February 4, 2008
Blogging the AWP, Round Two
More reports from the trenches at the writers’ conference here (notes from a panel on memoir) and here (a panel for short-story partisans). At Harriet, the Poetry Foundation’s blog, Rigoberto González fires off a few choice words about the reading lineup and who is and isn’t heard:
“I will have to say though that I was very disappointed that the Latino headliners were weakly represented. ... It reminded me of the joke: What does AWP stand for? All White People. Well, for those of us that have been going to AWP over the years, we immediately recognize this statement as false. You see people of color everywhere: they’re working the bookfair tables, buying books, attending panels, and cleaning the hotel rooms! But we’re only sporadically present on that glossy poster AWP sends to us every year. When a Latino face makes it on there I get the phone tree started. All that just to say, I still love AWP, great job, but it can get better, esteemed board members.”
On the same blog, Reginald Shepherd uses the conference as an opportunity to ask “What’s in and what’s out?” in American poetry:
“... the boundaries of the ‘inside” and the “outside” of the poetry world, or rather the multiple contemporary American poetry worlds, are very porous and unpredictable, and are constantly being redrawn. For example, whatever some people may think of AWP and the AWP conference as instances or symbols of ‘official verse culture’ or some such shibboleth, almost everyone I met and/or spent time with at both conferences I’ve attended could be considered some variety of a ‘post-avant’ writer.”
If anyone has a handy definition of “post-avant” to share, please do.
Jennifer Howard | Posted on Monday February 4, 2008 | PermalinkComments
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Saul Bellow called people to the center; Rousseau warned people off of imaginative drama and its excesses of murder and lust; “post-avant” poetry is stuff, in verbal form, written by people who share “an attitude”—poets who share anything at all with other poets are no longer poetic. Indeed the best of them—Pinsky and Edgar Bowers—do not even share things with themselves. They are historic protuberances in human experience and its expression. Farmers of verbal roots.
— Richard Tabor Greene Feb 4, 06:04 PM #
“Post-avant” is not a term I invented—it’s bandied about quite a bit in the online poetry world, with much of a sense of “we all know what that is“—but I believe it can be defined, and will attempt to do so.
“Post-avant” (as in, “post-avant garde“—insider groups love shorthand) poets (I am a poet, and I am primarily describing 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 what have been called the New American Poetries (from Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan to John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara—a rather disparate group) and the Language poets (including most prominently such poets and polemicists as Charles Bernstein and Ron Silliman, the latter of whom is a prominent presence in the online poetry world), without feeling the need (as so many other poetic formations have) to pledge allegiance to a particular group identity (the poetry world is full of fence-building and turf wars) or a particular mode of proceeding artistically, though they do tend to eschew the standard and standardized autobiographical or pseudo-biographical anecdote which predominates in what’s called (usually pejoratively) “mainstream” poetry, and they tend to avoid or at least seriously complicate narrative in general. They are interested in exploring, interrogating, and sometimes exploding language, identity, and society, without giving up on the glories and resources of the traditional lyric. Their work combines the creative impulse of the traditional lyric with the critical impulse of movements like Language poetry.
There are doubtless many “post-avant” poets who would not recognize themselves in this description and would even vehemently reject it (practitioners of “flarf,” for instance, which I can’t describe because I don’t understand what it is or is supposed to be), but I think that this is a fair if overly broad description of a significant area of contemporary poetic activity.
Reginald Shepherd
— Reginald Shepherd Feb 5, 02:11 PM #
Hello Reginald and Jennifer, I want to quickly clarify something here since it’s come up: I invented the term “post-avant” in the debate I moderated and published titled “Avant, Post-Avant, and Beyond” and also used the shorthand “post-post” to parody the idea further (i.e. as attempting to go beyond something at the leading edge, the “avant-garde”) in a Boston Comment essay called “Post-post Dementia.” Though I intended the term as a joke, I like your defintion, Reginald, and agree with how you characterize this type of poetry (also referred to, by the way, as T.K.O.P or “that kind of poetry” by editors). The debate and essay can be seen on www.bostoncomment.com
Thanks,
Joan
— Joan Houlihan Feb 5, 04:02 PM #
I’ve got dibs on Beyond-Avant! And for that matter Beyond Beyond-Avant. That ought to cement my fame for a few more years.
— marci Feb 7, 05:39 PM #
Reginald and Joan:
Thanks very much for taking up the question I asked. I hoped someone would. I’ve been following the subsequent discussion over at Harriet, too.
—Jennifer
— Jennifer Howard Feb 11, 04:29 PM #