Essays in Experiment

What a range of essays and experiments! We hear from many parts of the world and our present surroundings and the brain. How could we not agree with what every essay here advances and how not to experiment with our own readings? And, of course, on another level, our own writings?

So, to refer to Paul Benzon's essay, is using electronic literature already itself experimental literature? Loss Pequeño Glazier's argument that materiality is a key to understanding innovative practice seems most persuasive to me. How can it not matter, how what we write looks and is distributed, to say nothing about what kind of things we dare to say in our—drastically embodied!—private and public experiments? To finish with these totally rhetorical questions, we can right now repeat from several of the really intelligent essays, how it is that formal experimentation is always political? How it is that everything comes into all this, even the imperial cast of the history of the South and the Caribbean? It is so often about power relations, of course, and sociological relations are always in place. I much enjoyed the wonderfully described issues of the subjective and lyric as contrasted with the collective, to say nothing of the fantastically interesting concepts of migratory poetics and varieties of identity culture.

It seems to me that the metapoetics of any writing, experimental or not, is what we want to concentrate upon—but wait an instant, is not all writing experimental, since it takes on everything and at once?

I love that here in this issue we run the large gamut of writers written about, just take three of them: Alejo Carpentier, Edouard Glissant, and Gertrude Stein: already the mind reacts excitedly.

Ada Smailbegović's delicious essay on Gertrude Stein's zoopoetics and all those animals named and cared about, before even getting to the little dog Basket, plays a metapoetic of texts, quite up to the slipping and oozing of the texts written about.

These essays together make an important expansion of the very idea of experiment, even if we cannot truly distinguish between the reaching out of human nature and the human mind. I get seized by ideas like the perspective of the seagull: now writing from that point of view, that would really be experimental!

And of course, that brings me to the magnificent books that Seagull publications in India is putting forth. They are just right: they look right, they feel right, and they read right. Years ago, and this leads me immediately to the realm of the visual, the French poet Yves Bonnefoy's authoritative and delicious essays on art (in my view, his most ongoing in our minds book) called L'Arrière-Pays could not find a publisher in the United States for its grand translation by Stephen Romer, and Seagull, to its everlasting credit, not that it needs more of that (but on the other hand, who does not?), published it very grandly. That book and his poetry and writing on art from early to late, are essential for writers launching into experimental territory, if the poetic matters to them as much as the visual.

In my own work on surrealism—which has not ceased, since I am at present holding a seminar of five weeks on surrealism from 1922 to 1944, called Surrealism 1, to be followed by Surrealism 2 in the spring, if all goes well—there are thirteen students from doctoral programs in French, English, and Comparative Literature, and as well as the class discussions and presentations, all have their own individual projects to write about and talk about in the last week. And, in the penultimate session, a wonderful cellist, Susan Salm, will play and speak about musical interpretations, and I will say a few words about the poetics of translation, about which I care greatly.

As for music and text and the avant-garde or not very derrière-garde at least, like surrealism, the visual is crucial, to under-state the issue. I am saving André Breton's superbly large collection, Surrealism and Painting, for the second part of...