Post-Hangover

Am really digging Richard Lopez's and Jonathan Hayes's split chapbook, Hallucinating California (Windowpane Press, 2008, soon to be hosted on blowfish's servers, because I need to do something with that server space while Koshkin and I try to find time to dedicate to it. So no, blowfish is not dead, just very very late, but I guess you are used to this).

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Johannes wrote on his blog:

But clearly I realize that I am talking about a historical time and place different from my own. Lots of proponents seem to have forgotten this. One guy for example argues that Breton, if alive today, would write like Andrew Joron. A ridiculous notion, as Breton is from a totally different situation.

But for me it sums up so much about American discussions about avant-garde: most of all the nauseating concept that Breton would be an American (of course, welcome to the EPcot Center of the World!).

Meanwhile, Andrew Zawacki was talking about writing under the sign of Heidegger when he put together the last section of his book Anabranch, titled Masque. (Thank God for Heidegger. I was starting to think that a vast majority of philosophically-inclined American poets were obsessed with Walter Benjamin)

My question is thus: Is it possible to write under the sign of Husserl? Concretely speaking, can we write a phenomenology of the avant-garde? Recapture its moment? (Speaking of the avant-garde, leave me alone with your post-avant. Paul's "pan-avant" label has its problems too) In doing so, wouldn't we be writing a phenomenology of poetry?

Derrida comments on Husserl's The Origin of Geometry that the rewriting of a proof, of that original moment of understanding, is similar, but not the same. It is what he called an "iteration." But going back to Husserl and Breton, we should forget about the latter if we were to go on such enterprise.

And I doubt the result of such enterprise would look or sound like Adam Zagajewski (who has a thing for Husserl) or Robert Duncan.

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