Interesting observations from Marjorie Perloff in an essay titled After Language Poetry: Innovation and its Theoretical Discontents:
The OED reminds us that innovation was once synonymous with sedition and even treason. In 1561, Thomas Norton wrote in Calvin’s Institute, “It is the duty of private men to obey, and not to make innovation of states after their own will.” Richard Hooker in 1597 refers to a political pamphleteer as “an authour of suspicious innovation.” The great Jacobean dramatist John Webster speaks of “the hydra-headed multitude / That only gape for innovation” (1639), and in 1796, Edmund Burke refers to the French Revolution as “a revolt of innovation; and thereby, the very elements of society have been confounded and dissipated.”
Indeed, it was not until the late nineteenth century that innovation became perceived as something both good and necessary, the equivalent, in fact, of avant-garde, specifically of the great avant-gardes of the early century from Russian and Italian Futurism to Dada, Surrealism, and beyond. I cannot here trace the vagaries of the term, but it is important to see that, so far as our own poetry is concerned, the call for Making it New was the watchword of the Beats as of Black Mountain, of Concrete Poetry and Fluxus as of the New York School. At times in recent years, one wonders how long the drive to innovate can continue, especially when, as in the case of Sloan’s Moving Borders, fifty contemporary American women poets are placed under the “innovative” umbrella. Given these numbers, one wonders, who isn’t innovative? And how much longer can poets keep innovating without finding themselves inadvertently Making It Old?
The essay rambles and is tedious at points, but it does raise the significant question of how we accept and deny innovation. After an intense and sometimes furious pace of trying to help keep innovative ideas and product launches secure during the past few weeks, I have to say I am exhausted and excited at the same time — building a bridge between old/known and new/untested is at the heart of practicing security in the modern world of rapid “life-cycles”.
Imagine training for years on how to make things safe and then being dropped into territory unknown to anyone and asked to steer innovation. Do you draw upon your practiced routines, or start innovating, or both? And for how long do you need to stay friendly with innovation before you can turn the project over to groups who specialize in low-risk, high-return automation?