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27 2 NEW CONSENSUS POETICS AND THE AVANT-GARDE The poets I most care about are, maybe, trying to become human—or nonhuman; anyway, they are not so quick to assume what the human is or how it manifests itself. —Charles Bernstein, interview with Marjorie Perloff (2002) In a May 2007 review of three volumes published by Atelos Press, Eric Keenaghan suggests that the American poetic avant-garde is kaput. The issue is not quality. The books in question—Laura Moriarty’s Ultravioleta (2006), Jocelyn Saidenberg’s Negativity (2006), and Juliana Spahr’s The Transformation (2007)—are all well worth reading insofar as they “critique the imperatives of identification and categorization constituting our social, cultural, and political lives.” The problem is their packaging. Despite being held up as the latest offerings from the avant-garde, they show no signs of allegiance to a “coherent political and intellectual program,” nor do they engage in “combative and territorial posturing.” Moreover, judged by the standards of an older generation, they backpedal. “Unlike their L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E forebears, Saidenberg, Moriarty, and Spahr insist that language is referential, that the sentence be combined syllogistically into narrative units, and even that the poetic personhood be recuperated.” This retreat from the barricades, Keenaghan argues, is laudable . By forgoing the “security” of an avant-garde “identity,” these poets avoid mistaking “an oppositional identitarian attitude for a resistive politics.” They rediscover, too, that “narrative” can serve “as a device for constructing . . . forms of commonality and for beginning the work of redefining personhood and humanity .”1 This review reflects what one might call an emergent critical consensus. In the wake of essays such as Stephen Burt’s “The Elliptical Poets” (1999) and Susan Wheeler’s “What Outside?” (1998–99), it has become increasingly common for professors and poets alike to declare obsolete the late twentieth century’s 28 NOBODY’S BUSINESS fractious divide between “mainstream” and “oppositional” poetries.2 Indeed, there is a Norton anthology—American Hybrid (2009), edited by Cole Swensen and David St. John—awarding this thesis a pedagogical imprimatur. According to Amazon.com’s website, American Hybrid demonstrates that “the longacknowledged ‘fundamental division’ between experimental and traditional is disappearing in American poetry in favor of hybrid approaches that blend trends from accessible lyricism to linguistic exploration.” The Hegelian logic here is seductive . Back in the 1950s, an ossified establishment spawned its antithesis, a spunky countercultural rival. A period of conflict ensued, but at last we have entered an era of synthesis that preserves and perfects the best aspects of the writing from both camps. Inessentials, too, have fallen away: passé are both the egocentric iconoclasm of the vanguardists and the narrowness and nostalgia of the traditionalists. Does this storyline fit the facts? One can invoke it to make sense of a large swath of current American poetry, ranging from high-profile works by established names—Brenda Hillman’s Cascadia (2001), Heather McHugh’s Eyeshot (2003), and John Yau’s Paradiso Diaspora (2006), for example—to impressive volumes by younger figures, among them Terrance Hayes’s Wind in a Box (2006), D. A. Powell’s Cocktails (2004), and Elizabeth Willis’s Meteoric Flowers (2006). In the case of Atelos, however, the idea of a grand synthesis is a harder sell. The press is co-edited by Lyn Hejinian, a founding member of the San Francisco Bay Area branch of Language Poetry. Two of her previous ventures, Tuumba Press and the Poetics Journal (co-edited with Barrett Watten), were instrumental in shaping , defining, and publicizing that movement. Keenaghan’s review implies that Hejinian is presiding over the dissolution of the very cause that she did so much to advance in the past. But what if, under Hejinian’s experienced eye, Atelos truly is helping to usher in a new phase in the historical unfolding of the avant-garde? Admittedly, the contemporary poetic avant-garde may no longer much resemble the phenomenon analyzed in the last century by such influential thinkers as Peter Bürger, Andreas Huyssen, and Fredric Jameson—and hence may not be recognizable qua vanguard by many of today’s academics—but why should today’s formally adventurous utopian poets write in the same way or toward the same ends as their counterparts in the 1910s, 1950s, or 1980s? To defend this thesis one could turn to any of the poets in Keenaghan’s review . Robert Kaufman has elucidated Laura Moriarty’s innovative “Adornian poetics”; Saidenberg has strong ties to the queer...

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