Post-Avant Throwdown

February 9, 2008

An interesting post on the idea of “post-avant” poetics by Reginald Shepherd sparks a fiery comments conversation. Overall pretty enlightening, though the whole thing takes a turn about 2/3 of the way in that I don’t completely understand.

The issue of politics and poetry is very frustrating to me. I guess I’m a fuddy-duddy traditionalist mainstreamer because I find very little value in most of the attempts to fuse art and politics. Poems about politics are, of course, almost always simply bad. But writing poetry as a political act (in any but the most allusive, abstracted sense) mystifies me as well.

That doesn’t mean I don’t recognize that writing poetry in the 50s and 60s– when it was a rare, “outsider” activity inextricably bundled up with rebelling against authority inside and outside of academia– had to be a very different experience than it is now. But it is precisely because of that bundling that so much of the poetry suffers with the passage of time and the changing of context.

In the discussion following Shepherd’s post, Ange Mlinko laments (as I read it) that there is no “outside” any more. I agree. In fact, it is precisely from trying to create this kind of outsider culture in a distributed and mediated environment that leads to a variety of kinds of post-avant poetry that I find so disheartening. Acting or wishing that this era would be like the late 50s and 60s doesn’t make it so. It just makes a lot of unreadable poems.

I agree with Shepherd that there is a third way, and I don’t think it is about appropriating stylistic ticks or adopting a posture of newness for the sake of newness and calling oneself a member of the avant garde. On that road lays a kind of leveling, where every utterance is called poetry as if there is nothing else that words can do or be. At the same time, just because we don’t live in a time of counter-cultural upheaval that forged a particular kind of innovative poetry doesn’t mean that further innovation is impossible. Political engagement (as I define it, and again I consider a political act to rise above the broadest definitions where almost any act becomes political, because that again leads to a non-productive equation where no acts can be otherwise) still works toward familiar ends even if the locus has become more personal and we all, as Mlinko aptly puts it, operate in “hundreds of overlapping circles.” The way the post avant (or whatever you want to call them, just for the sake of having a reference point) utilizes technology is, in fact, fulfilling that promise.

Tags: poetics, poetry