“…even if your preferred mode is fragment, you need syntax to love”
Brenda Hillman, “Remembering Form,” Loose Sugar
Is all writing “experimental”? Attempting anything that you haven’t done prior can be said to be an “experiment,” but if the thing being attempted has already been produced, and even better executed, can any new writing in a similar mode be considered an experiment? We know what’s going to happen. What if you combine red and blue? What if I combine red and blue?
Poet and critic Carl Watts via Twitter complained that a publisher’s text for a new poetry title offered it as “avant-garde,” a term wildly (and repeatedly) misapplied to works that clearly aren’t anything of the sort. It’s the same idea, really. There was a poet on Twitter during those early days of the platform who couldn’t speak without uttering the words “avant” and “garde” together, and they eventually published a debut novel that declared itself thusly “avant garde” in the cover copy. As at least one elder experimental writer declared: This book is not experimental. At what point does self-designation become wishful thinking? At what point does self-designation evolve into parody?
Green. You’ll get green.
It’s important to stretch one’s muscles. To attempt to replicate or echo in some manner, as a way through which to learn and expand one’s craft. “I attempted to write a Beatles song,” a songwriter might offer, after having achieved something far different, both from what they had done prior, and anything The Beatles might have produced of their own. How did you get there from here?
Across the 1960s and 70s, certain of those TISH poets were repeatedly accused of replicating American models. Canadian critics, most of whom seemed to originate from Ontario, claimed those TISH poets weren’t Canadian enough, or at all, through their American influences. They did not like that George Bowering won the 1969 Governor General’s Award for Poetry, for example. Beyond what we’d now refer to as gatekeeping, the western poets couldn’t help but produce work from a Canadian perspective, despite whatever structural concerns or approaches held as influence. Their references were Canadian, their cultural foundations were Canadian. What is Canadian, exactly? Consider the argument of “this is how we do things,” when anyone west simply wouldn’t hold to the same perspectives and references as those writers living in Toronto, Montreal or Ottawa. Why would we want all writing to share a perspective?
I spent the bulk of my twenties attempting to echo or replicate poems by George Bowering, David Donnell, Barry McKinnon, John Newlove, Judith Fitzgerald and others, with varying degrees of fumbling success. By the time I was thirty, I had opened up into a further, more expansive list of writers from whom I was learning compositional tools, phrasing, structures: Robert Kroetsch, Robert Creeley, Jack Spicer, Barry McKinnon. It is also important, I told myself at the time, to occasionally engage with work one disagrees with.
I reviewed a new poetry collection a recently by an established American poet that the back cover copy suggested included poems that were “experimental in form” before offering a kilometre-long list of poetic influences from the mid-20th century. Was there nothing more recent? The notion of “experiment,” in context. I could have offered an equally-long list of poets across those seventy intervening years who worked far more interesting variations on that exact form. So, the question remains: does that still make this work “experimental”? Well before questions of whether or not the work is vibrant, dull, interesting, compelling, done well or poorly. How is this an experiment?
We saw it, we read it, we absorbed it. Art progresses, after all. The craft and the culture evolve. To replicate straight might seem dated, quaint. Is there nothing worse than seeing a poetry title doing something already done twenty, thirty, forty years prior, but not nearly as well?
Returning to basics is not the same as ignoring the evolution and trajectory of form. I have discovered something, therefore I am the first. I will not be contradicted.
The curse of the young writer. So many appear not to read enough. The biggest lesson one could push through creative writing classes.
To combine red and blue? Green. You’ll get green. A whole era, a whole bookshelf, of green.
And yet, have I achieved anything better? George Bowering, who responded to early 1990s letters and chapbooks I mailed him with lists of names I should be reading, all Kootenay School of Writing poets whose books I couldn’t afford to order, certainly didn’t know how if I could, and didn’t see on my Ottawa shelves. Am I learning, still, too little, too late? Am I taking too long to figure this out?
As Kroetsch wrote in A Likely Story: the writing life (1995):
I don’t pretend to have answers. I am much more interested in the questions we ask ourselves than in the answers we hide behind.
Lecture for an Empty Room
excellent. also writers are rewarded for repeating their successes so why experiment? and once a successful "experimental" poet, why experiment?
Late to the party, I know. Still, this strikes a chord with me as a beginning writer coming back to the craft after living a whole other life. What do I have to say that has not already been said, and said so well? Time will tell whether my literary voice emerges unique and worthy.