From "An Alchemist With One Eye on Fire" by Clayton Eshleman

So we have this reading for senior seminar that we were supposed to "translate in terms of visual art"...but I have a real problem with this, because I think it already applies;

What might a responsible avant-garde in poetry today include?

1. Radical, investigational writing that is raw, often wayward, in process; poetry as an intervention within culture against static forms of knowledge, schooled conception, cliched formulations.

(Now with this passage, if you just replace the words; investigational writing and poetry with words like art, this totally applies.)

2. Writing that envinces a thoughtful awareness of racism, imperialism, ecological issues, disasters and war. 

(and wants to do something about it...again switch writing with art)

3. Multiple levels of (visual) language- the arcane, the idiomatic, the erudite, the vulgar, the scientific; relentless probing; say anything; not just "free speech" but freed speech

4.  Transgression, openning up of the sealed sexual strong rooms; inspection of occult systems for psychic networks; the archaic and the tribal viewed as part of everyone's fate.

5.  Treating boundaries like stage scenery.

Notes from class: WHAT IS THE FUNCTION OF ART IN THE 21st CENTURY?

-Art used to be made for the world, now art is made for the ART world, completely disconnected with the actual world.

-Gary Gaffney says "Art is the collision between man and universe."-