Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

From: Don Byrd
Subject: Experiments
Dear Charles–
I suppose you in part posted the list of experiments as an homage to Bernadette,
and of course I wish her well.… And it is also a tribute to Tzara, Cage, and
Mac Low, all of whom I would likewise honor.
Although, as you know, I sometimes–perhaps often–do not agree with you, I
take your work very seriously. I find most of your moves in relation to the art
generative–decisively so. And I have attempted to understand why you
introduce these "experiments" in the context of your of your proposal of poetry
as experimentation.
The use of that kind of experiment, when it was of use, was to rend the placid,
rational surface of smug and placid rationalism. There was a powerful, even
controlling assurance, that the world made sense. One half of Modernism was
commitment to the revelation of precisely that sense– Yeats, Pound, Joyce,
Shoenberg, Anglo-American philosophy from Russell and Wittgenstein to
Quine and the Cognitive Scientists. It is sadly reduced but the drivel that comes
from most Creative Writing programs to this day still basks in that now grim
assurance that because I saw a blue jay on a maple branch take a shit, it most
have some true and important connection to my thought of mortality.
The irruption of the irrational and its disruption of that smug sense of the
world–whether from the Dadaist/surrealist algorithms of non-sense or from the
failure to make it cohere by the like of Pound–was immensely satisfying and, of
course, immensely productive.
The mode of production that had proven so successful in art was adapted in the
1950’s also to commercial production. The rational machine of the capitalist
economy began exploiting its own material unconscious, thus, fueling
unparalleled economic growth. The surface of the earth was increasingly
covered with the chaotic residue of riotous production: the production of art,
the production of consumer goods, the production of by-products that polluted
the environment, the production of what Smithson called "the slurbs"–"a
circular gulf between city and country–a place where buildings seem to sink
away from one’s visionP buildings fall back into sprawling babels or limbos.