My Post-Post-Post-Avant Post

Ahhh...it's February, and definition is in the air (there should be an emoticon for such things). It kinda makes me wish I were still teaching freshman comp.

Anyway, over at the Poetry Foundation, Reginald Shepherd, Ange Mlinko, & Co. are sorting out the definition of Post-Avant, a phrase that gets bandied about quite a bit without being discussed itself. Here's a snipit from Shepherd:

Post-avant writers tend to eschew the standard and standardized autobiographical or pseudo-autobiographical anecdote which predominates in what’s called (usually pejoratively) “mainstream” poetry. Indeed, they frequently problematize and question the notions of self and of personal experience. But they don't just discard the self as an ideological illusion. As well, they tend to avoid or at least seriously complicate narrative of any variety. They incorporate fracture and disjunction without enthroning it as a ruling principle. They are interested in exploring, interrogating, and sometimes exploding language, identity, and society, without giving up on the pleasures, challenges, and resources of the traditional lyric.

One of my favorite things to watch is how folks, during these kinds of discussions, scramble to prove they were the first to coin such phrases (remember the flarf wars and when the Dan Hoy essay dropped? I friggin' loved it). Joan Houlihan and Ron Silliman engage in such a sub-convo (and Kent Johnson points out this forum). But I digress.

Mlinko responds with her own, more politically rooted, definition:

There is no "third way." A third way supposes a compromise of lyric and anti-lyric, but the New Americans largely weren't interested in style: they were committed to visionary politics and noncomformism. Their poetics was an outgrowth of that. There is no comparable movement now, but that doesn't mean we can paper over the differences between poets who were genuinely negative -- who knew the value of negativity -- and poets with great c.v.'s who organize themselves around Mommy anthologies and niche readings at professional conferences. There is no point of overlap whatsoever.

Dans les Cahiers, Joshua Corey sides with Mlinko:

I agree with Ange when she argues that to be avant-garde is a political position before it is an aesthetic one: that it assumes a negative, outsider's stance toward aesthetic establishments and institutions. If, as she goes on to claim, there is no longer any meaningful "outside" in American poetry, the avant-garde is emptied of its content and becomes a style at best and a pose at worst: one more chip to be played in the increasingly disorganized game of Texas hold 'em that is our boundaryless poetry present.

Corey discusses the fact that there might not be an inside vs. outside dichotomy in poetry anymore, that academia (a haven for many post-avants) no longer carries the cultural insider cred it used to:

Yet from my perspective, the crisis we're a part of now has less to do with the disappearance of the outside than it does with the disappearance of the inside. That is, literary culture (not just poetry!) no longer has a meaningful relation with our culture-in-general, which in itself no longer seems to serve the function of legitimizing political power that it used to do (but it may still have a role in legitimizing markets). Put another way and more locally, many poets associated with the "post-avant" now have tenure track academic jobs; but I would argue such positions no longer constitute a meaningful "inside" because neither American culture nor American poetry center on academia any more, and haven't for quite some time.

While all of this is very interesting and important...I mean, if we are going to use abstractions to define aesthetics, we should discuss on what, if any, common ground we stand...what I find most interesting about all this is the discussion of the lyric, particularly "Steve"'s comment (Stephen Burt?):

But there are plenty of people (Ange, you're one of them!) trying to figure out how to incorporate both lyric and non- (if not anti-) lyric impulses, and trying (not coincidentally) to put modernist fragmentation together with Romantic expectations about voice and form.

To me this is kind of a brilliant definition of a lot of the poetics we've been talking about recently (The New Sincerity, The New Childishness, etc.), and actually was quite revelatory for me as a poet. While most of the time I find it refreshing that my friends don't discuss their poetry in terms of a poetics, lately I've been lamenting that fact. What kind of poets are we?!?! What *kind* of poet am I? In a general sense, the kind of poetry I like to read and the kind of poetry I try to write does in fact attempt to combine the lyric and anti-lyric (which in my mind is not necessarily narrative), the modernist and the Romantic.

But this, I recently realized, is in and of itself a dangerously vague definition. And here's why. Last weekend, at a bar called Bukowski's of all things, a group of friends and I were discussing the lyric's very definition. I was shocked by how different the four of us took the lyric to be. I remember an article...maybe it was in The American Poet...maybe it was Zapruder and Harvey...doing a similar thing. If someboday has that issue lying around, throw a synopsis into the mix. Anyway, I thought I'd broaden the discussion. What is the lyric? What contemporaries exemplify your definition of the lyric? What would anti-lyric be? Who would you consider an anti-lyrical contemporary poet?