My Avant-Garde Card

I differentiate avant-garde used as a critical term with precise historical entailments from the use of avant-garde in innovative poetry circles, where it is a loose synonym (along with such adjectives as experimental, modernist, postavant, postmodern, etc.) used to mark affiliation. The poetic avant-garde is both sequential (involving a sense of advance in the present) and transhistorical (involving a historically mixed archive of examples); it cannot be defined by any sequence of formal features. I then discuss my poem “Confession” in the context of Language writing, focusing on the lines “I / seem to have lost my avant-garde // card in the laundry.” To clarify the ironic play of the poem, I borrow a pair of terms from religious studies: orthodoxy/orthopraxis. An avant-garde orthopraxis is a permanently paradoxical notion; in the present, avant-garde orthodoxy is a stultifying danger.