Well, The Village Voice's Joshua Clover says the
experiment
is over, and provides this hilarious send-up of the avant-garde:
The standard avantist poem these days seems bound and determined to display its theoretical aptitude without the risks once involved, sweetening such secondhand labors with flavor crystals of tasty immediacy. Analytic ambition with something like O'Hara's "personism" could make for a charming synthesis, but the results generally go:
Blah blah blah blah,
I read a chapter of Derrida.
But lest you think I'm impersonal,
Here's a Girl Scout Cookie!
Often this poem is fragmented and augmented with allusions from the Science Times and/or Buddhism:
Blah blah blah a quark strolls
along the eight-
fold path looking down
on this pleasant scene I think of you
Walter Benjamin
And also Girl Scout Cookies
He goes on to say "the poetics of the 21st century will have to abandon what was new in the 20th,"
but, unfortunately, he seems to mean we'll have to find something else new, instead of learning to
write verse well. It is the Voice, after all.
10:11:48 PM 
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