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Watch Out, Man, Don’t Trip
Over That Post-Avant!
3 July 2008, the poet @ 9:35 pm

I’ve been amused over the months reading Ron Silliman’s ideas on post-avant poetry and what he calls the School of Quietude. I’ve been a bit confused mostly, wondering what he meant by them for I had never heard anyone else talk about them. But since I’ve been in and out of the poetry world for the last 10 years, it is possible that I could have missed something. I didn’t, thankfully.

Since I could never get a real read from Silliman on just what these terms meant, I am thankful that I finally found a resource that has shed some light on the subject. Reginald Shepherd wrote a blog post in February of this year titled “Defining ‘Post-Avant-Garde’ Poetry”.

Shepherd had originally published his piece on the Poetry Foundation’s blog, Harriet, where he is a regular contributor. I’ve noted some of his insights regarding the definition and character of the Post-Avant “school” of poetics and would like to offer my own thoughts.

His first bit of meaty insight comes in this rather long sentence that at least makes an effort to define post-avant poetics in some sense (he gets better):

“Post-avant” (as in, “post-avant-garde”—insider groups love shorthand) poets can be described as writers who, at their best, have imbibed the lessons of the modernists and their successors in what might be called the experimental or avant-garde stream of American poets, including the Objectivists (especially Oppen and Zukofsky), what have been called the New American Poetries, particularly the Projectivist/Black Mountain School and the New York School(s), from Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan to John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara, and the Language poets (including such poets and polemicists as Charles Bernstein and Ron Silliman), without feeling the need (as so many other poetic formations have) to pledge allegiance to a particular group identity (the poetry world is full of fence-building and turf wars) or a particular mode of proceeding artistically.

The bold parts of this sentence are the essence of what he’s getting at (minus the parenthetical clauses). I see three things here to highlight and draw attention to:

• They’ve imbibed the lessons of the Modernists and successors
• In the experimental or avant-garde stream of American poetics
• Without pledging allegiance to a particular group or mode of artistic expression (my term: aesthetic)

Without getting into too much detail about the Modernists (I think you all know how I feel), I’d like to just point you to a link that covers, in broad brush strokes, how they ruined American poetry. Keep in mind, however, that the Modernists did have much to teach us and it wasn’t all bad, but it certainly wasn’t all good either.

Regarding the stream of American poetics classified as avant-garde, it’s rather broad. I’ve said before that I don’t like the avant-garde poets, but that’s a rather broad generalization that isn’t quite true. I do like some of them. But I tend not to like the purists. Particularly, I am averse to Gertrude Stein and her disciples as well as the Imagists and others like them. But it’s hard not to feel the influence of the avant-garde poets in contemporary poetics. It’s everywhere. With the exception of a few traditionalists and New Formalists, they’ve really have some influence on us all.

That last bullet point is the essence, I think, of what is meant by the post-avant movement - at least, as Shepherd defines it. Post avant poets do not feel the need to become a part of a group or subscribe to a particular poetic philosophy. They are much more interested in simply writing poetry using poetic devices that work for what they are trying to do.

So Who Is A Post Avant Poet?
I’ve taken the liberty to read through Shepherd’s post regarding this topic several times before writing about it. I wanted to be sure to take in as much as I could before embarrassing myself. But he goes on to add some more characteristics to this definition of post-avant poetry that prove to be useful:

• They don’t form a “movement”, but a set of tendencies (in other words, it isn’t an organized effort; post-avants just migrate toward nowhere in particular)
• Quote: such writing “intentionally blurs the distinction between ‘difficulty’ and ‘accessibility,’ preferring instead to address a continuum of utterance.” (I found it particularly helpful here that Shepherd also included several journals and publishers that publish the type of poetry he is discussing)
• Books, or projects, are important apart from individual poems
• There is a lot of writing about poetry, but not much in the way of a manifesto
• Post-avants like to explore abstraction as a mode and theme
• Post-avants also eschew the predominant autobiographical or pseudo-autobiographical anecdote
• There is a questioning of the self and personal experience without discarding the self as an ideological illusion
• There is an avoidance or complication of narrative
• Post-avants will incorporate disjunction without enthroning it
• Quote: They are interested in exploring, interrogating, and sometimes exploding language, identity, and society, without giving up on the pleasures, challenges, and resources of the traditional lyric.
• Quote: Their work combines the lyric’s creative impulse with the critical project of Language poetry, engaging the dialectic of what critic Charles Altieri calls lyricism and lucidity and what, earlier, W.H. Auden called enchantment and disenchantment without settling on one side or the other.

I found these characteristics rather interesting and helpful and found myself going through the list to see if they apply to me. As a summary of the above, Shepherd had this to say:

In Stephen Burt’s words, they are “trying to figure out how to incorporate both lyric and non- (if not anti-) lyric impulses, and trying…to put modernist fragmentation together with Romantic expectations about voice and form,” and without any preconceptions about what forms such a potential synthesis might take. Theirs is a magpie-like eclecticism, that draws from whatever materials, traditions and techniques are of interest and of use, however seemingly incompatible, however ideologically opposed historically. They don’t try to destroy the past for the sake of the future, or trumpet teleological notions of artistic “progress” or “advance,” though they are fascinated with the processes of poetic construction.

That about sums it up to me. It looks and sounds a lot like what I’ve been discussing with regard to Millennial Poetics. While there may not be a direct 1-to-1 correlation, there is, I think, enough of a common sense of judgment that we could safely say Reginald Shepherd’s Post-Avant Poetics and my Millennial Poetics are close to the same. His post-avant poetics is certainly much more defined and detailed and based on outside observation of other poets writing in a particular mode while my Millennial Poetics is simply based on my own personal philosophy and the way that I like to write. The defining characteristic for me is his statement:

Theirs is a magpie-like eclecticism, that draws from whatever materials, traditions and techniques are of interest and of use, however seemingly incompatible, however ideologically opposed historically.

This can be summed up in my own philosophy in this pillar: There is no prejudice with regard to forms, schools, techniques, or devices. While there may be some differences between my own philosophy and Shepherd’s correlatives, I suspect that if you study all the poets on his list that there will be some differences between them such that not any one of them represent every characteristic on his list. But similarities exist for the sake of comparison not necessarily for the sake of definition. As he points out, poets from historic schools are not necessarily grouped together because they share the same style or voice or even mode of expression; sometimes it is because they share the same political or social attitudes. To be sure, William Blake and Percy Bysshe Shelley (both Romantics) are about as different as night and day. One was a religious mystic and the other was an atheist, but they shared a common aesthetic attitude with regard to language even if their styles are completely different.

According to Shepherd, “This cross-fertilization has been happening in American poetry for a long time ….” Yes, and I think Ron Silliman knows that as well. I wonder if his discussions of post-avant poetics is based on his understanding that Language Poetry (his own school) is at the end of the road of the avant-garde dynamic. Is that where the post-avant idea came from?

I think it’s healthy that younger poets (I don’t think this applies to me) do not care about divisions among themselves. To me, and I think to many others, a solid poem based on any aesthetic is better than a mediocre poem based on none and a good poet with mixed aesthetic preferences is a darn sight better than a half-good poet devoted to just one mode of expression.

Poetics is not so much an art or a science as it is a philosophy. And like any good philosophy, it’s got to be grounded in the philosophies of the past. It has to say something about where it came from without throwing rocks at the glass, but it needs to also point a way to the future without being divorced from the present. In my view, Shepherd’s view of post-avant poetics does that. It’s much more defined than Silliman’s vague references and that allows me to get my mind around it. Otherwise, if I don’t look down I might trip over a poet who has fallen in a post-avant garde gutter and can’t get up.

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