as re-vision.”
Poetic Community begins in the rural United States; it then moves to cosmopolitan London (while assessing the post-war diaspora en route); the study circles back to America, this time to its urban centres; and then finally shifting to Toronto (a city positioned at the borderline of its superpower neighbour), at which point the book ends with a transnational community untethered to a tangible scene of cultural production. Generally speaking, it is an accurate contention that practices of community are becoming increasingly discursive; digital cultures undoubtedly facilitate these new forms of social experience. Yet, just as claims for an “information economy” risk ignoring the massive outsourcing of industrial production to under-developed nations, digital cultures are largely confined to the middle and wealthy classes in the West. Moreover, the new tactics that digital networks create typically transform and supplement tangible sites of social creativity. One may still locate the political in locality. The example of a collective like UbuWeb is instructive. Strongly influenced by the TRG, Fluxus, and conceptualism, the group’s website (ubuweb.com) effectively digitizes the Eternal Network. Readers and writers use the site both as an archive of avant-garde art and literature, and as a forum through which to organize readings and other activities. Its members belong to collectives like ArtMob, Information As Material, and the Poetic Research Bureau, tangible scenes with an online presence whose activist work involves defending artistic appropriation and the public domain from the same intellectual property regimes that the TRG presciently anticipate.2 Just as this cross-cultural research documents the Cold War’s influence on poetic culture from a global perspective, mapping its implications among U.S., post-Commonwealth, and diasporic communities, it traces a lineage to late twentieth- and twenty-first-century writing that defines its central objective as the defence of public culture.
Although it is enticing to argue that subversive writers work “outside” of the official institutions and ideologies of a dominant culture, apart from questions regarding the epistemological validity of an ideological “outside” or a “beyond,” post-war writing had no choice but to confront the apparatuses that regulate politics and aesthetics from a position immanent within a socio-political totality. The 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s witnessed renewed ethnic and racial conflicts, the radical displacement of populations across the globe, intensified military-corporate collusion, and hence increasingly more sophisticated modes of domination. The political and cultural fronts had not evaporated but were being redrawn. In opposition to the radical subjection of our social relationships to capital – what Olson describes as a total enclosure and Creeley a surrounding darkness – mid-century poets sought to intervene in the ideological fields that compete for our precepts, our affects, our everyday practices. Within these shifting enclosures, creativity becomes a matter of adapting, contesting, and transforming the dominant ideologies that shape culture. It is striking that so many of the concepts and techniques we associate with mid-century art and literature emerge from the kinds of collaborative networks discussed in this study: open form, nation language, re-vision, the détournement, creative translation, the new sentence, intermedial art, performance poetry, appropriative strategies, polylingualism, and so on. Poets were increasingly appealing to social models and collective labour to explain the poetic object: the field (Olson, Creeley), the park (Levertov), the commune (Duncan), the cooperative (Salkey), the laboratory/institute (McCaffery, Nichol, Higgins), and the workshop/stage (Four Horsemen). By evoking these public spaces and social sites, these poets emphasize that all aesthetic production occurs as a result of interaction, cooperation, and contestation. Shorthand descriptions of poetry in the post-1945 era typically involve a shift from product to process, from an emphasis on the poem’s aesthetic autonomy to the foregrounding of a text’s construction. Whether it is McCaffery and Nichol’s “We-full” writing or Duncan’s emphatic claim for a “derivative poetics,” the construction of literary practices was undertaken collectively and the materials used to create poetry were conceived as shared resources. These developments have important consequences for the study of twentieth-century poetics: namely, many of its most significant tendencies challenge conventional notions of authorship and originality not by announcing the author’s death, but by “communalizing” literary artefacts. When texts combine media, genres, and languages, they map convergences between the communities who create, use, circulate, and interpret these artefacts. In a word, they make communities of these objects. The purpose of this book, therefore, has been to reveal the networks that texts create and the modalities of social existence they enact.
Which leads, in the final analysis, to the following claim: if an avantgarde is to intervene in the realm of ideological production, if it is to stage what might be thought of as an appropriation of capital’s subsumptive enclosure of knowledge and affect, then it will not only have to inscribe in literature the chief task of imagining new modalities of being; further, it will have to remake the philosophical category of the universal. As I have claimed throughout this book, the concept of eternal community need not make recourse to essentialist conceptions of gender, ethnicity, or race, nor does it need to claim that its axioms exist in human nature. It must, however, having declared its principal truths to be socially constructed, then proceed to the more admirable work of actually socially constructing them, and hence making a practice of such axioms. With the precondition that such truths are not universally applicable but are universally transmittable, then a cultural politics based on radical equality, autonomy, accessibility, and free association seems, as Rich might suggest, a viable ground on which to “reconstitute the world.”
The so-called Information age has no doubt generated unbridled enthusiasm for transnationalism, interdisciplinarity, and cultural syncretism. Certainly this book, in addressing Cold War–era cultures from a global (rather than a strictly American) perspective, makes use of such tropes and approaches. Yet reading across national boundaries signals no fundamental good for its own sake – after all, nothing is more rhizomatically multinational than capital at the end of the twentieth century. Cross-cultural study, therefore, should not elide ethnic, racial, and gender differences but instead engage the specificity – indeed, the locality – of cultures in the plural, their formation, and their development. Rich was adamant that her search for a common language sought not erasure but respect and acknowledgment of difference – that, indeed, what is common is not who we are but what we share. Awareness of social location notwithstanding, one should neither rarify difference nor pathologize all forms of appropriation as the work of cultural colonizers and thieves. Creeley’s pledge to “hand everything over” to “whomever … might use it” serves as a model of the open, collective, and non-proprietary making of art based on the notion that his creative output belongs to a community beyond the self.
Although this book retains the broad segmentarity of a literary epoch (1950–80), the division is a porous one. Black Mountain has clear affiliations with Pound and W.C. Williams; the TRG appropriates elements of New York and Zurich Dada; while CAM treats history as a collagic assembly of “time centres,” the rebellion of Toussaint having as much importance as yesterday’s news. The modern/postmodern divide has never really worked for poetry. For instance, American modernism arguably features a continuous trajectory from Pound and Williams to the objectivists, and on to groups such as the Black Mountain poets, the New York School, and the San Francisco Renaissance. Concrete and sound poets link avant-garde modernisms with contemporary experimental poetry. The divergent rhythms of Harlem Renaissance writers generate the blues- and jazz-inflected poetics of the Beats, the Black Arts Movement, and spoken word. Similarly, Fluxus and conceptual art has had a profound influence on twenty-first-century poetries. Of course, any classification by epoch, nation, or genre generates divisions and marks both inclusions and exclusions. But perhaps the concepts of community and practice afford another way to periodize literary tradition. Instead of further dividing history into yet smaller and more precisely delineated epochs, critics might choose to trace practices, mapping generative constellations of authors, groups, social spaces, events, texts, and technologies. If one insists upon the connection between experiments in forms of writing and experiments in forms of living, it is because poetry does.