[Richard Wakefield]

A few years ago we heard frequently about "experimental" verse and "experimental" fiction (or "fictions" or, often, "texts"). Perhaps the term is still around and I'm simply not in the right places to hear it, but my impression is that is has dropped out of use. Still, I'd like to ask my fellow eratosphereans, first, what they take the term to mean, and, second, whether they have read anything that changed their way of reading.

For me, Emerson over a long period changed my way of reading -- or my awareness of my way of reading -- by making me see how much any reader brings to the words on paper or in the air.

So, my friends, what makes writing experimental, and what specific experiments in writing have influenced you?
Richard

[Len Krisak]

Richard,

Excellent question. A couple of years ago
at West Chester someone was blathering on
during a panel discussion about how little
experimental freedom was available to American
poets and how very much we needed to correct that
situation, blah, blah, etc. I was stunned. Not
ENOUGH "experimental" verse?

I asked him, since he was so fond of the word,
why it seemed we never, ever heard back from our
experimental, perpetually avant-garde friends,
whether any of their experiments were a
success or failure. Dead silence. I think Katherine
Varnes said something like, "Hmm. Interesting
question. We'll have to think about that."

Now you've asked the question the right way--the polite
way. As you may have gathered by now, I think the
concept is intellectually bogus--a lame code word
for bad writing no one has to answer for.

But I'd be curious to hear (see?) if others consider
EVERY poem "experimental." And even then, would we
not face the same problem in trying to determine
its success or failure?

Notice, by the way, that I'm using the word the way
I think most people in poetry use it--as the layman's
lax synonym for random activity whose outcome we
can't foresee--the 9-year-old's chemistry "experiment."
As to how the scientific definition would fit--a hypothesis
carefully controlled and tested--I'm not at all sure.

Sorry to blather on so long myself!

[RCL]

Richard and Len, if "experimental" is used as Emerson used it, as an activity rooted in experience, every poem is an experiment, a testing or trying out of what we think may be significant. In this sense, a poem succeeds or fails to the extent that it taps and communicates that significance? Emerson could respect Whitman for having succeeded in both the etymological and common senses of the word. For me, every poem builds on experience and is an active experience of pursuing truth and understanding. (Emerson's essay on "Experience" is very instructive.)

------------------
Ralph

[This message has been edited by RCL (edited September 09, 2001).]

[Tim Murphy]

I thnk we've produced some fabulous Experimental Poets, most recently Dickinson and Hopkins. Of course Hardy with his 950 nonce structures and Frost with his insistence that each poem sound distinctly like itself and no other, are also highly experimental, and my own experiments in tightly rhymed trimeter and dimeter (and my occasional forays into "loose iambics") are grounded in their prior efforts.

[Tim Love]

> what makes writing experimental

I think I use the term to mean writing which demands (or teases) the reader to develop new aesthetic criteria. Perhaps the writer has little idea whether the work is good, or even whether it's "literary". Some readers enjoy the challenge of adapting and recombining their modes of reception. Some, unable to fit the work into a genre, reject it.

It seems to me that Art is currently more receptive to experiment than Writing is, and consequently more riddled by hoaxers and charlatans. In science the institutions act as a moderator of change. In Art the major galleries seem to accelerate change even though in Art it takes longer to determine the value of a work. Literature seems between the 2 domains, but since the 70s has been left behind by Art's
rate of change.

[nyctom]

I don't like hard and fast definitions, particularly post-structuralist/post-modern "discourse", so "experimental" to me, simply means "an attempt to invent a previously unused form or variation on a historical form of poetry/prose/drama, etc." But I went to college in the late 80s/early 90s when all of this postmodern thinking was percolating madly. It put me off strict academic defintions.
And really, how much "new" is there under the sun?




[This message has been edited by nyctom (edited September 11, 2001).]

[A. E. Stallings]

Well, I think we are all experimenting whenever we start a new poem. Otherwise, we'd just be writing the same poem over and over again. Innovation (as in the case of Emily Dickinson) is not to be confused with novelty, however, which I think is generally a dead end...

I ran into this the other day in my Poet's Market, which amused me. The writer's guidelines for a journal called the <u>10th Muse</u>:

10th Muse "is the leading international forum for nonist poetics. Nonism is the only contemporary experimental genre which is progressive and radical in outlook. Nonists overturned the conservatism of the experimental milieu by embracing nonexperimental traditions within the experimental aesthetic."

?

[graywyvern]

Yes indeed: "how do you know when an experiment succeeds"?
(Not a question many experimenters anymore bother with, but--)

When others are sufficiently struck by what you've done that they want to copy it.

When it becomes mainstream practice.

When it's become known enough for someone to make fun of it.

When it changes the way you write because you realize you can't keep on doing that other thing anymore.

[Len Krisak]

Gray, your points are well-taken, but I guess it
still bothers me that the experimenters (whatever
that means) themselves almost never (never?) report
back. I suppose I would say that there is genuine
innovation (after all, Lentini probably was the first
to codify the sonnet form) and phony innovation. This
latter means, for me, the use of the word to cover
whatever those 10th Muse magazine people are rambling
on about--inanity and obfuscation. Thanks to Alicia,
I think that better illustrates what I meant!

Finally, just three little letters (sshhhhh!): APR.

[Tim Love]

> Len Krisak - it still bothers me that the experimenters (whatever that means) themselves almost never (never?) report back.
I think they do, even if it's only in the form of their future work. When experimental work is criticised it's not so uncommon for the poet (or friends of the poet) to respond. E.g. http://angel-exhaust.offworld.org/ht...10/Verbal.html


Besides, I don't think non-experimenters are in general much better. I haven't seen many poets write well about their own work.