"There is, about artists when asked to define their business, a coyness which would be exquisitely ludicrous if it were evinced by chemists or mathematicians, by carpenters or brick-layers. This coyness, and the vague waving of hands to give the expression of helplessness, in-a-sort, in the grip of some high force, which if not divine, is at least too much above the common level to be comprehended by the Philistine, or common-sense man -- these are quite sufficient to place art as we now know it, in its sub-conscious period. There is nothing to be gained by calling out against artists: their lack of comprehension as to what they are about, is a matter for regret rather than reprehension. They are in the position the alchemists and astrologers were, before alchemy became chemistry, and astrology astronomy."1
Despite being all but forgotten, & intentionally so -- see, for instance, T.S. Eliot's attribution of Pound's 'The Serious Artist' not to The New Freewoman but to its successor The Egoist, in his selection of Pound's Literary Essays 2 (this follows Pound's own unwillingness to mention The New Freewoman or Marsden in his synoptic history of 'Small Magazines' for The English Journal3]; see also Pound's 1934 letter to John Drummond fancifully claiming Marsden was "titular edtr. . . . who wrote the front pages on "philosophy" and left the rest free to letters", as well as his disingenuous 1913 letter to W.C. Williams positing Richard Aldington & himself as the journal's editors, replacing Marsden entirely4; & see the willingness contemporary critics have shown in writing Marsden out of their accounts of modernism, such as for instance Marjorie Perloff's repetition of Pound's claim for Aldington as editor5. For necessary, accurate discussion of Marsden see Bruce Clarke's 'Dora Marsden and Ezra Pound: "The New Freewoman" and "The Serious Artist"' and Andrew Thacker's, 'Dora Marsden and The Egoist: "Our War Is With Words"'6.
Dora Marsden's critique stands firm nearly one hundred years later, when artists seem happier than ever to attribute their work to either supernatural powers or the wholesale application of formal technique & theoretical construct. It is telling that in the second decade of the third millennium on God's grey earth, popular culture remains more accepting of the spiritual channeling of 'holy minimalists' Arvo Pärt & John Tavener, or the cut-&-paste 'uncreative writing' of Kenneth Goldsmith7, than with the messy decisions found in the works of Iancu Dumitrescu, Ana-Maria Avram, jwcurry, Simon H. Fell, T.H.F. Drenching & a host of others no one but the AMM seems to actually enjoy. As Frank Zappa had 'The Evil Prince' bemoan in an outtake of his masterful Broadway satire Thing-Fish:
"Those dreadful CREATIVES! Those up-rising NATIVES! They make us remember; They cause us such grief!"8
Why should it be almost embarrassing at this time to listen to, read, or be an artist who doesn't fit into a pat theoretical mold? It is entirely plausible that, following the marketing & conditioning of mass media trends & the pattern of lazy academics studying only works which fit into pre-made categories, the public has limited its taste in advance to suit perceived ideal forms - the American Idol phenomenon, wherein the only work of interest is ridiculed & rejected. It is also entirely sensible that the popular Public ought to be of no more concern to creative people today than it was to modernists one hundred years ago, as indicated in Margaret Anderson's motto for The Little Review, "Making No Compromise with the Public Taste"9.
To say this is not to advocate the type of elitist politics & aesthetics fashionable in the early twentieth century, nor to push towards cliquish schools such as 'Pataphysics', 'psychogeography' & other contemporary art fads, but rather to encourage occultation in Breton's (or Finnegans Wake's) sense of developing inwardly & perversely right in the midst of tumultuous popular life.
Academia seems to have frozen its accounts of the arts for the last thirty years in a post- situation, or at best a spin cycle of neo- isms. But of course we're not post- anything - we're still right in the thick of it, requiring active decision-making in the present to transform this miserable world. Perhaps the greatest difficulty the artist faces today would be the quantity of information requiring sifting & critique to even understand his or her necessary role in upending this shady business. Dealing with it & finding one's way thru as an artist requires time, effort, & in many cases money; it's unsurprising that most people with those resources don't devote them to the difficult task of creativity, but rather to uncritical consumption. The arts in these last hundred years have been strenuously advertised as identity politics & lifestyle wallpaper, a part of pre-packaged culture alongside mall-bought clothing or supermarket food to perpetuate a non-participatory affirmation of society as it stands. The labour required to create the product is hidden - even its status as a product is hidden in a cloak of marketed personality - & the most successful artists are hence those who reproduce uncreatively, thru nostalgia & plagiarism, from dead religion, pop art & historical trends.
Authentic creativity - actually, both authenticity & creativity are concepts so abused & drained of meaning that here I'll slip into shorthand & just call it 'poetry' - is the most unprofitable activity known to contemporary life. It is, in relation to the society which produces it, rubbish - hence my call not for a 'serious artist' but for a dedicated ragpicker, or perhaps 'serious derelict', a librarian of neglected information. It is the poet's task at any time to perform a socially contrarian function - not in order to conserve tradition or advance culture or as a wilful withdrawal from status quo just for the sake of difference, but wholeheartedly to serve a dialectical function, to become the antithesis, without which synthesis is unfathomable. There must be such a dialectic, or the subject - & her language - fails to change & thus dies. Whether Dora Marsden or Eugene Jolas or Ben Watson or James Boswell constitutes a necessary piece of neglected information is of course a historical question - & the poet today must answer such questions continuously in relation to his or her particular time & place.
Poetry, then, must be the part of society which is thrown away, the remainder, until society has advanced to Lautréamont's vision of "poetry made by all" - that is, until society ceases to find parts of its production worthless & begins to value culture not as what we consume but what we create thru our own participation.
There are times in which the creative poet must rebel against even poetry itself -- & if the neglected information of a time & place is not linguistic in nature, then poetry migrates outside the poem, & it is the poet's task to follow. *
Committed as she was to anarchist individualism, the political philosophy popular among late nineteenth-century bomb throwers - see for instance Richard Parry's The Bonnot Gang (Rebel Press, London, 1987) for one of the few accounts of the movement in English - & evidently unaware of the pitch-perfect satire of 'Saint' Max Stirner by Marx & Engels in The German Ideology, Dora Marsden unfortunately didn't pick up on many of the collective revolutionary developments in the aesthetics of her time: she is regrettably silent on the radical potential of jazz improvisation, motion picture cartoons & dadaist anti-art. In later issues her radically subjectivist philosophy & militant feminist politics evolved into a quasi-Ayn Rand individualism she termed 'archism', a cosmic justification of the virtues of capital in gratifying "vulgar simple satisfaction according to taste - a tub for Diogenes; a continent for Napoleon; control of a trust for Rockefeller"10. After nearly two decades of writing up her philosophy in relation to metaphysics in Lake District seclusion (where else?), her resulting books were ignored or dismissed by even her former anarchist peers, & there followed a breakdown & confinement in mental asylum for her remaining two decades.
Nonetheless, Dora Marsden was perfectly correct when rubbishing Ezra Pound for his pretentious high seriousness & "vague waving of hands", envisioning instead an 'Art of the Future' to in fact deal subjectively, critically, creatively - & in many cases humorously - with the present. There would be examples of such an art in her time: James Joyce (whose Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man she was the first to publish); Edgard Varèse (whose own rubbishing of the term Futurist in favour of 'present-day composer' was one of the most forward-thinking gestures in modern music); & Leon Trotsky (who preempted all static analytic philosophies & formalisms & their faux objectivity with his concept of Permanent Revolution). She is in her early work as unpopular & correct as the AMM itself, & for an understanding of Lautréamont's call for poetry made by all as not lowest common denominator ingratiation but rather as uncompromisingly modernist & politically radical, one need look no further than her own lost beginnings to envision a present beyond the neo- & post- rehash. Thru Marsden we see Ezra Pound's famous 'Make It New' motto as no more than a call to redecorate tradition, & we reject such recuperative solutions outright -- 'Make It Up' is the revolutionary risk we take, creating the future from the very left behinds of our boring, popular present.
Notes
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1. 1 November 1913: 181
2. TS Elliot, in Ezra Pound, Literary Essays, London: Faber and Faber, 1954: 41
3. Ezra Pound, 'Small Magazines' for The English Journal, Vol. 19 No. 9, Nov. 1930: 689-704.
4. D.D. Paige, ed., The Letters of Ezra Pound 1907-1941, Faber and Faber, London, 1951: 343-4; 65.
5. Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986: 264n7.
6. Bruce Clarke, 'Dora Marsden and Ezra Pound: The New Freewoman and The Serious Artist', Contemporary Literature, Vol. 33 No. 1, Spring 1992: 91-112; and Andrew Thacker, 'Dora Marsden and The Egoist: "Our War Is With Words"', English Literature in Transition 1880-1920, Vol. 36 No. 2, 1993: 179-96.
Just quietly, the last two articles are available for free on aaaaarg.org ; & not so quietly, the complete run of The Freewoman, The New Freewoman, & (coming soon) The Egoist are available as free digital files on modjourn.org.
7. Hosted by The White House, no less: http://jacket2.org/commentary/kenny-goldsmith-perform-white-house
8. Zappa 1984, in Carl Weissner, ed., Zonx: Texte letzter Hand, 1977-1994, Frankfurt, Zweitausendeins, 1996: 614.
9. Much of The Little Review is likewise now freely available on modjourn.org
10. Dora Marsden, 'Views and Comments', The Egoist, Vol. 1 No. 5 (2 March 1914): 84.
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