"Innovative writing" 1

The Writhing Society, which practices a number of constrained-writing techniques — oulipian, para-oulipian, extra-oulipian, zoomorphic, biblioerotic, and propriofugal — feels itself to be in solidarity with the "innovative writing" community and more broadly with new ways of practicing and thinking about the arts. Accordingly Wendy Walker and I traveled to Buffalo earlier this month to show the Writhing Society flag (blank as yet, may feature porcupines rampant) at the AndNow 2009 conference. We stayed for five nights at the glacial, poorly housekept Hyatt Regency in downtown Buffalo, gave and attended panels and workshops, sold some Proteotypes books and some by our friends James Walsh of Observatory, Herbert Pfostl of Observatory and Blind Pony books, and Alicita Rodriguez and Joe Starr of MARGINALIA magazine. Many delightful encounters with our fellow innovators and long conversations with Rebecca Goodman and Martin Nakell. A few memorable readings, some memorably good (Danielle Alexander, Pedro Ponce, Nathaniel Mackey, Steve Katz), and some others that left us wondering what was innovative about them, they seemed so like mainstream fiction with perhaps a shade more violent sex and a choppier distribution of structural bits and points of view.

So I have started to think about "innovation" in writing, and I'm not going to be able to fit all those thoughts into one post. But to give a partial preview, I want to see whether innovation is adequately defined by its notional contrary, either "mainstream" writing or "traditional writing." I want to ask some questions about what seems to be the growing assumption that innovative writing needs to be "performative" (thereby engaging the resources of many other media besides the printed page) and not "absorptive," like the transaction between the reader and the book.

Right now I'm still thinking about the venues for the AndNow conferences: at Notre Dame University, famed for Jesuits and football; at Lake Forest, a selective college in a wealthy suburb of Chicago; at Chapman University, founded as a Christian college in the county seat of Orange County, CA; and Buffalo, under the auspices but not on the premises of SUNY Buffalo.

Maybe this last setting seems most appropriate. Buffalo is a town struggling with post-industrial depression but with a strong tradition of supporting the arts (three F. L. Wright houses, the fine Albright-Knox museum, the ugly new Burchfield-Penney museum which will be a real destination when they get around to showing some of their vast holdings of Charles Burchfield's paintings). And SUNY Buffalo itself has a strong tradition of promoting innovative writing, especially poetry in the Olson-Creeley-Bernstein tradition. But it's still possible to say that the conference has been held in all these places because someone in an English department (Steve Tomasula, Davis Schneiderman, Martin Nakell, Christina Milletti and Dimitri Anastasopoulos) has had the courage and the clout to bring it to their school. Conversations with some AndNow organizers brought out the fact that blood was shed in the struggle (almost literally in one case) to get the conference to these places.

But none of these places is a natural or even a comfortable home to innovation. Maybe the avant-garde thrives on discomfort and alienation, but it also, since misery loves company, thrives where there is a community of fellow-practitioners across the spectrum of the arts. Downtown Manhattan and parts of western Brooklyn; Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, or the Bay Area come to mind, and many of the participants at AndNow have come from these places. Of course there's nothing wrong with getting out of the neighborhood and seeing a bit of the world. But when the bit of the world consists of hotel conference rooms or university classrooms (which differ really only in the carpeting, particularly hectic at the Buffalo Hyatt), then I start to ask why AndNow has to happen under the auspices of a university. And the still more important question: what is the proper role of universities and the academic world in housing the arts, especially the more vulnerable, fledgling, experimental or innovative arts? Don't those arts have something to lose from the academic connection?

To be continued.