>legitimacy is boring

good point. But I think "experimental"
deep down

means, "Please don't judge me."

which I have no problem with, actually...
(please don't judge me)

I think have this sort of discussion is closer to what I originally intended when I started this tribe. there's nothing "wrong" with the stuff that usually shows up, but y'know, I had my agenda. that noone cares about, but that's ok...if the word "experimental" can foster such discussions, then that is at least one good reason for keeping it. it seems to motivate people. many of whom have obviously never read or even heard of kathy acker. perhaps they will read her, and others "like" her. and go to events like Writers with Drinks, and read Other magazine, and go to City Lights on Thursday for Other Mag's reading...

I shouldn't've waited so long to return to this site. First I'll reply to Pete :

You make some good points. First, although I don't see so much the apologetic nature of the word "nontraditional", I DO see that it can be taken as a sort of arrogant label (that is, the "YOU'RE just following the pack" sort of thing (notwithstanding that we "nontraditinalists" ARE, by nature, sort of arrogant about the whole thing)). So, yeah, maybe "nontraditional" isn't so good a label.

I use the word "progressive" a lot, but it's a tricky word. It doesn't really mean "nontraditional" or "weird" or "unusual", and the latter three terms don't necessarily imply progressiveness (and, actually, they usually don't) -- by "progressive" I always mean work that represents cultural motion. Progressive literature is literature which gives people new ideas, new images (something Werner Herzog was fond of touting), and most of all new possibilities.

If by "Experimental" you ONLY mean works that are by nature uncertain and so are presented as such, and simply trying out things on the audience, then I suppose it can apply. But when it comes to fiction and verse, people simply don't use the word that way. Even more so than "avant-garde", the word's been adopted very widely to refer to any literary work that's atypical.

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If anyone DOES have any ideas about a good word that can describe nontraditional fiction or verse, then I'd love to have THAT discussion. Actually, the word "transgressive", which describes another of the Tribes on this site, sounds interesting to me. Does anybody else think so?

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Charles :

I DO care about your agenda! But my objection to the word "experimental" was what drove me to post. Maybe a little later i'll talk about some writers. (Of course, people can also go to my site, www.gonelawn.com, and hopefully learn a little about some author you didn't know about before.) Also: Ironically, I mentioned Kathy Acker not just because she said in interview exactly what I myself had been thinking, but also because, among people who're really into weird, daring, and/or nontraditional fiction, she's pretty well known. At least I figured she would be to anyone who's attracted to a discussion about "experimental writing".

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mIEKAL :

Here's the line I liked most in your post: "Every artist creates from the comfortable edge of their domain, trying, pushing, retreating, conjuring specimens that can be called their own." There're two phrases here that really made me think: "comfortable edge of their domain" and "conjuring specimens". I like those very much, and they're accurate, I agree there. And this is precisely what I mean: EVERY artist experiments - it's how we become capable, and it's how we find our voices.

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This is just one of the problems I have with the term "experimental" as it's used with literature -- very simply, by definition it's inaccurate. And the second is: Final works are generally not experiments (because how many artists do any of us know, really, who will write something carelessly and then just toss it out there? I know, I know this was the original intention of the French Surrealist movement, but let's face it -- Surrealism's original intention was perverted even while it was in full swing, in the 30's. And the OULIPO group, of course, is by its very nature conceptual, not artistic -- each OULIPean activity is not a work of art itself but an experiment. They come up with ideas of how an artist might restrict herself in order to engender new ideas. Therefore, when one tries one of these ideas, one is "experimenting". If the artist leaves it at that and sticks it in her drawer (not drawers), then yes, that remains an experiment; but let's face it: most artists are by nature self-conscious and want other people to think THIS about them and not THAT. So... you experiment, you modify the experiment, you transform it into art.

But actually, this all brings up an interesting question: CAN a work of art, in its complete state, actually be "experimental"? For example: With Kathy Acker's work there's a deliberate fragility (in concert with its very fierceness). But I wouldn't call that "experimental" (and obviously, she didn't either), especially since she put a certain amount of work into it, she improved her craft and her art over time. HOWEVER: If I, artist, were to decide to take the approach that I would start playing around with ideas that I was uncertain about, try to work them out as I could, and at some point, still unsure of how the result will come across to various audience members, just throw it out there to see how it's received... would this be "Experimental art"? Are "experimentation" and "art" REALLY so distinct that you cannot have both of them in the same room at the same time?

Are dreams experiments, and if not, what are they?

In other words, i guess: Am I all wrong?

Who here said art WASN'T an art form? True, "art form" was probably the wrong term to use. Of course most people, if not nearly all, consider literature an "art form". But what I meant was two things:

1. When people say the word "art", most others think "painting and sculpture", sometimes performance / conceptual art.
2. Literature, it seems to me (and this is stated in the Gone Lawn 'manifesto'), is the most stagnant of all art forms. I think this is because, unlike art forms such as painting, sculpture, and conceptual art (whose culture stresses invention - I went to art school), in literature there seems to be - and I can't explain it - this strange adherence to 'convention' (I also studied English/writing at university, where in fiction classes there are usually two or three inventive students), whatever that convention might be at the time. Every few decades there's a new tradition, it seems, and writers are expected to write that way. Why? I don't know.

[As I've heard], there're a number of writing schools that embrace and teach.... a particular convention.

Plus the market is still strangled by big business (primarily Bertelsemann/Random House). I don't have to explain their story. Fortunately, thanks to the internet things are gradually, I think, heading toward change. But people're going to have to be active about it, if this change is really going to bloom. (Reference to all: check out www.thelongtail.com, Chris Anderson's site. Read his book, too.)