Experimental Fiction

Kristina Marie Darling's Kill Your Idols: On the Violence of Experimental Literature caught my attention by its title and although the piece concerns itself with two poetry collections and a memoir. I figures since I don't really know what I am doing with my writing then all of it is an experiment. With that in mind,I found much to think about in Ms. Darling's opening paragraph:

In a recent lecture on innovative writing, Myung Mi Kim argued that any artistic experiment is inherently violent, as the artist is dismantling an inherited tradition in order to make way for the new. For many writers, innovation does indeed contain destruction in its very definition. After all, the experimental text cannot exist in the same space as the conventions that restrict its meaning, stifle its performativity, and deny its legitimacy.

Darling make these claims for the three books she reviews:

If innovation is in itself a destructive gesture, can that generative violence be placed in service of activism and advocacy through language? Kelsey, Talusan, and Liu show us that the precision of the experiment constitutes its power. In each of these three collections, this dismantling of convention is placed in service of a specific philosophical question, the work an inquiry into what is possible when specific rules associated with language are renegotiated. Here, language is wielded as veiled threat, as provocative reversal, as gloriously shattered syntactic convention. Yet it is this space between words that allows us to see the light.

I am not sure if prose can achieve what Darling claims but what's wrong abut a little aspiration?  America has always been an apiration.