"Anything with an edge": Rethinking Post-Avant

Many definitions have been posited for post-avant. There was a flurry of action about five months ago, in which I and a handful of other poets had it out over what post-avant means and what it does not. It was my impression that no general consensus was reached, and that much had been said but little of it had a substantial impact. This goes, certainly, for the things I said too; I do not privilege my own formulations here. Nonetheless, I think the discussion is a worthwhile one, and thinking about it has led me to some new conclusions. Here is the original definition I posited for post-avant: the diasporic movement of Lang-Po towards a new synthesis with erotic and narrative elements. That's roughly it. What I have been thinking over the last week is slightly different, and simpler. It is defining post-avant poetry as anything with an edge. This begs some immediate questions. What do we mean when we say that a poem, or a book of poems, has an edge? How do we strictly define edgy poetry? Colloquially, if it is said that something has an edge, it usually denotes that it is pointed, direct, sharp, and that it skirts the uncomfortable or the unsettling. It may deal, thematically, with a difficult issue, or it may take an unusual stance on an issue that has become stuck in a rut of settled representations. One obvious historical example would be Shakespeare's sonnet My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun..., which takes Petrarchan conventions and turns them on their heads. Or, the way Pound conflates two seemingly irreconcilable disparates in In a Station of the Metro, creating an unlikely synthesis of urban and rural imageries. Perhaps, owing to the sophisticated games played in his sonnets, we could call Shakespeare the first post-avant poet. Why not?

What else is edgy, pointed, direct, and sharp? I might be useful to name some things that are not edgy, but that tend to bear the post-avant moniker. Lazy disjunctive writing is, for me, not post-avant, specifically because it has no edge. Having an edge necessarily connotates making some kind of sense. It is hard, actually, to have any kind of thematic element included at all, if you do not make any narrative sense. I have no intention of picking on anyone in particular, but we all know lazy disjunctive writing (most of us know it a mile away) and it is not difficult to see that by this new definition, it does not fit under the rubric of post-avant. Epiphanic poetry, anything that relies on sentiment, would obviously not be post-avant, in these terms. How about spoken word poetry? That is a tough nut to crack; good spoken word poetry certainly has an edge, certainly carries thematic elements, so it would be hard-going to deny it a place in post-avant. What needs to be discussed is how stringently standards of formal rigor are applied to post-avant. If no standards are applied, someone could get onstage at a reading and say shit fuck piss ten times and be post-avant. All those tired arguments about "serious" poetry versus "performance" poetry need to be dragged out of the closet for the thousandth time; we have to find ourselves making distinctions and setting boundaries that might be unreal. I have no intention of laying down my version of the law; but where performance poetry is concerned, inclusion under the aegis of post-avant cannot, I think, be taken for granted. Which may, unfortunately, invalidate the anything with an edge tag-line. Or maybe not. The beauty of dealing with a new movement is that it is still amorphous and, if you are lucky (which I may or may not be), you can do your bit to shape it.

I affixed a picture of Frank O'Hara to this post because (perhaps this is a bit obvious) anything with an edge follows directly from going on your nerve. Why is it that O'Hara (along with few others) gets respect from both major sides of the American poetry landscape? How is it possible to be loved by both Billy Collins and Language Poets? There are myriad reasons, but I would say that a major one is the deft manner in which O'Hara creates narratives that have an edge. New York City created O'Hara just as surely as Paris created Baudelaire; O'Hara's version of Negative Capability meant creating poetry that mirrored, as precisely as possible, the edginess of New York street-life mid-century XX. If O'Hara was a kind of conduit, this was facilitated by the seeming impetuosity of his poems. Is "anything with an edge" impetuous? Not necessarily. But the element of conscious craft and "edginess," taken as an indicator of aesthetic worth, make uneasy bedfellows. On the other hand, the tension between uneasy bedfellows can make for interesting poetry. There is no way to seal this thing up in one post (and blog-posts are often themselves "go on your nerve" exercises); but I think the idea of post-avant and anything with an edge could lead to a fruitful discussion, especially because it gets boring writing a diasporic movement... over and over again. I have always felt that O'Hara's best poetry started something that has not yet been finished. How would O'Hara feel about potentially having started a movement? Well, he did Personism already, so technically this would be the second movement...the more (I hope he would say) the merrier! I hope to go into what constitutes "edginess" and "anything with an edge" in days to come.