Late Past the Post

Reginald Shepherd has proposed a definition for the term "post-avant poetry"—a term bandied about by poets without much consensus about its alleged referent, so I do not envy him his task, even though his definition has provided a scaffold for much subsequent discussion. Despite the currency of the term, I must confess that, since encountering the coinage in an early entry by Ron Silliman on his blog, I have studiously avoided the use of the moniker "post-avant" to describe any of the work by my peers, if only because I think that the overuse of the prefix "post-" in a lot of postmodern commentary never actually indicates the foreclosure of a particular, historical paradigm, so much as the prefix indicates our impatience that such a persistent, conceptual heritage has not yet been transcended—and thus we preemptively do so, long before we have yet constructed a much more innovative radicalism to replace it. I think that the term "post-avant poetry" thus signals a desire, among poets, for the obsolescence of the avant-garde, despite the fact that no other futuristic categories stand at the ready to upstage it….

Postmodern experience has totally recoded our demand for radical newness, since the concept of "innovation" itself now implies the kind of manufactured obsolescence that has come to justify advertisements for improved products. No longer can the avant-garde conceive of its history as a series of successional improvements, proceeding in a unilinear direction, according to a story of dynastic progress; instead, the demand for novelty and anomaly now spawns a whole array of speculative experiments that can proceed in whatever rhizomatic directions a poet might care to explore. The avant-garde must still generate "limit-cases" of exception, but now poets must do so in a milieu, where the word "new" in fact indicates a digital upgrade to the software of ideology. I might even argue that, just as the prefix "neo-" (when grafted onto the name of an artistic movement) no longer means "novel," but "retro," so also does the prefix "post-" no longer imply an advancement beyond, or even an abandonment of, a past idea for a better future—instead, the prefix now signifies something like: "more of the same—only worse.…"
Shepherd defines the "post-avant" as a generation of poets who have learned their lessons from the complete, American heritage of the avant-garde (ending with the Language Movement)—but in response to this heritage, such poets have declared no pledge of allegiance to any set of literary mandates; instead, such poets have hesitated to "factionalize" into competing, polemical movements, preferring to adopt an eclectic variety of disjunctive styles and fragmentary tropes, doing so in order to disrupt conventional storytelling about conventional subjectivity without, however, having to foreswear all the resources of the lyric voice. Shepherd suggests that such poets resemble "magpies" that combine techniques from diverse schools once considered historically incompatible, and he argues that such writers have forfeited any teleological motivations for their activity, preferring to avoid any concepts of "progress" in their discipline. For him, this eclecticism constitutes a radical gesture that makes both the recidivism of conservative poets and the vangardism of experimental poets look equally "backward" by comparison.
Shepherd has provided some original outlines for the state of current poetics, but I might question the value of any nonceword to describe the amalgamation of modern poetry under a single rubric. While I think that concepts like "synthesis" and "hybridity" constitute an important framework for innovation, the "eclecticism" that Shepherd extolls seems valuable, to me, only for so long as it can generate anomalous mutations, each one of which might differentiate itself into a unique phylum of, heretofore unforeseen, styles—all with their own incompatible, evolutionary branches. I think that such a circumstance might characterize the modern milieu of plastic artwork, where dominant, artistic "schools" have disappeared into a welter of microfauna spawned by a multiplicity of avant-garde miscegenations; however, the "eclecticism" of the post-avant, seems to risk becoming little more than a literary dilution that obliterates such disparities (defusing their polemical, stylistic arguments) in order to homogenize the avant-garde into one undifferentiated tissue of protoplasmic textualities, no less uniform in tone than any standard lyricism.
Shepherd seems to intimate that, because the "post-avant" integrates meta-lyrical themes of identity into anti-lyrical styles of rhetoric, this kind of writing constitutes the forefront of current, literary activity—when in fact (as Shepherd also suggests) such work actually seems to take pride in having forfeited any fixed claim to this forefront. I am perhaps inclined to agree with the incisive comments made by Paul Hoover, who suggests that, whether we regard the "post-avant" as either a defanging of experimental poetics or a rewilding of conservative poetics, the results constitute "a compromise," in which the avant-garde risks losing some of its unique powers of both opposition and innovation. I might concur with Hoover when he says that, consequently, we may in fact be witnessing the advent not of a "post-avant poetry" so much as a "pan-avant poetry"—an aesthetic condition, in which the avant-garde has become so pervasive and so insistent in the poetic milieu that poets may feel obliged to modify their own practice so as to accommodate the most digestible component of this once unorthodox, but now respected, set of traditions.
Finally, I must confess that I feel some relief to see that, for Shepherd, poets like the Flarfers or the Ububoys do not fall under the rubric of the "post-avant" (although Silliman might have included such poets in his own reckoning)—and I suspect that these peers might have avoided such a moniker in part because, to Shepherd, they do not practice an atelic poetry, governed by a promiscuous eclecticism; instead, they have proposed some relatively coherent, literary principles for innovation, putting these theories to work, according to an "agenda," in order to stake a claim for their merits. I think that poetry must aspire to some kind of epistemological noteworthiness by conducting experiments in order to make discoveries about language itself—and to do so means testing some hypothesis about the aesthetic potential of some untried formula (be it, for example, in the ironic prosody of online searches or the boring prosody of copied newscasts—or whatever…). I do not think that poets can practice declawed versions of a polemical aesthetic (like Langpo, for example), and thereby expect to make work of unprecedented significance.
Despite any desire to see the avant-garde become obsolete, poets must still confront the fact that, even in its vaunted absence, they must nevertheless aspire to become more imaginative, if not more progressive, than the past so as to keep poetry itself robust….