Poetics Today 2000 21(1):129-150; DOI:10.1215/03335372-21-1-129
Duke University Press
Aftershock: Poetry and Cultural Politics Since 1989 |
Making It / New: Institutionalizing Postwar Avant-Gardes
Libbie Rifkin
English, Alabama
ABSTRACT
This essay attempts to reframe the scholarship on postwar avant-gardist
practice by rereading an event some commentators consider the beginning of the
academic cooptation of the avant-garde: the Berkeley Poetry Conference of
1965. Held just after the anthology wars had established the more-notable
poets in attendance as the "wild other" of academic verse culture,
the event was an effort to stage a collective identity. The essay focuses its
account of the conference—and the vast, internally-differentiated
avant-garde represented there—through an analysis of Charles Olson's
notorious performance. Olson's reading is considered by some a tour de force
and by others a drunken ramble. This essay interprets it as an attempt to
articulate an institution and contends that its excesses derive from his
simultaneously marginal and central positioning as the "boss poet"
of a community committed to perpetual emergence. Theories of the avant-garde
that figure institutionalization as a necessary and final fall from grace,
while perhaps schematically accurate, cannot do justice to the struggle over
identity and value that marks every stage in the process of literary
evolution. Reading Olson's performance as an effort—in the words of
Gertrude Stein—to have contemporaries, this essay seeks to complicate
the myth of the aporetic, antisocial avant-garde on a self-destructive quest
for the future. Instead, it finds revolutionary impulses coexisting with the
project of shoring up one's personal position by creating new institutions.
Institutionalization and breakthrough, thus, go hand in hand.
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Copyright 2000 by Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics, Tel Aviv University
