THE PROVISIONAL AVANT GARDE

by Anne Boyer (originally at Odali$qued). I liked this essay so much when I originally read it that I asked Anne’s permission to re-post it here, and she graciously agreed.

1. It won’t be called the avant-garde. It will be referred to by various names, all of them precise, like “the society for touching lightly the forearms of  another” or “a tendency toward making chains of half-rhymes in a circle with one’s friends.”

2. It will share with the historic avant-garde that art will often be made in groups, but it will seek or find the artistic and literary expressions that mimic something other than war or machines or violent manly death, something like “human touch” and “animal touch” and “comforting noises made when another is ill” and “maternal protection” and “friendly ritual” and “a little daub of secretion” or “just like playing cards with my aunts and uncles” or “the soft feeling of an arm” or “game for which the rules are never directly stated but which everyone knows how to play.”

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So the other day I linked to Ange Mlinko’s Seidel piece at The Nation website, where she comes down pretty hard on Frederick Seidel, as well as a number of critics who have praised him. It was just a snippet link, because I don’t know the first thing about Seidel or his work, but I thought her piece was interesting in its own right, and so I passed it along. Since then, I’ve been reminded that the best solution for un-acquaintance with a subject is acquaintance, and so here then are several Seidel-related links for your weekend-

Seidel’s author page at Macmillan is loaded with audio.

“Hell on Wheels” by Christian Lorenzten; this was one of the reviews with which Mlinko took issue.

Frederick Seidel poems at Harper’s (you have to be a subscriber to view these)

David Orr reviews Seidel’s Poems, 1959-2009

“Poem by the Bridge at Ten-Shin” by Frederick Seidel

Reading and enjoying muchly the new issue of Fence, #21, which is full of fresh and good and fun, one of their best issues of late. It has some wonderful work from Giant friends Sean Kilpatrick, Colin Bassett, Janaka Stucky, as well as new by Rachel Sherman, Dean Young, Eugene Ostashevsky, and Ben Black, and a roundtable on nonrealist fiction with Brian Evenson, Laird Hunt, Joyelle McSweeney, Kate Bernheimer, and Eric Lorberer, and a lot more. I haven’t read a piece yet that I haven’t enjoyed and felt cooled by.

While you are at it, the friends at Fence are still offering a really great deal in that if you subscribe for 2 years (only $30, which is a steal), you get a free book of your choice (another $15 value, at least) from their excellent of array of past titles, including, among my favorites, Joyelle’s Flet, Daniel Brenner’s The Stupefying Flashblubs, Aaron Kunin’s The Mandarin, and their many new titles. If I weren’t already a subscriber, and have most all of their books, I would have done it again now twice.

Not sold yet? Fine. If that won’t do it, try on this sentence cut from Kilpatrick’s poem (1 of 3 from him), ‘Gay Trade.’:

Same old fears kind of save the day, / or make you look vacuously sane / in this light, eyelid small, giving / handshakes of solid milk, warmed / by crack-lighters drying your reflection / on a buried clothesline.

If you aren’t ready now, you never will be.

Follow this link for a series of clerihews by my friend Brad.

A clerihew is a four-line biographical poem. They are characterized by a whimsical tone, and I thought maybe today we could use some whimsy. Included is this one about Dennis Cooper:

Party-pooper,
Dennis Cooper:
First violent erections…
Then, alas, vivisections.

(For the record, Brad is a big fan of Cooper’s work. Whimsy.)

More (including Foucault) after the jump READ MORE >

Fictionaut has announced a new blog feature, Writing Spaces, “dedicated to the desks, cafes, libraries and retreats where Fictionaut writers work, providing a window to the physical places where some of the stories on the site originated.” The first featured writer is Stephen Stark, whose writing space appears to be a tiny barn.

Those of you interested in writing spaces might want to check back every now and then to see what goes up. Should be a cool time over there.

(via Monkeybicycle)

Hey friends. Leaving this Friday to hit the road for the Featherproof Dollar Store Summer Tour, which if you are on the east coast or nearby, is likely coming to or near you… would seriously be awesome to see faces, meet faces, drink drinks on faces, eat faces. Come out! Please? We have a lot of crazies peoples, crazy guests (check each city below to see who in yr city will be there), surely to be drunk fun, I have early copies of my new book Scorch Atlas, there are things going to happen. Consider putting it on your schedule? Dates/more info after the break:

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This isn’t really literary at all, I just thought people would be interested to know that Glenn Beck and Michael Scheuer are on TV praying for all of us to be terrorized and hurt. Just something to, uh, think about when you’re searching for “inspiration.” (via Gawker)