The Poet Resigns: Essays on Poetry in a Difficult Time

Negative Legislators

80 Negative Legislators Exhibiting the Post-Avant is there such a thing as post-avant poetry? If so, what makes it post-avant? And why is it as it is? The answers, in the briefest form I can devise, are “yes,” “reticence about large claims,” and “generational experience,” respectively. Such answers are, of course, brief and crude enough to be entirely indefensible. A slightly more extended treatment in the form of a series of exhibits will, I hope, be slightly less indefensible. Exhibit A: Who You Callin’ Post-Avant? Reginald Shepherd, in an essay called “Who You Callin’ Post-Avant?” offers as good a short definition of the post-avant as one is likely to find: ‘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 (from Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan to John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara), particularly the Projectivist/Black Mountain School and the New York School(s), 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....Though 81 Poetry in a Difficult World many of these poets have projects and even systems, there aren’t a lot of programs. There’s much prose writing and thinking about poetry, and many, many blogs (this is a very wired ‘generation’), but not many manifestoes. (n.p.) Post-avants are poets who tend to shy away from the autobiographical, anecdotal poetry that has made up the bulk of the poetry found in established American poetry magazines. “But,” writes Shepherd, “they don’t just discard the self as an ideological illusion.” In addition, ...they incorporate fracture and disjunction without enthroning it as a ruling principle. 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. Their work combines the lyric’s creative impulse with the critical impulse of Language poetry. 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 (let alone grand narratives) of artistic ‘progress’ or ‘advance’... (n.p.) The eclecticism, the crossing of the lyrical with the non-lyrical, and the generally non-heroic sense of the poet’s historical mission—I’ve seen these over and over in the works of the poets of my generation. The non-heroic, non-manifesto-writing ethos certainly applies to the postavant sense of artistic progress—and this is different from several prior generations. When you read, say, Ezra Pound (“to break the pentameter, that was the first heave”), you get a sense that he really believes there’s a kind of advance taking place (538). You get a similar sense from many critical accounts of what happened to poetry around the time of Robert Lowell’s Life Studies: poets, it seemed, had suddenly broken through stuffy mid-century formalism and into a new, advanced form of freedom (in Modern Poetry After Modernism James Longenbach called this the “breakthrough narrative” version of American poetry). And although it has sometimes been satirized by some of the poets, there’s often a heroic strain in language poetry polemics, a sense of intrepidly bearing the art forward to some New Jerusalem while fighting back the undead armies 82 The Poet Resigns of tradition. There’s little of this heroic sense in the post-avant. The post-avant has no significant interest in making grand claims of any kind. Not only does it eschew a sense of heroic poetic progress: it eschews large political or spiritual claims. For better or for worse, you just don’t find anyone affiliated with the post-avant acting the revolutionary or guru the way Allen Ginsberg did. Exhibit B: The Negative Legislator It is no accident, then, that George Oppen has had a kind of renaissance among poets of the post-avant. Consider what James Longenbach says about him in...