Contemporary Experimental Poetry Pratices at the Centre anc. the Semi-Periphery: American anc Post-Yugoslav Poetry Cultures Dubravka Duric Faculty of Media and Communications, Singidunum University, Karadordeva 65, Beograd, Serbia dubravka.djuric@fmk.edu.rs The paper addresses experimental po^^ry in the US and in post- Yugoslavian cultures. I will discuss the possibilities of contemporary experimental practice and the phenomenon of hybrid poetry. Keywords: experimental poetry / avant-garde poetry / hybrid poetry / American culture / post-YU culture / new media The Avant-garde, Innovative, Radical, and Experimental in the Context of American Poetry and the Recent Transformations in the Field I will begin my discussion of experimental poetry by referring to the American poetry scene (although it would be better to talk of a plurality of scenes, since there is really no such thing as "American poetry", but only a number of poetries). This is the context of an imperial country of the First World, or a core country, which, following the Second World War, dictated new trends in poetry, arts, and theory. Then, I will discuss the state of affairs in the semi-peripheral post-Yugoslav countries. But first, a brief introductory discussion is required here, regarding the terminology used by American critics, many of whom experimental poets themselves, to denote this kind of poetry. First, I will point to an early work by Marjorie Perloff, The Poetics of Indeterminacy, where she introduces the notion of the other tradition, which, according to her, begins in the American context with Ezra Pound, includes William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett, and finally arrives to John Cage and David Antin, many of whom were not considered poets according to the mainstream concept of poetry at the time. In her next book, The Dance of the Intel^I^ect, she extends the idea Primerjalna književnost (Ljubljana) 37.1 (2014) of the other tradition to include language poetry. In some of her texts, she uses the notion of radicaI.poetry, which becomes evident in the title of her Radical Artifice. According to Charles Bernstein, "[r]adical formal innovation in modernist and contemporary art has, at times, been seen as undermining the aesthetic, but it is more accurate to say that such work reinvents the aesthetic for new readers and new contexts" (33). In her latest book, Unoriginal Genius, Perloff focuses on the new experimental trend of conceptual poetry. In the 1980s, a number of language poets, including Bernstein, highlighted the constf^ctivist character of experimental poetry in a wide range of works, from Italian futurism and Russian cubo-futurism to language poetry. More recently, Bernstein introduced the notion of the difficult poem, claiming that "[t]he difficult poem has created distress for both poets and readers for many years" (3). In her Paratextual Communities, Susan Vanderborg writes that the term "avant-garde" is too often used as a generalized label for innovative writing (6). In 1996 and 1998, respectively, two anthologies of experimental women's poetry appeared, with the term innovative in their titles: Out of Everywhere: Linguisticc^l^lj Innovative Poetry by Women in North America & the UK, edited and introduced by Maggie O'Sullivan, and Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women, edited by Mary Margaret Sloan. Sloan writes that "[t]he terms for defining innovative writing over the last three decades center on issues of formal explorations, that is, on the interrogation of forms of representation and on the opening and investigation of literary structures and genres" (6). Juliana Spahr explains that innovation refers to "agrammatical modernist techniques such as fragmentation, parataxis, run-ons, interruption, and disjunction", and at the same time points to the "avoidance of linear narrative developments, of meditative confessionalism, and of singular voice" (2). In 2002 poets Mark Wallace and Steven Marks edited a book titled Tel^ling It Sl^ant: A^vant-garde Poetics of the 1990s, which, among other things, shows that in the context of American experimental poetry "avant-garde" refers not only to the historical avant-gardes, but also to the so-called "tradition of the new", the idea that art historian Harold Rosenberg introduced in 1959 (Bray et al. 4). In my interpretation, this idea insists that radical, avant-garde, experimental, innovative poetry remains important for contemporary poetry practices, not only as something that happened in the past, is now passe, and has its more or less (un)important place in the national canon of poetry. Or, in other words, American poetry culture(s) can generate so many different parallel poetry worlds, in a way that semi-peripheral cultures of poetry could not. What fascinates me when I look at American poetry/ies (although I must stress that I am looking from afar, so my view could be distorted) is that since the Second World War we have had a number of different schools and individuals working in the field of experimental poetry because many experimental poets have managed to become professors at universities, which has enabled them to construct this kind of poetry as a cultural value, although even then we could talk of a kind of cultural marginality with regards to what used to be called mainstream poetry. I will now turn to Perloffs Radical Artifice. Summarizing what were then recent developments, she writes that the more radical poetries have turned to the deconstruction of the image and lists three ways in which this occurred: (1) the image, in all its concretion and specificity, continues to be foregrounded, but it is now presented as inherently deceptive, as that which must be bracketed, parodied, and submitted to scrutiny — this is the mode of Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery, more recently of Michael Palmer, and Leslie Scalapino and Ron Silliman; (2) the Image as referring to something in external reality is replaced by the word as Image, but concerns with morphology and the visualization of the word's constituent parts: this is the mode of Concrete Poetry extending from such pioneers as Eugen Gomringer and Augusto de Campos to John Cage's mesostic works, to the visual texts of Steve McCaffery, Susan Howe, and Johanna Drucker; and (3) Image as the dominant gives way to syntax: in Poundian terms, the turn is from phanopoeia to logopoiea. "Making strange" now occurs at the level of phrasal and sentence structure rather than at the level of the image cluster so that poetic language cannot be absorbed into the discourse of the media: this is the mode of Clark Coolidge ^ and of Lyn Hejinian, Charles Bernstein, Rae Armantrout and Bruce Andrews among others; it comes to us from Gertrude Stein, for whom image was never the central concern, via Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen. (78—79) The recently published Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, co-edited by Joe Bray, Alison Gibbons, and Brian McHale, covers a wide range of experimentalism in literature from the beginning of the 20*^ century up to the present. Regarding the postwar period, it includes texts on "New American Poetry", concretism and visual poetry, ethnopoetics, found poetry, language poetry, African-American experiments, and different forms of "uncreative writing", special new developments from the 1990s, such as conceptual writing, and flarf. It is important to stress that since the 1990s, the experimental poetry scene in the US has changed; that is why Michael Davidson wrote in the introduction to his book On the Out^skirt^s of Form that when he began writing it the "outskirts" of poetry were easier to discern. In the early 1980s, previously unincorporated literary trends had formed into recognizable communities. He mentions the Beat Generation, Deep Image, the Black Arts movement, Asian American poetry, Chicano Nationalist poetry, the Black Mountain poets, confessionalist poetry, the New York School, and language poetry. And what he calls "the city of official verse culture" stayed within commuting distance in relation to experimental practice (1). In the meantime the poetic demographic had changed and Davidson argues that "subsequent generations of language-writing, stand-up, new formalist, concretist, collaborative, flarf, intermedia, performance, transgeneric, Deaf, dub, elliptical, digital, hybrid, postliterary and more recently, 'conceptual' poetries have obscured the outskirts of form and made them more difficult if not irrelevant as a descriptor" (1). He also emphasizes that during the last 20 years, a gradual shift occurred from spatial and geographic metaphors of poetic cultures, based on schools, movements, and aesthetic positions, to more rhizomatic and not so well-defined formations produced in globalization. So in order to see the work of culture in a transnational age of globalization, we must witness forms that exceed the limits of the page, the sound of voice, and the borders of gallery space (2). The transformation of the field of poetry may be interpreted from two interrelated positions. The first position is that of Bernstein's Attack of the Difficult^Poems and has to do with recent technological changes. Bernstein writes: The new computer technology — both desktop publishing and electronic publishing — has radically altered the material, specifically visual, presentation of text. It begins to seem as natural to think of composing screen by screen or link as page by page. Many text-based works now exist primarily for the screen rather than as transcriptions from another medium. The printed version of works might be considered the reproduction and not the other way around, though reciprocity is a better way than hierarchy to understand the relation among textual media. (84) According to Bernstein, digitalized text now exists separately from and prior to any given embodiment. He refers to Johanna Drucker's discussion of this new textual condition, who argues that binary coding produces virtual texts, while "alphabetic sequences exist in an immaterial form for which any visible manifestation displayed on screen or printed 'out' on paper is a second-order phenomenon" (quoted in Bernstein 85). "At the same time, Drucker rejects the dematerialization of electronic textuality, pointing to the materiality not only of format and configuration but also of the emplacement of the digital code."(85) Bernstein concludes that the "coding is not the antecedent original but an anoriginal source from which multiple versions emerge" (85). Bernstein also stresses that the contemporary tendency of many poets to posit performance as a central part of their poetry practice is important to discuss, because it enables them to work out their rhythms in real time and gives them a chance to engage their listeners (124). Discussing the new possibilities of performing texts in poetry readings/performances and onscreen, he distinguishes between analphabetic and post-analphabetic language environments. The oral poetry of analphabetic cultures is, according to Bernstein, a technology for storing and retrieving cultural memory. In Bernstein's judgment, what we might call contemporary oral-ity as it is practiced today is based on memorization, which implies the priority of written text and is therefore "a theatricalization of orality rather than an instance of it" (124). Bernstein states that "[r]eadings offer a concrete countermeasure to the relentless abstraction and reification of the poem as something existing disembodied in an anthology" (44). Live poetry readings provide a model for understanding poems not just as meaning formations but as social productions and material texts. Like oral performance, virtual textuality creates an original material work in each presentation. The computer screen provides a stage for the transformation of texts into works. Writers become language environment designers — textual architects — who need to foresee how the texts they write will be brought to life in particularized enactments. This entails anticipating the inevitable variances made by the different systems on which the work will be displayed. It also allows for creating variants in the configuration of the work; for example, randomizing the sequence of a hypertext so that each time it is viewed it is read in a different order. Moreover, readers can participate in the constitution of the work (and not only in its interpretation) by taking advantage of options for determining the graphic and acoustic environment in which they experience a work and for altering the text of works whose configuration allows for, or indeed mandates, variance. (85) Kenneth Goldsmith has offered another explanation for the change in the field of contemporary poetry, which relates to Bernstein's. Goldsmith "has declared poetry's need to catch up with the other arts and to confront the realities of the digital mediasphere in which we all float today" (Epstein 315). Among other reasons, this may be needed because in most contemporary cultures poetry is "confined to the peripheries of cultural imagination" (Bernstein 43), and the question is whether it is possible to change its status and how. Maybe it is also a reaction to an interesting phenomenon in American poetry, discussed by Paul Hoover, which will be important in my own discussion of the post-Yugoslav poetry cultures. In his essay "New Modernism" Hoover explains how at some point during the 1990s the more conservative poets began to negotiate "with language poetry and the [John] Ashbery influence. Due to [Jorie] Graham's presence and visiting writers such as Michael Palmer and Leslie Scalapino who have been in residence, experimental poetics is now being practiced by some of the students at the University of Iowa Writers Workshops. This may signal assimilation of innovative values by the wider literary culture" (138). Experimental Poetry and the Post-Yugoslav Poetry Cultures At the beginning of my discussion of the post-Yugoslav poetry cultures, I will posit these so-called small countries at the semi-periphery of the world system, which means that global trends always reach them with some delay. For various reasons, these cultures generally find it more difficult to admit experimental poetry into their national canons as an important value and are usually unable to form parallel canons. The waning of experimentation in the poetry cultures of the socialist Yugoslavia began during the 1980s and experimentation almost disappeared from Yugoslav poetry by the early 1990s. There were different kinds of postmodern retro-garde and/or reactionary anti-modernism, especially in Serbian poetry. In its metastasis of the 1990s, the perceived threat to the nation directed it toward Orthodox Christianity as the basis of Serbia as a post-socialist nation and to Byzantium as the projected place of its spiritual origin. In this context, a number of Serbian poets constructed the discursive position of the wise man, empowered to tell the Truth to the nation and summon it to a holy war for its salvation. Similar positions were constructed for women poets, such as the shepherdess, the good fairy, the devout bride, and sometimes also the female warrior, always subjected to the male heroic patriarchal order (Duric, Politika 168-169). These conservative models of poetry remained absolutely dominant for years. During the 1980s, Yugoslav poetry cultures followed the general European postmodernist trend of returning to earlier forms of poetry devices. With the breakup of socialist, multicultural Yugoslavia, this re-traditionalization of poetry played a part in the construction of the new post-socialist and post-Yugoslav mono-national cultural identities. This was a process of nationalization in the field of poetry, whereby poets and critics alike revalorized traditional genres and national themes. This process was most pronounced in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where, as Damir Arsenijevic notes in his study Forgotten Future: The Politics of Poetry in Bosnia and Herzegovina: "the promoters of the re-ethnization in the field of cultural production appropriated and refasioned historical facts and myths, offering an ideological mystification of social antagonism in which they function as symptoms of subjugation and oppression of their individual ethnic group" (73). The gradual stabilization of new post-Yugoslav societies and their opening up to neoliberal models in politics and economy have made an impact on the dominant models in poetry as well. But it is interesting to note that in Slovenia, the new generation of poets who began to appear around 1990, when Slovenia became an independent country, turned to moderately emancipated poetry forms. By "emancipated" I mean that they more or less rejected traditional devices such as rhyme and meter and did not restrict themselves to their local traditions, especially religious and national myths, when choosing their topics. As Darja Pavlič has noted, "there are few pure lyrics in the sense of direct presentation of the inner world, and there are practically no language experiments. The lyric subject constructs its identity by telling a story that can be more or less trenchant." (167) Thanks to the continual development of experimentation in American poetry and its assimilation among its various poetry communities, many poetry cultures across the world have embraced experimentalism, albeit in hybrid forms and to various degrees, as the globally dominant model. Why are experimental practices impossible in the post-Yugoslav region as a continuous practice? I suppose that the idea of national identity is an important topic here, especially following the violent breakup of Yugoslavia and establishment of its successor states as independent nations in its wake. The new national cultures and their discourses of literary criticism have sought to delimit the possible ranges of their new nationc^l poetries. Croatian poet and artist Vlado Martek refers to this problem when he talks in a conversation about his retreat from poetry into the visual arts. Martek argues that visual signs can be communicated more directly than verbal signs, especially because poetry has been saddled with the heavy burden of carrying the torch of national identity, which is severely restricting. So during the 1980s, most Yugoslav experimental poets stopped experimenting and those who did not abandon writing poetry altogether started writing more acceptable and more traditional poetry. It is also interesting that the institution of national poetry or poetry as an ideological cultural apparatus (Sinfield 30), with its many power devices, has tried to portray poetry as an anti-intellectual field, as opposed to Theory as the field of intellectual debate. Or, we might say that most interpretations of poetry based on poststructuralism and later theories, which are supposed to be crucially anti-essentialist and anti-humanist, value poetry in most regional critical discourses as Theory's other. One might say that poetry is constructed as an other that preserves humanism as an essential but lost value.1 It is as if it had disappeared from general culture and the task of art, and especially of poetry, were to preserve it. In this regard, post-Yugoslav poetry cultures poets may choose between four possible discursive positions. The first position is that of a "talented genius", who has no knowledge but only creative intuition. The second position is that of poets who are well-educated and self-aware artists, but who never explicitly expose themselves in this light, because the ideology of mainstream poetry rejects self-awareness and intellectualism as dangerous for genuine artistic creativity. The third position is occupied by poets who double up as critics. They are part of the mainstream poetry scene insofar as they write poems that are hostile toward any intellectualism in poetry, while, on the other side, they write extremely intellectual criticism. Poets who occupy the fourth position, which was until recently unique for a group of Belgrade poets gathered in the Association for Women's Initiative (AWIN), are those who are active in the extremely intellectual-ized field of poetry, blurring the difference between poetry and theory. This position was built in relation to language poetry as a global model (Duric, Poi^^i^k^a 112-113). It should be noted that over the past few years the national poetry scenes in the post-Yugoslav area have changed dramatically. This is especially the case in Serbia and Montenegro, whose respective canons in poetry were not previously constructed as predominantly modernist, and to a lesser extent in other newly formed states: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Macedonia, and we might also add Kosovo as the latest country of the former Yugoslavia to gain independence. Although we could say that these post-Yugoslav national poetries have different and specific histories as well as different social micro-contexts, they are mostly not developing in a vacuum of locally closed cultures, bounded by their national borders. Whether we wish to argue that during late socialism Yugoslav poetry was produced in a unified, multicultural, and socialist Yugoslavia, without much regard for its internal borders, or that each Socialist Republic had a poetry and language of its own, Yugoslav poetry/poetries were always somehow related to the dominant (global) hegemonic trends in poetry. In the age of globalization, we may speak of porous national borders - state, cultural, as well as linguistic - because poetry and new trends in it are easily and immediately available and globally distributed on the Internet, at a time when English functions as the world's lingua^franca (Duric, "Globalni" 38). Before the Internet, global poetry models traveled thanks to mediators, usually translators, who were in most cases also poets and found ways to obtain books and magazines and translate poems (in socialism this was not always easy to do), functioning as mediators between different national poetry cultures and languages. The other important fact is that poets nowadays travel globally more than ever and participate in numerous local, regional, and international poetry readings, residencies, and other events, so that different poetry models are now exchanged more than ever before. With all of that in mind, we might note two dominant paradigms in writing poetry in the post-Yugoslav poetry cultures. The first of these is realism, which manifests itself in two ways. First, there is straightforward narration, i.e., poems written in free verse that deal with everyday reality, modeled after what is in the US typically called the workshop poem. The other typical manifestation of this realism follows the New York School's "I do this, I do that" poems. As for the other dominant paradigm, I might call it hybrid poetry, whose model may be found in American Hybrid, an anthology co-edited by Cole Swensen and David St. John. Swensen writes: "Hybrid poems often honor the avant-garde mandate to renew the forms and extend the boundaries of poetry ^ while also remaining committed to the emotional spectra of lived experience" (xxi). While in the context of US poetry, some poets would find this model problematic, in the context of post-Yugoslav cultures, especially for those writing in Serbia, this model might be regarded as one that opens the field (to use Robert Duncan's phrase) and emancipates it. I will now turn to the critical discourse of hybrid poems developed in the US. In his essay "Grammar Trouble" Brian Reed treats the hybrid approaches, "which blend trends from accessible lyricism to linguistic exploration", calling them "new consensus verse". This position declares that "the late twentieth-century fractions divide between 'mainstream' and 'oppositional poetries" is now obsolete" (Reed 134). Reed points to another ideological position implied in this practice: "passe are both egocentric iconoclasm of the vanguardists and the narrowness and nostalgia of the traditionalists" (134). Explaining the term "elliptical poetry", coined by Stephen Burt, Craig Dworkin writes in his "Hypermnesia" about the context of such syncretism, "with its attempt to render avant-garde techniques subservient to 'traditional lyric goals'" (80). Dworkin argues that "[e]clipse was meant to feel intransigent, a repudiation of the secret peace treaty seemingly signed between 'lyric tradition' and 'language poetry'" (80). But, Dworkin notes, even the most minor technologies are never just stylistic ornaments simply interchangeable with some other surface veneer. Formal devices constitute part of the deep structure of a text, inseparable from any consideration of thematic content. To understand this means to lay bare the ideologies, rather than ignore the historical dimensions of all linguistic forms (80). It is interesting to mention that the Belgrade-based e-magazine Agon has published Serbian translations of texts by American conceptual poets and that Kenneth Goldsmith visited Zagreb last year (2013) and presented his work at Mama. And I hope that this kind of practice will further develop in our region. In Slovenia there are poet-artists who work in the domain of new media poetry, but their work exists in a kind of isolation in their own culture. My thesis is that in so-called small cultures, experimental practice could be a kind of "safe place", outside of mainstream poetry. In this context, I might mention Vlado Martek and AWIn once again. As an experimental poet and artist, Martek has pursued his work in poetry for decades on the Croatian conceptual/post-conceptual art scene. His work occupies a border area between art and poetry. As a conceptual artist, in poetry he works with ideas concerning poetry (and art), exploring them in different kinds of materials and events. His usual media are words and drawings, and their possible relations. His poetry includes objects, maps, agitations, open-air performances and interventions, he uses photography, etc. His work is micro-political in two chief ways. One is that he deals with the politics of poetic/artistic forms: questioning first of all the borders of the field of poetry, broadening them in ways that mainstream poetry does not permit. He leaves words and returns to them, using objects and working with the ideas of what is and what could be poetry. He also questions local politics and the dominant ideologies of the society he inhabits, whether socialist or now post-socialist, always with a critical stance toward the geopolitical powers operative in the contemporary global world (Duric, "Vlado"). AWIn was a group of feminist poets gathering in Belgrade between 1996 and 2006. Their "safe space" was the feminist antiwar Belgrade scene, far away from mainstream poetry. They started with a model that could be called hybrid poetry, experimented with the lyrical and experimental in the manner of the New York School or Beat Generation, but after 2004 they based their experimentation on the experiences of the European avant-garde, from the Italian futurists, Russian cubo-futurists, Yugoslavian Zenitists, to concretism and the impulse of American language poetry. They also worked in performance poetry, reading together at a number of occasions (Duric, . Conclusion: Poetry Experiments at the Semi-periphery One should bear in mind the recent notions of multiple modernities and alter-modernism, the idea that modernism was not a single or exclusively Western phenomenon. Similarly, in "Art History after Globalization", Kobena Mercer writes: "the attention that the multiple modernities thesis gives to complex dynamics of structure and agency shows that the process of modernization-as-westernization rarely resulted in a fully achieved 'finished' state of colonial subjectification because it was constantly made ambivalent by the generative agonism of power and resistance" (237). Mercer also writes that "modernity is a mode of living that has taken root in many traditions, including ones often considered antithetical to it." It is important to point to the idea of hybridization as a response of art to these problems. But the state of affairs at the semi-periphery is more complicated. According to Belgrade-based feminist sociologist Marina Blagojevic, the semi-periphery is positioned in between the center and periphery; it is itself a kind of hybrid, in-between, unstable, in relation to the core, in a "condition of being different but not different enough, and in relation to the periphery in the state of being different but not being similar enough. So another term for the avant-garde at the semi-periphery might be "alteravant-garde", in the sense that it is too similar to the avant-garde practices of the core countries to be distinctive enough and the capital of the cultural contexts where it comes from is too small to be noticed on the global scale as powerful, important, or influential. But the trends of globalizing modernism - and I hope that soon those trends will be shared by globalizing avant-gardes as well, not only the historical avant-gardes but also the avant-gardes of the mid-20th century and the later ones - will posit these semi-peripheral alter-avant-gardes on the global map, as culturally distinctive and specific in relation to similar examples from the core and peripheral countries alike. Also, I hope that this process will make experimental, innovative, radical, avant-garde contemporary poetry not just a thinkable, but a regular practice. NOTE 1 Here I might mention Bernstein's discussion of humanism. In the US context, Bernstein explains that "[o]n the level of mass culture, humanist values emphasize mimesis of human presence and conventional modes of 'realistic' representation", whereas "[o]n the level of high culture, humanist ideology works to maintain control of those free-floating value sectors not determined by market dominance" (86). BIBLIOGRAPHY Arsenijevic, Damir. Forgotten Future: The Politics of Poetry in Bosnia and Herzegovina. BadenBaden: Nomos, 2010. Bernstein, Charles. Attack of the Difficult Poems: Essays and Inventions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Blagojevic, Marina. Knowledge Production at the Semipheriphery: A Gender Perspective. Belgrade: Institut za kriminološka i sociološka istraživanja, 2009. Bray, Joe, Alison Gibbson, and Brian McHale. "Introduction." The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature. Eds. Joe Bray, Alison Gibbons, and Brian McHale. New York: Routledge, 2012. Davidson, Michael. On the Outskirts of Form: Practicing Cultural Poetics. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011. Duric, Dubravka. "Globalni poetski pejzaži u lokalnom kontekstu: Pogled na srpsku poez-iju iz paradigme metodološkog kosmopolitizma." Prosvjeta 109 (2012): 37-44. -. Politika poezije: Tranzicija i pesnički eksperiment. Belgrade: Ažin, 2010. ---. ^'Vlado Martek: Elementarni procesi u poeziji i redefinisano polje poezije." Vlado Marl^ek: Konceptual^stičk^a poezija (1975-1983). Zagreb: MSU, 2010. 5-20. . Dworkin, Craig. "Hypermnesis." Boundary 2 36.3 (2009): 77-95. Epstein, Andrew. "Found Poetry, 'Uncreative Writing', and the Art of Appropriation." The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature. Eds. Joe Bray, Alison Gibbons, and Brian McHale. New York: Routledge, 2012. 310-322. Hoover, Paul. Fables of Representation: Essays. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2004. Mercer, Kobena. "Art History after Globalization: Formations of the Colonial Modern." Colonial Modern: Aesthetics of the Past Rebellionsfor the Future. Eds. Tom Avermaete, Serhat Karakayali, and Marion von Ostern. London: Black Dog, 2010. 233-242. O'Sullivan, Maggie (ed.). Out of Everywhere: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America & the UK. London: Reality Street Editions, 1996. Pavlič, Darja. "Contextualizing Contemporary Slovenian Lyric Poetry within Literary History." Sl^ovene Studies: Journal for Slovene Studies 31.2 (2009): 161-170. Perloff, Marjorie. Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. ---. The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985. ---. The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981. ---. Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010. Reed, Brian. "Grammar Trouble." Boun^ry 2 36.3 (2009): 133-158. Sinfield, Alan. Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain. London: Continuum, 2004. Sloan, Mary Margaret (ed.). Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women, Jersey City, NJ: Talisman House Publishers, 1998. Spahr, Juliana. "Introduction." American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language. Eds. Claudia Rankine and Juliana Spahr. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002. 1-15. Swensen, Cole. "Introduction." American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry. Eds. Cole Swensen and David St. John. New York: W.W. Norton, 2009. xvii-xxvi. Vandeborg, Susan. Paratextual Communities: American Avant-garde Poetry since 1950. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001. Sodobne eksperimentalne pesniške prakse 1«VS/« 11 I« • središča in pol-obrobja: ameriške in postjugoslovanske pesniške kulture Ključne besede: eksperimentalna poezija / avantgardna poezija / hibridna poezija / ameriška kultura / postjugoslovanska kultura / novi mediji Izhodišče članka je definicija eksperimentalne, inovativne, avantgardne poezije v ameriških pesniških kulturah. Avtorica pokaže na transformacijo področja, kjer svetovni splet in novi mediji kot nova dejstva v okolju povzročajo spremembe pri nastajanju sodobne poezije. Opozori tudi na dejstvo, da se v ameriški poeziji pojmovanje pesniškega eksperimenta razteza od performansov na računalniškem zaslonu do performansov v živo, ki postajajo čedalje pomembnejši dogodki. Drugi pomemben fenomen ameriške poezije je hibridna pesem, za katero avtorica meni, da je vplivala na različne pesniške kulture v svetu, tudi na postjugoslovanske. Pojem hibridna pesem se nanaša na dejstvo, da so konservativnejše mainstream poezije v ZDA vsrkale različne plati radikalizma, od newyorške šole in beat poezije do jezikovne poezije (language poetry). Avtorica opozarja na kritičen odnos do hibridnih pesmi znotraj radikalnega ameriškega pesniškega prizorišča. Med orisom jugoslovanskih in postjugoslovanskih poezij članek zatrjuje, da je eksperimentalna pesniška praksa, če je obstajala, na ravni nacionalnega kanona lahko veljala samo kot bolj ali manj pomembna praksa iz preteklosti. Za tako imenovane male kulture bi bilo po eni strani nemogoče zasnovati vzporedne kanone v smislu izraza »druga tradicija«, saj se pri njih eksperiment kaže kot nekaj, kar ne more biti pomembno za sodobno pesniško prakso; po drugi strani pa je fenomen hibridne pesmi čedalje pomembnejši, tako da lokalna postjugoslovanska pesniška prizorišča prakticirajo tri globalno prevladujoče pesniške modele: 1) realizem, kjer je jezik pojmovan kot zgolj inertno sredstvo za posredovanje transparentnega pomena; 2) realizem na način newyorške pesniške šole, ki deluje na način pesnika O' Hara: »Delam to, delam ono,« in 3) model hibridne pesmi, ki kombinira eksperimente, značilne za newyorško pesniško šolo, beatniško poezijo in, nekoliko manj, jezikovno poezijo. September 2013