Todd Swift: Cafe Alibi

Todd Swift's Cafe Alibi, released in 2002, makes an almost uncanny fit with the post-avant discourse I have been developing. Swift is a Canadian poet who resides in London. He is important to bring in, for more than one reason. If I am not careful, people will mistake post-avant for an American movement, something indigenous to this country. That, I can say with some authority, it is not. There are many non-American poets mining territory that can rightfully be called post-avant, among them Chris McCabe, David Prater, and Andrew Duncan. Duncan might be called the elder statesman of this group; like John Tranter, Duncan has been pursuing an agenda that is perpetually edgy for quite some time. But all these poets, including Swift, are far too good to be brought in only for being non-American. Cafe Alibi is a book frightening and shocking enough to be in contention (along with Aaron Belz's Bird Hoverer) for a place as the greatest single demonstration of edge that fits into the discourse. Much of the edge in Swift's book has to do with sex- a sense of forbidden fruit that has in it willful perversity and fatalistic dread. Swift's work (here and elsewhere) tends to be formally immaculate; while not a formalist as such, it is clear that Swift takes pleasure in meter and other manifestations of formal discipline. So this is the edgy formalism I have talked about, with a vengeance. The tightness of Swift's constructs adds intensity, rather than taking it away, and adds a claustrophobic ambience that gives the poems their peculiar creepiness. Swift holds a mirror up to poetry's past and shows the moral decay and degeneracy that has crept into our lives, and form aids him in conveying this. Without form, the poems would lose their concentrated energy, become diffuse, and creepiness dissipate into banality.

One of the most remarkable (and remarkably creepy) poems in Cafe Alibi demonstrates this perfectly. It is called After School, and a tinge of Nabokov is quite apparent:

She bends at the foolproof coil,
her bicycle locked around STOP,
handles curved down, a ram's horns
butting clear space, left out alone
to notice, but not take. I learn

her routine by rote, can recite
times and places: when she is late,
or safe at home. All this the result
of her orange reflector, visible
in the failing light. It has become

my signal, floating like a firefly
in confusion on a country lane.
Its property to warn is better known
than how it will also attract.
Time to follow my girl again.

No line in this poem contains more than ten syllables, and most stay in the 7-10 syllable range. This creates an interesting discrepancy between a narrator who seems to be out of control and a poem that is super-controlled, both syntactically and metrically. The overall feeling is of something being hidden, something subterranean that is not being acknowledged. It reminds me of Van Morrison's Cyprus Avenue from Astral Weeks. Van's protagonist is drunk, exultant; Swift's protagonist is sly, superficially calm. Neither shows any remorse, but Swift's seems to be more deadly; in Cyprus Avenue, the protagonist is watching a young girl from inside his car. He does not follow her anywhere. Swift's narrator is preparing to actively stalk his girl, to invade her space without her knowing it. The first detail of Swift's poem, that the girl is "bending," has clear and potent sexual overtones. The last line of the poem asserts possession; this is not merely "a girl", it is "my girl." Edges could not be more prominent; the affect that is hidden shows up sideways, and the narrator's unrepentant degeneracy demands a reaction. Unlike the vast majority of poems, we are not (I assume) meant to identify with the protagonist; he confronts us, we react. This is the edge of the transgressive, and it forces us to look at the transgressive edge we all carry around somewhere. As such, because it forces a confrontation in a blatant way, and because it does so in the context of a masterfully constructed poem (formally air-tight), I call this great. Formal perfection gives the poem solid roots; thematic daring makes the poem resolutely modern. The edges between these elements make the poem as tense as taut wire.

This poem, Couplets, also plays with transgression, but in a more ambiguous (and intriguing) way:

O, the salt, the terror, her skin: her vulva,
my tongue, our behavior.

This in a small room, second floor, of a
house where all looked well.

No marks where her fingers had been,
only a stealing gentleness,

that I cannot comprehend.
The regret, confusion, hatred, desire, is like

a bone that will not mend.
All beds are her bed, all lovers have her smell,

her curious girl's mischief.
This is the desert mouth- a slow going forward

that is simply not stopping,
for what that will bring. O, how I curled in her,

my penis embarrassed in
unwanted plenty, rich in all the wet, holding loss,

the soft tutorial of her vagina,
the arrest of her sweat, that scent which stains all

the bodies since. I live in two
minds on this: one sadly furious; the other depleted

endlessly, as if all memory
poured out of that moment, into nullity. Never

to be so close, no, never,
not in this skin-tight, careful, awkward, tender,

polar expedition to forgiving, longing for her.
How do we survive forever?

It is very noticeable that this poem is full of unanswered questions. We do not learn the basic story of the situation being alluded to- clearly what has happened is not "well," has "terror" in it (and not a little pity), involves what seems to be a boy and a "curious girl" having sex. Why this situation should be a horror story remains unclear. The poem forces us, as readers, to generate our own version of the story, and the edge here is in what is left out. Swift gets great mileage here out of raw language, the kinds of words that are found in poems only infrequently- penis, vagina, vulva. There is something almost clinical about the use of these words that is (again) quite creepy. In a sense, the protagonist's infatuation with the "curious girl" that has seduced him is even more Nabokov-ian than the situation presented in After School. This has not only forbidden fruit but an edge of longing in it, that adds dimension and depth that After School does not have. There is even a sense that something incestuous might be at work; not necessarily literal incest, but the co-mingling of two young lovers that are somehow related, in a way that makes their behavior transgressive. This takes us straight from Lolita to Ada or Ardor. But, it is worth noting that poetry (as usual) has been slow to catch up with the things Nabokov was doing fifty years ago. Not that Swift's poems do not feel contemporary- they do- but that poets should have begun writing these sorts of poems long before they have. A situation that is artificial (a story we have to piece together for ourselves), yet dripping (pun intended) with affect- this is multi-leveled attack at its best, and Belz is the only American poet I can think of mining similar territory. Post-avant, certainly, and I hope Todd will accept the classification, where this book is concerned.

Cafe Alibi is, in fact, brimming over with poems of this caliber. This is a book that puts sex at the center, as it should be with post-avant. As a species, our primary physical edge is sexual, so it stands to reason that an art based on edge should be rooted in overt sexuality, tinged with artifice, imagination, and affect. Art that tries to be sexy seldom works; what is sexy is what gets under our skin. That is why, to me, Cat Power will always be sexier than Madonna; her songs get under my skin, and stay there. I have never been touched by a Madonna song in my life, and sex is touch. Usually, sex-in-poetry gets corrupted by a Confessional approach that is too nose-on-the-face to get under anyone's skin. Post-avant will not accept the merely Confessional; better to sketch something suggestive, as Swift has, and let edges develop around it, rather than filling in all the blanks for us beforehand. Cafe Alibi is representative of a sensibility that has its roots in a polyglot approach to poetry- immersion in film, music, as well as verse. As such, it is as potent a representative of this discourse as anything I have touched on so far. Though Swift is a poet with great range, and he has other achievements, it is this book that (for me) epitomizes a sensibility that can lead poetry forward into a new era, and efface all the obvious tropes and approaches that have been done to death. It is also proof that I am not alone in pursuing a sensibility drenched in edge, and that poets the world over are finding themselves drawn to the same things.

Artaud and "Profound Anarchy"

The spirit of profound anarchy...is at the root of all poetry.

Poetry is anarchic to the degree that it brings into play all the relationships of object to object and of form to signification. It is anarchic also to the degree that its occurrence is the consequence of a disorder that draws us closer to chaos.

To make metaphysics out of a spoken language is to make the language express what it does not ordinarily express: to make use of it in a new, exceptional, and unaccustomed fashion; to reveal its possibility for producing physical shock; to divide and distribute it actively in space; to deal with intonations in an absolutely concrete manner, restoring their power to shatter as well as really to manifest something; to turn against language and its basely utilitarian, one could say alimentary, sources, against its trapped-beast origins; and finally, to consider language as the form of INCANTATION.

It is readily visible here that some parts of Artaud's formulations fit post-avant better than others. How much in common does edge have with anarchy? Artaud does not give examples here of what would constitute a resolutely anarchic language. It would seem that, because post-avant (as I have formulated it) has a strong narrative sense, the kind of anarchy that Artaud is naming would be inadmissable. On the other hand, poems with edges can impart the feeling of anarchy, rather than the anarchic state itself. That is part of post-avant: creating affect out of semblances of anarchy and/or chaos. The irony, and it is one that Artaud does not address, is that to create this kind of affect takes tremendous formal discipline. You cannot waste any words, make any false or half-assed moves, put anything out that does not add to the effect. This, to me, is one of Artaud's Achilles' heels: he does not offer examples (at least where poetry is concerned), so that we are left to piece together and reconstruct our version of what Artaud is talking about. One thing that would be hard to argue with is that Artaud wants words to transmit a certain vision of reality, rather than any artifice or self-absorption.

This is what I referred to earlier: a certain way of making art through authenticity, which in this case means channeling and accessing the primeval chaos that lies beneath all language. Language serves something deeper, rather than being an end in itself. Where post-avant is concerned, this depth flows from a commitment to expressing every kind of edge that human beings experience: psychological (and Artaud happens to hate psychology, which is another stumbling block), emotional, metaphysical, sexual, and all the other ones. Physical shock, as Artaud describes it, is an apt description of what post-avant poetry should produce (in its ideal form, which many poets are still working towards.) Incantation, however, is problematic, in the sense that it aligns poetry with music, and language that merely "chimes," that is merely musical, can never suffice for post-avant. Although, who knows, perhaps someone will write a great anaphoric poem like Song of Myself (only part anaphoric, I know) in the post-avant mode, and show us how it can be accomplished. I do not see any reason why it could not happen. All it takes is a commitment to edge and to affixing it to poetry's long history; ambition, in other words. How ambitious is post-avant?

Here's another interesting Artaud bit:

We must get rid of our superstitious valuation of texts and WRITTEN poetry. Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others. Then we might even come to see that it is our veneration for what has already been created, however beautiful and valid it may be, that petrifies us, deadens our responses, and prevents us from making contact with that underlying power, call it thought-energy, the life force, the determinism of change, lunar menses, or anything you like. Beneath the poetry of the texts, there is the actual poetry, without form and without text.

Artaud wanted to get beyond language, and to do it through theater; poetry (of course) does not have the option of getting beyond language. Nonetheless, these are useful insights, because it shows what post-avant has in common with its parent movements: a hankering for something "deeper than language." It is also useful to think of post-avant as an irreverent movement, that acknowledges lineage without being willing to sacrifice any of its edges. Post-avant, and post-avant poets, should be polyglot. I want post-avant to be in that prized second category: a movement that succeeds via authenticity. I do not want to cast aspersions on other movements, but there is a potential for a new mode of humanism in post-avant, and the opportunity is too good to waste. We cannot be the ideal artists that Artaud would have wanted; we rely too much on what Artuad wants to get rid of. However, that Artaud associated affect, chaos, anarchy, and physical shock with his Theater of Cruelty is a good sign. There is genuine overlap. The idea that post-avant could manifest a Poetics of Cruelty is not too far-fetched. The point Artaud was trying to make is that what is cruel is what is real, and post-avant is trying to assert precisely the same point.

"Darkness is Brighter"

It seems eerily appropriate to blog about this the day after Michael Jackson has died. There was certainly a sense of darkness around Jackson, although it had more to do (from what I have seen) with his life than with his art. But, looking back at the Thriller-era videos, it is astonishing just how outrageously talented Jackson was, and how much talent wound up being squandered. There is also, for me, the silver lining of a new understanding- I understand Beat It, for example, more thoroughly now, as a specifically L.A. song, written about L.A. teenagers who have to deal with gang war-fare. In any case, I am interested in writing something that is not part of the just-completed discourse, but can act as a sort of adjunct to it. Specifically, to explore the idea that lies beneath the entire discourse: that art that is primarily dark has a kind of superior power to art that takes a more positive or positivist stance. That, as the title of the post claims, where art is concerned, darkness is brighter. Thinkers since Aristotle have been dealing with this, but there are reasons to bring it up again in 2009. What do we want out of art right now? What about the Zeitgeist of this moment makes darkness brighter? I can only speak for me, but I have some very specific reasons to prefer darkness (and edge) to anything anodyne or comforting. This is especially pertinent to American poetry because so little of it is genuinely dark. What is dark about most of it is how lame it is, rather than how many genuinely rough edges are fitted in (think William Stafford and get back to me.) There is a kind of indirect darkness to over-used cliches and worn-out tropes, but it is the darkness of a perceived irony. The irony has to do with the fact that 2009 is a new time, unlike any other, and yet in most poet's heads it might as well be 1962. It is unfair to generalize, but specifically on the "Quietude" side of the fence, past-dwelling is rampant and unfortunate.

I do not believe that 2009 is characterized primarily by darkness; I do, however, believe that the newness of this moment is best reflected in dark-tinged work. Think how much time we spend on the Internet which, like everything else, has a dark and a light side. The dark edges of Net-life have to do with chasing phantoms, pursuing illusions, living in a self-created, Other-inhabited No Man's Land. Jim Morrison, in 1967, said that we are all afflicted with the psychology of the voyeur, and the Net has magnified this one-hundred fold. The Net has turned us all (or most of us) into little stalkers. Art needs to reflect this phenomenon, because it is a phenomenon with spiritual overtones. Why are we so excessively concerned with other people? Why do we need to keep peeping at these bodies, these products of mind? Ultimately, art that looks at this side of Net-life will be more rewarding, more satisfyingly human, and much more dark than art that leans on the fun side of the Net. What, exactly, is dark? "Dark," where art is concerned, manifests as an unwillingness to sugar-coat hard realities, a willingness to leave in rough edges, and an emphasis on elements of human nature that are compulsive, destructive, and helpless. We need this now because all these elements have been given a radically new context. When I left home for the first time, in 1994, no one had a cell phone, not everyone had a computer, and the Net was something left of center. Think how much cell-phones alone have changed the way we live. Voyeurism is also aided and abetted by cell-phones: now, we can reach anyone, anywhere, at any time. Texts and cell-phones are both intrusive and, I might, effective contraceptives as well (pardon my archness.) Cell-phones have made intimacy more fragile; delicate moods get cut into, tenderness is easily thwarted, all because of a device that is supposed to make things convenient.

So, if you are developing intimacy with someone, better hope the cell-phone does not ring. This seems like a little problem, but it is not. And the fabric of the problem is a kind of darkness, the flip side of "fast, fluid, and without boundaries", as I wrote in my Internet Theory book. Cell-phones at their worst are Kafka-esque, and this needs to be reflected in works of verbal art. Poems need to be this specific, this intense, this willing to look at the minutiae of our lives, or they are useless. Of course, darkness is not a new thing, but new modes of suffering require new modes of art. The resigned Stoicism of the Objectivists, the suave urbanity of the New York School, and the austere beauty of Lang-Po were OK for their moment, but I do not think that any were sufficiently dark to render 2009. I have been toying with an idea, though I do not yet know if I will pursue it. I had the thought of writing a book called Stalk, and setting it in the mind of a compulsive stalker (whether on the Net or in person I do not know.) It would be an exercise not dissimilar to the one that Bret Easton Ellis pursued in American Psycho. 2009 is a moment in which an unprecedented amount of stalking is going on all over the place, and we are all guilty. What do we want from each other? What do we perceive the Other to have that we do not have? Why are we so comfortable staring at the (easily accessed) Other from a safe distance? The answers to these questions cannot be comforting, and reflect the terrible spiritual emptiness of our moment. Technology has become both a passion and a vice so that stalking has never been so easy or so sophisticated. We are living inside each other without really thinking about it, or what it means. Yet it all happens in darkness, without the Other knowing. And that is a dark edge that needs to come out in new poetry, post-avant and otherwise.

"Chaos is a friend of mine"

This is something Bob Dylan used to say. He also used to say to live outside the law you must be honest, and it is a maxim that rings very true to me. This latest post-avant discourse does seem to have created a fair bit of chaos, particularly in my comments stream. Nonetheless, I have been grateful that poets like Rauan Klassnik, Peter Philpott and several others have found it useful and dealt with it on their respective blogs. And, of course, Ron Silliman, who is responsible for bringing me a good part of my audience. I am not sure if there are any angles left that I have not covered, any nook or cranny in the discourse that needs to be filled. If this is, in fact, the end of this particular discourse, I have to take a look at some tough questions to determine whether or not I have achieved anything substantial. The most fundamental question, and the one that will be most determinative, is whether or not other poets will accept or adopt my own particular slant on post-avant. If poets continue to talk about post-avant as something amorphous, something that has not been defined, then I have failed. Before, no one knew what post-avant was; many hundreds of poets have read the whole (or at least parts) of this discourse, in which I have tried to create concrete significations around it; but a one-man revolution is an impossibility, in poetry at least. I have to be realistic about the fact that my word is not law, and that, because I am comparatively young, I face certain disadvantages where credibility is concerned. How many thirty-three year old poets have any authority? Yet, I stand by the ideas I have formulated, think they have some merit, and hope I will not be dismissed owing to my age.

It is a banal commonplace to say that the old must be thrown away to make room for the new. But, as far as I am concerned, it happens to be the truth. Many of these posts were designed to demonstrate the commensurability of younger poets with older ones. In MFA and MA programs all across the country, poetry students are encouraged to demonstrate blind reverence for certain poetry deities. This is part of the bullshit insularity that I have pointed out, and "poetry teachers," if there are such things, need to learn to encourage irreverence. Maybe poetry teachers are afraid to produce students less useless than themselves; it is a big, bad, scary world out there, might as well stay in the bubble. Spoon-feeding of mediocrity by mediocrities to students that need not be mediocrities (followed by expectations of obediance and reverence) is a tragic scenario that I have seen played out at a bunch of different schools. I want other younger poets to see that the good work they are doing may well be commensurate with whatever they are being taught. Most poetry teachers have no balls, and they encourage their students not to have balls either. The prissiness and preciosity around poetry in academia is not to be believed. But now is as good a moment in American poetry as has ever been. The past has a wealth of valuable data to teach us; the present may have even more. Post-avant, as I have designed it, is for now. I am not talking to the brainwashed dweebs; I am talking to those independent enough to think for themselves. Challenge your teachers, just as I have been challenged here. Do not let yourself be spoon-fed by the untalented and the cowardly. Where art is concerned, you don't get any points for toeing the line.

Disjunctive Issues

The way I have presented post-avant, it would be possible for certain artists to call it a retreat into representation. On one level, it is. However, to what extent this is deemed a problem has much to do with perceived attitudes regarding abstract verbal art. All verbal art, of course, involves a level of abstraction- language itself, we know, is a kind of abstraction. Text is a double abstraction, away from both the immediacy of impulses and of speech acts. Yet there is an insularity to abstract verbal art that makes it unappealing to almost everyone that does not work within its confines. Compare the response that abstract verbal forms have had to abstract painters like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning: de Kooning and Pollock have reached a wide audience, to whom their art is expressive, emotional, and profound. Abstract poets have reached a comparatively minimal audience. Why? A painter like de Kooning can use certain gestures, brush-strokes, uses of color, smears, shapes, half-complete human forms, to give his work resonance, depth, and wide appeal. The tools to make abstract poetry as expressive are harder to manifest: I have found the tactility of words to be a "half-myth." Words "smeared" or "brushed on" a certain way are just not as expressive as paint and color. So, if post-avant does signify a retreat into representation, I am prepared to acknowledge it without necessarily believing that it is a bad thing. I belive that the preponderance of representation, where poetry is concerned, is very real and very pertinent. Good representational poems tend to be (in my opinion) more powerful than their abstract counterparts. Non-poets that look to poetry generally want to see poems that actually say something. Post-avant is meant to fight against insularity and give poetry a place (which it has lost) in the wider cultural world. As such, poetry that is abstract or disjunctive would need to include some element of representation within it. I want here to present two instances of disjunctive poetry, one that is in what I call the classic disjunctive mode, one that takes a disjunctive approach but adds the darkened (and representational) edges of post-avant. The two poems chosen happen to be by women, but they were not chosen for that reason. Notice how levels of affect effect levels of intensity and vice versa.

This first poem comes from Barbara Guest, and it is called Red Lilies:

Someone has remembered to dry the dishes;
they have taken the accident out of the stove.
Afterward lilies for supper; there
the lines in front of the window
are rubbed on the table of stone

The paper flies up
then down as the wind
repeats. repeats its birdsong.

Those arms under the pillow
the burrowing arms they cleave
at night as the tug kneads water
calling themselves branches

The tree is you
the blanket is what warms it
snow erupts from thistle
to toe; the snow pours out of you.

A cold hand on the dishes
placing a saucer inside
her who undressed for supper
gliding that hair to the snow

The pilot light
went out on the stove

The paper folded like a napkin
other wings flew into the stone.

Compare the moderate, even-keeled tone of Guest's poems to this more post-avant response from Amy King, After Whispering, A Compulsion To Move:

Though I would like to breathe at the best possible moment
when people are waking up after their first cups
of homegrown fresh black brew that is a liquid containing
an important caffeine the rest of a populated race doesn't drink
and slows down without, in fact, as facts, we aren't ever
on the same page, our libidos and metabolisms separate
our bodies, and we call this mixed desire and unmatched
in appetite so hard that you don't finish your plate and call me
a savage with tiny daisies stuck to my fingers. I'm sorry,
I was ravaged by personal pangs, and you would not satiate
my petal-plucking needs, so I blasted the leaves to shreds
with my teeth when I meant I'm sorry,
utensils don't do it for me: I'm turned on by the osmosis
of carnal matters, including the blood that might
flow through these aging forked veins that carry the meat
of life giving particles in their jittery existence as a way to speak
and pass meaning between us. I want to break bread, but my mouth
is open and there's no way you could attempt to understand
the words full and mixing with this white matter coursing
within my corpus system, then out through an unclean sound,
even if I wiped it spotless the moment it moved in closer to you.

Amy's use of the word "jittery" is interesting, because this is, in fact, a jittery poem, and jittery is a synonym for edgy. The most striking edge of Amy's poem, for me, is that it has a between quality: it is situated somewhere between narrative and non-narrative, representational and non-representational. The surface is opaque; affect seethes beneath. The idea of a first-person protagonist "ravaged by personal pangs" is almost Romantic, but the sentiment is soon lost in a barbed stream-of-consciousness that recalls the influence of Joyce and Stein (perhaps even Woolf) as much as it does any Lang-Po predecessors. The Other is rendered imaginatively, but always in a kind of negative context: we do not connect, we do not relate, despite these bodies which we share. There is a large amount of affective and sexual data here that is not available in most disjunctive poetry, but that gives the poem a kind of live-wire charge. In comparison, most of the disjunctive work produced by younger poets seems flaccid, like a kind of empty formalism (right there with Adam Kirsch.) To make disjunctive work exciting, there has to be something human in the poem other than a mess of words: the edgier, the better. Guest's poem reminds me of Reverdy; there is a haunting grace about it, an evansecence. However, much of the energy of the poem is diffused in its many paratactic moves; it does not build to anything, no crescendo. Amy's poem is more like an avalanche or a fire-ball, heading ineluctably toward its goal, of expressed non-connection, the evanescence of the Other. Disjunctive models seem to be in King's mind, but Personism is in there somewhere too. Guest gives us a "you" without an "I"; this lends an authentically classic touch, but precludes an affective edge from entering the poem. Guest is more sedate, more stately; King is more punchy, harder. This is what allows me to place her poem (with, I hope, Amy's approval) under the aegis of post-avant. I feel that if you show these two poems to a painter, or to Bruce Nauman, or a musician, sculptor, actor, etc, they will be more riveted by Amy's poem. People generally want emotion from art, not insularity. This seems obvious, but in poetry in 2009, it is not. Disjunctive poetry needs more than the tactility of words; it needs the durability of emotions. I do not wish to dismiss Guest's poem out of hand; but, as I said, I feel that Amy's poem has more out-reach, and a better shot of translating into something meaningful for a wider community of artists. Edge is something everyone can relate to, and that (for me) makes it important, and worth pursuing.

Post-Avant and Personism

Frank O'Hara's Personism, though not as stringently defined as Breton's Surrealism, is another movement (a one-poet movement, in this case) that can and has had a fruitful interaction with post-avant. I feel that there are solid reasons to say that post-avant can go further than Surrealism; where Personism is concerned, I would say that post-avant does not necessarily go further, but is substantially different in its approach. Personism involves the social aspect of poems; how they can serve as links between individuals (or groups), and in doing so enact a tender (or fierce) intimacy. What is intimate about the O'Hara poems we know and love is that we never doubt his sincerity as a (usually first-person) protagonist. The edges come from a certain honesty at all costs; that O'Hara does not pull punches, though he is seldom brutal, either. O'Hara is sincere, overt, direct, and touchingly so. What post-avant wants to do is to take Personism and darken it. Post-avant's spin on the Personism ball often produces poems that have an edge of detachment, parody/satire, or even meanness. In the same manner that Anne Boyer takes Surrealism and darkens it, post-avant takes Personism and gives it an edge of experience over innocence. Rather than reality infringing on dreams, reality infringes on relationships. People's edges are exposed, their weaknesses probed, their insecurities laid bare. This is visible everywhere from Thom Yorke's songs (think Creep) right through to the kind of poetry I am describing. To demonstrate the darkening of Personism, I thought to bring in a poem by Jason Bredle, one of the darkest (and funniest) poets working this terrain. I have an affinity for Jason's work (not just because we both happen to be Aquarius Dragons) that is grounded in my appreciation for the way he conveys a certain satiric vision of humanity, that has both tenderness and brutality in it. In the poems to come (one from Jason, one from Frank), notice how things are darkened by the switch from a first person to a third-person perspective.

This famous Personal Poem is taken from O'Hara's Lunch Poems. It is representative of O'Hara's vision of Personism (which he did, in fact, patent):

Now when I walk around at lunchtime
I have only two charms in my pocket
an old Roman coin Mike Kanemitsu gave me
and a bolt-head that broke off a packing case
when I was in Madrid the others never
brought me too much luck though they did
help keep me in New York against coercion
but now I'm happy for a time and interested

I walk through the luminous humidity
passing the House of Seagram with its wet
and its loungers and the construction to
the left that closed the sidewalk if
I ever get to be a construction worker
I'd like to have a silver hat please
and get to Moriarty's where I wait for
LeRoi and hear who wants to be a mover and
shaker the last five years my batting average
is .016 that's that, and LeRoi comes in
and tells me Miles Davis was clubbed 12
times last night outside BIRDLAND by a cop
a lady asks us for a nickel for a terrible
disease but we don't give her one we
don't like terrible diseases, then

we go eat some fish and some ale it's
cool but crowded we don't like Lionel Trilling
we decide, we like Don Allen we don't like
Henry James so much we like Herman Melville
we don't want to be in the poets' walk in
San Francisco even we just want to be rich
and walk on girders in our silver hats
I wonder if one person out of 8,000,000 is
thinking of me as I shake hands with LeRoi
and buy a strap for my wristwatch and go
back to work happy at the thought possibly so

Now, have a look at a post-avant response. This is Bredle's immortal (and I am only half-kidding) Girls, Look Out for Todd Bernstein:

Because after sitting out for a spell
he's back with a degree in accounting and a high
paying position in one of the leading
pharmaceutical corporations in the country
and aspirations of owning that exotic yellow
sports car, license plate EVIL.
And like Dennis Meng at Sycamore Chevrolet
stakes his reputation on his fully reconditioned
used cars, I stake my reputation
on telling you Todd Bernstein means business
this time, girls. No more of this being passed over
for abusive arm wrestling stars. He's got
a velour shirt now. No more of your excuses-
if he wants you, you're there. None of this
I'm shaving my pubes Friday night nonsense-
come on, you think Todd Bernstein's
going to fall for that? He knows you're not
studying, not busy working on some local
political campaign, not having the guy
who played Cockroach on THE COSBY SHOW over
for dinner, not writing any great American
novel. He's seen your stuff and it's nothing more
than mediocre lyrical poetry with titles
like "The Falling" and "Crucible" and "Waking to Death"
that force impossible metaphors, despairing
about love and womanhood and how bad
your life is even though you grew up happily
in suburban America, or at least as happily
as anyone can grow up in suburban America,
which normally, you know, consists of
the appearance of happiness while your dad is doing
three secretaries on the side and your mom
pretends not to know and brags to the entire
town about how you're an actress about to star
in a sitcom about the misadventures of a cable TV
repairperson who, while out on a routine
installation one day, accidentally
electrically blasts herself into the living room
of a family of barbarian warloads on a planet
near Alpha Centauri who force her into slavery
before sending her on a pillage mission
to a planet of Cloxnors who capture her and place
her in a torture institution where she meets
a vulnerable Meeb whom she convinces, because of
her cable TV repairperson skills, to let her
become nanny to its impressionable Meeblets just
before it's about to rip off her limbs
with its ferocious abnons and devour her.
The results, according to your mom, are hilarious,
but come on, you and I both know the story
is just so PREDICTABLE. And Todd knows
your writing doesn't pull off any metaphors
for the happiness taken from you by some dude
who played bass and called himself a musician
when all he could really do was play a couple
of chords and sing about true love and alligators
and how the alligator represents true love
which somehow explains the legend where the guy
cut open an alligator one time in Florida
and found a golfer. There's just no fooling
Todd. Sure, he'll act like he's interested, that's
Todd Bernstein, and he'll make claims
that he too has written or been artistic
at some point in his life, but Todd Bernstein
knows all you girls really want is a piece
of good old Todd Bernstein. No longer
will any strange auras enter the bedroom
during sex and keep him from maintaining
an erection, no longer will any women
walk out on him repulsed. If anybody's walking out
after sex, it'll be Todd Bernstein, I can assure you.
He won't be humiliating himself by falling down
a flight of stairs in front of a group of Japanese
tourists anymore, but rather coaxing entire
masses of women into his bedroom. Because
that's Todd Bernstein. He's on the move.
And he wants you to know, girls, that he's well aware
you certainly can't learn Korean sitting around here
which is why he's out there right now, preparing
for the slew of women just beyond his sexual
horizon, spray-painting GIRLS, LOOK OUT
FOR TODD BERNSTEIN on the side
of a Village Pantry.

An incredible mouthful, to be sure. But, as funny, perverse, and on-the-surface as much of the humor is, notice that there is an ambiguity here that is not in O'Hara. What we have is a poem mostly written in the third-person, with an "I" here and there thrown in for good measure. The effect is to call into doubt what the relationship is between "I" and the legendary Todd Bernstein. The narrative has so many edges in it that the implied relationship could not be farther from the relationship between Frank and LeRoi in the first poem. There, Personism means straightforward friendship, camraderie, a sense of being in cahoots against the rest of the (especially literary) world. We do not learn anything embarrassing about Frank or LeRoi in the poem (unless we want to count Frank's "batting average.") Here, we learn nothing about the poem's "I," and everything (and more) than we ever wanted to know about Todd Bernstein. Frank and LeRoi are equals; the narrator in Bredle's poem seems to be looking down on Todd Bernstein from an omniscient perspective. When put through the post-avant skewer, Personism comes out twisted by the recognition of human frailties. We see so far into Todd Bernstein that he becomes a joke- his delusions of grandeur, sexual frustrations, inability to connect. Bredle's tangents (and there are a bunch) are another way of creating edge; it is the literary equivalent of playing bumper cars. Bredle includes the raw and the brutal, to hilarious effect- the gruesome detail about girls "shaving their pubes Friday night," the suburban dad "doing three secretaries on the side." The net effect is Personism shot through with black humor and satire, and it is, to my eyes, at least as potent as O'Hara's original version. There are spots in the poem in which Bredle appears to be pushing PC boundaries- they do not bother me, but I would be willing to entertain the notion that Bredle has crossed the line a few times. To return to my earlier remarks- experience, in the context of Bredle's poem, gives rise to an irony that is left out of O'Hara. This reflects the sensibility of our era, rather than Frank's- post-avant being the end of the near side of post-modernism, O'Hara being the beginning of the far side. As such, while it is easy to admire Frank's work from a distance, I feel that Jason has more to say to us, the way we live, now, because (let us be honest) irony is everywhere.

Anne Boyer: Edges of Dreams

If post-avant has to do with edges, anything that brings to light edges of consciousness would certainly be useful. Dreams, of course, do precisely this. Dreams are one place in which consciousness merges with unknown/foreign elements; whether we want to call it the unconscious, the subconscious, or even the Collective Unconscious does not matter that much. The point is that interaction with these foreign edges can result in the revelation of hidden affect. This affect can reveal itself in imagery, speech-acts, sexual encounters, or mundane situations; however its expression manifests, it has the potential to disturb, unsettle, and effect the waking mind. There is a brutal strangeness to many dreams that make them very simpatico with post-avant, as I am attempting to define it in this discourse. I have not been bringing up Breton for nothing; Surrealism shares many facets with post-avant, and an obsession with dreams, and with states of altered consciousness, is perhaps the primary overlap. I would like to hope that, where dreams are concerned, post-avant is like Surrealism, but sharper. The content of represented post-avant dreams may be similar to that expressed in Surrealist dream-poems; but the tone should have a bit more gravitas. To demonstrate this, I want to put together Max Jacob and Anne Boyer. It needs first to be said that Jacob was a reluctant-at-best Surrealist; he was influential for them, but the movement itself turned him off. Yet it is because his work was influential for them that he is useful here. Anne Boyer, in 2007, released a Dusie Chap called Selected Dreams. It is a little master-work, and the best dreams she presents have that extra something, that sense of more weight, that (hopefully) distinguishes post-avant from Surrealist dream-scapes. I do not want to turn this into an arm-wrestling match between movements (I also do not want to presume to categorize Anne if she does not wish to be categorized); certainly Surrealism has constituent features that post-avant does not. Some may even prefer dreams expressed with a lighter touch, in Jacob's manner, and there are many situations in which lighter is better. Nonetheless, let us dive into these dreams at the deep end.

It is interesting that Jacob actually implicated himself in his introduction to The Dice Cup, his magnum opus. Jacob regrets that his poems lack a certain tone our grief and decency demand; he was writing about World War I before it happened. This is called 1914:

Doesn't lightning look the same to a foreigner? Someone who was at my parents' home was commenting on the color of the sky. Was that lightning? It was a pink cloud moving toward us. How everything changed! My God! Can it be your reality is so vibrant? The family home is there: the chestnut trees at the window, the prefecture right up against the chestnut trees, and Mt. Frugy right up against the prefecture, only its summit visible. A voice called out "God!" And there was light in the darkness. A huge body hid most of the landscape. Was it Him? Or Job? He was poor; his pierced flesh was showing, thighs covered by a scrap of cloth: what tears O Lord! he descended...How? Then couples larger than life descended too. They came from the air encased, in Easter eggs: they laughed and the balcony of our family home was littered with black threads like gunpowder. We were frightened. The couples set themselves up in our house while we watched through a window. For they were evil. There were even black threads on the dining room table where my brothers were taking apart Lebel cartridges. Since then, I've been watched by the police.

Compare the tone of this with this dream from Boyer's Selected Dreams:

Fairly clear the end of the world had come or the end of the world as we understood it had come or the end of the world of humans in a civilization had come and this end had come through some water-borne contagion or at least a backed-up broken-down water and sewage system.

Knowing all this, we went to a large clean building in the middle of a city for an ART SHOW. This building was a hotel or convention center and on the fifth floor or so a woman who may or may not have been Kiki Smith had organized the ART SHOW before it was clear that the world was at its end. Many people at the show were vacuous or self-absorbed or on drugs or whatever so that they did not know it was the end or did not pay the end much notice. Very pale, thin, and glamorous people who were part of the art installations strode in threes naked or half naked and the other half cloaked in fur. Even at the end of the world I was envious of their beauty and furs and paleness. And in one room, there showed an ART FILM. This film was about WHAT YOU COULD BUY to prove you had been at the ART SHOW.

At that time three backpackers entered the room with backpacks. These backpackers knew it was the end of the world: they had put all their things in backpacks and decided to take off, to travel, as it was the end of the world and staying put, i.e. STAYING AS NORMAL, would only mean the end. Other people noticed the backpackers and maybe started waking up to the seriousness of the event of the end of the world, and fearing a panic, my companions and I decided to leave the ART SHOW and take the elevator to the top of the building.

We stepped in the elevator. I started to worry the sewage-contagion problem would damage the power grid. Would we be stuck on the elevator for all of time? Would we die on the elevator we took to escape the ART SHOW? My companions tried to calm me, to tell me "It is too early in the process for the power to go out," but I could smell the stink and contagion, and asked to what purpose is going to the roof of the building of the ART SHOW.

I said- Shouldn't we be doing something other than going to the top of the building at the end of the world?

Both of these dreams are apocalyptic, but they approach the subject of apocalypse differently. Jacob uses an edge of whimsy, that brings out a kind of human comedy in the darkness, a child-like innocence. Boyer's is definitely (and defiantly) a voice of experience. Not only does Boyer give us apocalypse, she gives us an implicit (and edgy) critique of the art-world, and the issues that many of us would not like to face: the uselessness of art in the face of chaos, the vapid nature of consumerism in regards to art, all the poseurs that dot the art landscape. Not all Surrealist dreams have the edge of innocence that Jacob's has; not all post-avant dreams have the edge of experience that Boyer's has. There are, in fact, a good number of dreams in Boyer's chap that are comparatively innocent. Yet this one, for me, is the most memorable, specifically because it is edgy in more than one direction. It is smart enough to be satire, and strange enough to be a dream. Satire and dreaminess are strange bedfellows, but Boyer makes it work because her quality of voice is so rich, so deep. The surprise in Boyer's poem has to do with a topsy-turvy twist: reality infringes on her dream, rather than vice versa (as would usually be the case). Reality distorts her dream-vision, in a reversal of the Surrealist paradigm. That perhaps, is what ultimately distinguishes post-avant from Surrealism: it has the capacity to tackle real-world issues directly. This is not to demean the Surrealists' achievement, because we are certainly using many of their innovations. The problem with dreams in post-avant is that they can never quite shut out the real world. This turns many dreams into nightmares. Boyer's dystopic vision is certainly nightmarish; it is also laugh-out-loud funny, canny, and sharp as a knife. It shows how a poet can take from poetry's past and go somewhere with it. This new kind of dream-scape definitely (to me) seems like a place worth visiting.

Jordan Stempleman: Softer Edges

What are the limitations of post-avant? It would be foolhardy of me to try to develop a discourse in which post-avant poetry is presented as capable of covering everything, thematically and otherwise. Like every other (potential) movement, post-avant has strengths and weaknesses, glories and blind spots. At this point, I think it may be useful to bring in a poet who may not be post-avant, to act as a kind of foil. In this process, it will become clearer what the limitations of post-avant are, what it can and cannot do. I have written extensively about Jordan Stempleman, and I find him to be a marvelous poet. Still, I am by no means convinced that Stempleman's work fits into a post-avant frame-work. There are edges, and what Stempleman is doing is (more often than not) substantially new, but edges are usually overtaken by an impulse towards grace, delicacy, charm, and sophisticated perspectives. These are the thematic issues Stempleman raises that this discourse needs to deal with: non-edgy affect (love), straightforward sentiment, caring, affection, and (perhaps most importantly, considering its key place in the aesthetic of poets like Creeley and Ashbery) the domestic. With Stempleman, as with Creeley, what you get a lot of the time is an air of the domestic sublime; poems that address private concerns in resolutely subjective language. All these things seem incompatible with the brutality, rawness, razor-sharp edges, and modes of affect that I see as pivotal to post-avant. They raise questions that post-avant will have to answer if it wants to avoid a narrow slot: how can we address love in a way that is not merely angst-ridden? How can we demonstrate caring? This is a tricky space to maneuver, and I do not have an answer worked out. Still, maybe there are such things as softer edges; maybe Stempleman can be worked in. Let us take a look at a few poems and see.

This poem is called Love, and it is from the Otoliths book Facings. It can be considered the archetypal Stempleman poem:

I told them, you can take half the conversation
away from a stranger without them ever knowing

it, take the real side away, and then turn it
into that place, that day that never happened

to you, some intended thought, now yours. There,
you will have it for years, or because of the excitement

that will no doubt accompany this treasure, the night
will come when, not alone to repeat it only to yourself,

perhaps, lying down in a close but uncomfortable
position, faced with a person equally as exciting (in

their own way) as what you've heard, you will tell
them this side of things, so they can stare at you

as you tell it. And afterwards, before falling asleep
near them, they will tell you, I know, I was there.

There are no (or few) edges, as I have defined them, here. The poem takes its energy from an intimacy that is graceful, relaxed, and even (slightly) epiphanic. Beyond an obvious glow of genuine human warmth, the poem is charged by a subtle kind of pronoun game: who is "them" in line one? Why does the third person plural not appear again? The fascinating depth of having more than one "I" in the poem creates an effect of boundaries being blurred, that is very similar to what we experience in close physical proximity to a lover or mate. Yet the poem's peculiar grace lies in the combination of familiar and unfamiliar elements: it is never obvious, and, while it does not exactly attack, it is certainly multi-leveled. This impression is heightened by a kind of twist ending, not in the Shyamalan sense but in the sense that the poem deliberately leaves unanswered questions. This is done without ever losing sight of an immaculate internal smoothness, the opposite of edginess. How could the second "I" have been there to witness the fabled conversation? Was it a miraculous occurrence? I would say that this poem gets close to post-avant without touching it. There is simply too much grace to warrant the post-avant tag being applied. The fact that the poem is substantially new and, (in my opinion) wonderful, means that post-avant simply cannot do everything. Just as Creeley was close to the Beats, without ever being Beat, Stempleman seems like he could be a prized cousin to the post-avant family. He will (and already has) shown us some of our blind spots, and diffused any claims to a totalized strength.

Here is another Stempleman poem, from his Blazevox book String Parade. It is called Unlike Weight:

There are more faucets
in this house than hands.

My daughter thinks of telling
me, the time is now

to go out and get myself
a gun. She silently looks

at me, eyeing my gumption,
determining how much firepower

my wrists will take.
She looks at me differently

in these times, with a doubtful
pattern of the eyes, quite unlike

when we swim in large bodies
of water. There she is light

enough to carry. There she trusts
my arms will never snap.

There is a sweetness and a vulnerability to this that suggests edginess without being edgy. Edge here is an undercurrent, or a darkling hint. But, fudamentally, this is a representation of the domestic, and works admirably as such. I cannot think how this can be done in post-avant, unless it is made threatening and/or surreal, which is of course what Brooklyn Copeland does in Borrowed House. The dynamic between Copeland and Stempleman is interesting: both are low-key, subtle, nuanced, detailed, and (seemingly) rural. The difference seems to be that Copeland focuses on an edgy sense of her own sexuality, rather than on the settled domesticity that Stempleman highlights. Stempleman comes ever so close to overdoing sentiment; but there is an imaginative edge, amidst all the grace, that redeems him most of the time. Here, it is displayed in the issue of fire-arms, in a very unlikely context. It comes to seem like a metaphor for the overwhelming responsibilities of fatherhood- having lives in your hands, having to protect them. Is post-avant mature enough to deal with these issues? I honestly do not know. Eliot did not have children; Pound did not write substantially about his. Domesticity is an issue that will need to be addressed over a length of time. It is too broad and too complicated to solve instantly, even in a discourse that aims to be as inclusive as possible. Maturity is just as important- we need to know (and will, hopefully, eventually find out) what constitutes mature post-avant poetry. Edge can easily degenerate into grandstanding; represented affect is often self-indulgent. There are many things that post-avant poets can learn from reading Jordan Stempleman; if we see the limitations clearly, we can begin to transcend them. On the other hand, perhaps Jordan will declare that he is post-avant, and solve the problem once and for all. What matters is that post-avant needs foils, and Jordan Stempleman is an excellent one to begin with.

Brooklyn Copeland: Borrowed House

Borrowed House is a chap released this year by Greying Ghost Press. I do not know if Brooklyn will have a problem with being labeled post-avant; out of respect for her, I will only say that to me, these poems seem like post-avant poems. They are, in fact, exemplary of what poems from the "narrative branch" of post-avant can do. The poems in Borrowed House take their energy from dramatic metaphors, some of which are extended for the length of the chap. Copeland's language never veers into the literal; figurative language predominates, and so narrative (in these poems) is immediately distinguished from language, as it appears in mainstream poetry. Copeland's poems haunt because they take their edge from a sense of heightened tension and drama that is all the more potent for being understated. Despite their reliance on dramatic metaphor, these are demonstrably "relationship poems," that work out their edge via "we" rather than "I." Between these divergent impulses, unique textual entities present themselves, that demonstrate both the freshness and the disturbing quality that I locate in post-avant poetry.

These conflicting strains manifest palpably in He Is Watching which, in its eight solid lines, brings together many of the best elements in Copeland's poetry:

Press into the window.
You become

the shallow face
that presses into the window,

surveying all that was
and wishing for just one

more chew on the blade,
another second to swallow.

The understated quality of the poem belies its viscerality, the physical nature and sensations that accrue to a close reading of it. This response is encapsulated in the final two lines: "..chew on the blade,/ another second to swallow." Revulsion is part of the point, what gives the poem its potency, and why I would align it to post-avant. It is disturbing, unsettling, but not presented in a ham-fisted way. In fact, if read quickly, this is a rather inconspicuous poem. You have to read it very slowly and carefully for it to work its magic. The title (He Is Watching) clues us in that the poem, on at least one level, concerns voyeurism. It could be emotional, psychological, or sexual, but it undoubtedly involves a self-conscious narrator, who cloaks her rhetoric in metaphoric terms. This is a very sophisticated game that Copeland is playing. It is a surprisingly complete performance from a younger poet, and doubly surprising because the different levels are not immediately apparent on first reading. If you dig deep into this poem, it is perceptible that the lack of sentiment and fanfare are specifically what allows the poem to play its game successfully. Levels of temporality are important here too: the narrator is "becoming," while "surveying all that was." All in all, a tough, tense performance, that does a good job of hiding its own edges, and allows the reader to venture as far in as he or she dares.

Other poems in the collection play their games more overtly. Flirtations turns emotional confrontation into a children's game, minimizing their seriousness with dollops of irony and raw frankness:

Drunk beside the pond, we play
with ultimatums

:if you cannot fathom this thick mud.

:if you cannot pull the legs from this daddy-long.

:if you cannot stew this prepubescent carrot
in your own blood.

:if you cannot hitch the butterfly with your sugared thumb.

:if you cannot look me in the eye
when you recite

the filthiest passage in the grassiest language.

The anaphoric catalogue presented here is interesting for a number of reasons. Since both partners are "playing," it can be difficult to tell which partner is saying what. The most obvious ultimatum, of course, is the "prepubescent carrot in your own blood," which seems to issue from the female protagonist. She seems to be indicting her partner's sexual immaturity, his inability to raise himself above self-obsession and infantilism. These two lines are placed in the center of the anaphoric structure, making them both more visible and asked to carry more weight. Conversely, we are presented initially with the fact that these lovers are "drunk": this would seem to cast doubts on whether the catalogue can be taken seriously, or if it is merely a kind of game. Why are the lovers placed "beside the pond"? The pond, in fact reappears throughout Borrowed House, but what it denotes remains elusive. A pond is not wild or active like a river or a sea; it is (like the astrological sign Scorpio) "fixed water." As such, it can be taken to denote the settled feeling of unease that has developed between the two protagonists, or something they have in common, or something between them that is draining their energy, or a little bit of all of these. Ultimately, Flirtations is interesting because it seems to contradict its own title; rather than seeming like flirtations, these ultimatums feel more like a game of Russian Roulette. Between the title and the substance of the poem, a layer of irony is added which makes the poem that much more satisfyingly obtuse. That kind of depth, of multi-leveled attack, is what post-avant is all about (or should be.)

"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.

Initial Receptions

One thing I've noticed about contemporary poets is that we do not learn the lessons the history of poetry wants to teach us. We all know certain things, but we do not apply them to ourselves. There is a very good chance that somewhere out there is a poet like Emily Dickinson or William Blake, with no blog, no audience, no nothing, who will someday come to light. This is particularly true about releasing poetry books. If you look at the last two hundred years of poetry, from Wordsworth straight through to 2010, almost every important poetry book is released to minimal fanfare, and takes decades (at least) to achieve significant recognition. This appears to be the simple truth: there is no art-form in which initial receptions are less important than in poetry. There are exceptions; but generally, the history of poetry teaches us the lesson that real influence and real impact takes decades to accumulate.

The ramifications of this realization are extensive. The attitude of crass competitiveness which surrounds poetry books is pure dross. What is instantly massive in poetry needs to be mistrusted. Bob Southey was (almost) instantly massive; Longfellow and Whittier were instantly massive; so was Archibald MacLeish. It is human nature, especially in America, to want instant gratification; when and if gratification comes, it is human nature to want more of it. Yet, I have a hunch that when Eliot spoke of the necessity of internalizing the history of poetry, he was not just referring to the poems and poets themselves. It is easy to look back at Eliot, taking his canonicity for granted, and forget that Prufrock was not an immediate sensation. There were hundreds of other poets, now forgotten, writing at the same time, who in their day were as big as Eliot was (at least in the beginning.) To me, once a book is published it is out of my hands. While I enjoy praise and success as much as the next poet, developing my own sense of patience and steadfastness as an artist is more important. None of us, I think, can rest secure in the knowledge that our work will have a lasting impact; what we can do is to brace ourselves for a life-long, variable, rewarding struggle.

Whitman is another renegade individualist. It is easy to forget just how marginal Whitman was, and for how long. Whitman was an ardent self-promoter, but until the final years of his life he derived little concrete benefit from his self-promotions. People thought he was insane. Yet he stuck to his guns, the tide turned, the Longefellows and Whittiers disappeared (as is their wont) and Whitman became the most important American poet of the 19th century. Gertrude Stein's famous archetypal artist-trajectory, rebel to classic, is much in evidence here. Yet the first edition of Leaves of Grass was released in silence and almost complete obscurity. Sure, Emerson liked it, but that was about it. How could we not learn from Walt? How could we not apply these lessons to our own lives as artists? What are we looking for? I don't want to rehash an old post, but it seems necessary to reiterate that doing the work is (or should be) its own reward, and that expectations of fame and fortune are for the Southeys, Longfellows, and Whittiers (and, God knows, they're still around.) So, I am writing this post to/for myself, but also to start a dialogue specifically about the history of poetry, as applied to us. Do we believe it? Do we find ourselves to be an exception? I do not find myself to be exceptional, in relation to this rich history that nonetheless presents discernable patterns. It seems to me that much of the scrounging and scrambling that goes on (my own, too) needs to be placed in a larger frame-work for those of us that intend to stick with poetry as an expressive art-form for a lifetime. The larger frame-work is the work our predecessors did and the lives they led. They mirror our own work and our own lives. We can choose to ignore this, and claim exemption from the laws that have dictated our own genealogy; or, we can place ourselves squarely inside the a novel historical framework which we have dedicated a substantial portion of our lives to. I think it is ultimately smarter to place ourselves in this framework, so that we can say, with some accuracy that we are paying our rent every day in the Tower of Verse.