An Ocean View of the Avant-Garde (Poly: New Speculative Writing, A Poetry Collection‪)‬

In 1989, a curious hardback called POLY: New Speculative Writing was published by a small press called Ocean View Books. This press, run by engineercum-poet Lee Ballentine, was founded in 1981 and had produced about 40 books, mostly poetry, by the mid 1990s. Its stated goal was to publish poets "influenced by surrealism and/or science fiction," and this rubric eventually included such figures as Anselm Hollo, Janet Hamill, and Tom Disch. The most bizarre aspect of this claim, for most literary critics of the early 1980s, would involve the linking of an avant-garde movement such as Surrealism with a literary genre that for most of its tenure has had little claim to highbrow status. Although Surrealists had historically celebrated the manifest content of science fiction films, and William Gibson's 1984 publication of Neuromancer gave momentum to academic study of science fiction as part of a more respectable "speculative" genre, the marriage of science fiction and highbrow poetry seemed/seems a distant prospect. Indeed, in the 1980s universities continued to hire middlebrow lyric poets to fill their creative writing needs while a few writers such as Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews attempted to formulate a language-oriented, avant-garde poetry. Needless to say, neither of these groups had much use for science fiction. While the first of these groups made few explicitly political claims for their poetry (with notable exceptions such as Carolyn Forche), the so-called Language poets tended to make politics the raison d'etre of their poetics. An essay by Charles Bernstein published in the influential journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, to take one notable example, suggests that poetry should aid in the political project inaugurated by the Parisian demonstrations in May 1968 (143), a project indebted not only to the Situationists, but the Surrealists. For Bernstein, at least, to be political is to operate under the sign of the avant-garde. Of course, Bernstein is not alone in this assumption. Avant-gardism, inasmuch as it can be differentiated from a historical moment and turned into a disposition, has been defined by critics as diverse as Peter Burger and Susan Suleiman as characterizing any project which attempts to change lived reality through a fusion of art and politics. Yet, it has by now become clear that contemporary politics will be increasingly defined by science and technology. While Walter Benjamin formulated this basic thesis in the 1930s, it has now more than ever become impossible for academics (and politicians) to ignore, even if their acknowledgment takes simplistic forms such as "the need to make students computer literate." This heightened acknowledgment of techne, furthermore, is what makes the pronouncements in POLY, and their context within the project of Ocean View Books, worth a careful look.