and i was thinking about this while i was flying
toward iowa and thinking about how everyone was going to be
trying to locate the avant-garde and about how almost
everyone was going to agree that it would involve either
shocking or making it new and and that i was supposed to be
talking about this too and i realized i was going to be
confused because practically every role classically
attributed to the avant-garde has been preempted by something
else and i reflected that i myself have never really had
a clear image of what it was to be avant-garde though ive
been thrust into the role often enough to know what it feels
like to be avant-garde
a friend of mine had written a book
marjorie perloff had written a book dealing with american
poetry as a kind of french connection as opposed to the
english connection which is conventionally supposed for it
in the schools now i personally think there are many
roots to contemporary american poetry certainly my poetry
and the poetry i admire but i also know what writing a
book means in a book you have to organize your ideas
pretty much one thing at a time if its an important thing
and you want to really get it done and this is a book
designed to challenge what i have always thought of as the
anglophiliac model of american poetry that is so dominant in
those literary strongholds east of the mississippi or the
connecticut river north of the monongahela that are so
strongly devoted to an anglican passion that they give
the impression of some kind of outpost in a novel by huxley
or evelyn waugh where the people are sitting around on a
veranda sipping their gin slings in the shade of the local
textile factory or integrated circuit fabricating plant
dreaming of playing polo or cricket or rugby in the greener
older playing fields at eton or harrow which they may
never have seen being often second generation eastern
european jews from brooklyn or queens or lithuanians from
indiana or lutherans from wisconsin and somehow there
they are gathered on the veranda in new haven or manhattan
in memory of the british empire of which they are among
the last supports and several columns of which this book
is probably intended to take away
or maybe more precisely
this books is only bringing the news to these outposts
that the british empire has long since passed away and
that the messages from england would no longer be coming and
had not been coming for a long time and that there was a
french connection as there is a russian connection and a
spanish connection and for many a chinese connection or
japanese connection there are lots of connections in this
world but in a book you have to do one thing at a time
the world may not happen one thing at a time but in a book
you have to tell one thing at a time
and my friend was invited
to washington to be part of a discourse with some of these
english emigres and refugees among whom were numbered
harold bloom and john hollander and richard howard who
are certainly distinguished members of the refugee community
now marjorie was giving a talk based on the
last chapter of her most recent book the poetics of
indeterminacy the last chapter of which happens to deal
with john cage and with me
and whatever differences there may
be between cage and me and these are considerable we
were both obliterated by the righteous wrath of harold bloom
who had hardly heard more than our names when he
denounced the proceedings as ridiculous and us as nonpoets
and stormed off the stage
i was told about this performance of
blooms and though it was wonderful and forgot about it
but it was not long afterward that i was invited out to
the very same place to do a talk performance on the folger
librarys little shakespearean stage and it happened that
when i came to do the performance i had something serious in
mind because a friend of mine had died two or three days
before after a sudden and unexpected hospitalization from
which we had all hoped she would come out alive and i
wanted to make my piece a kind of homage a mediation and
speculation on the nature of her life and death
so in the course of things i told her story
or what i knew of it and i tried to consider the
nature of the fit between the life we lead and the death
we get and what i wanted to think about was whether there
was such a fit and if there was what kind it was and i
did the best i could under the circumstances of being
there then which is my image of what an artist does and
is somebody who does the best he can under the
circumstances without worrying about making it new or
shocking because the best you can do depends upon what you
have to do and where and if you have to invent something
new to do the work at hand you will but not if you have a
ready-made that will work and is close at hand and you want
to get on with the rest of the business
then youll pick up
the tool thats there a tool that somebody else has made
that will work and youll lean on it and feel grateful
when its good to you for somebody elses work and youll
think of him as a friend who wold borrow as freely from you
if he thought of it or needed to because there is a
community of artists who dont recognize copyrights and
patents or shouldnt except under unusual circumstances
who send each other tools in the mail or exchange them
in conversation in a bar
though i had a couple of friends
from whom i got a lot of things in the mail who got very
nervous about exchanging things with each other because they
had ileana sonnabend looking over their shoulders and one
of them got so distressed because he had ileana looking over
his shoulder forbidding him to collaborate with the other
friend that when he wrote the text for the others
installation performance he never put his name on it but
this is an unusual situation and i only mention it because
of that
From what it means to be avant-garde. Copyright © 1993 by David Antin. Reprinted with permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.