Nah-vant Garde

1. I flippantly used this term after AWP.
2. I re-used it over at John Gallaher's blog recently.
3. What the hell do I mean by it?
4. First of all, I'm not trying to pull either a Silliman or an Abramson. This is not a new category I want to invent. See #1 regarding flippancy.
5. That being said, I do mean something by it.
6. I'm getting to the point, really.
7. If the avant garde is by definition the new, then we our first problem is establishing a timeline of the new.
8. Time being the key factor?
9. See, already there's a problem before the first problem.
10. Hence this idiotic numbering system.
11. I would first like to note that in order for something to be new, said newness has to occur faster than it used to. Much like processor speeds and fads, creativity is apparently given an ever-shorter shelf life.
12. When poetry goes bad, it smells worse than old socks. This is one reason we try to weed it out.
13. Of course, the metaphor is now hopelessly tangled, so let's get back to the new.
14. Advertising wants newness. Products want newness. Ezra Pound's dictum has been grasped by the anti-poetry of the world. Why in the name of all that is (un)holy do we want to blindly follow that path?
14a. The Italian Futurists went after the New. They also thought Fascism a pretty good idea. Newness =/= automatically good.
14b. Whitman went after the New. Dreams of peace and prosperity and gender-friendly erotica. Newness =/= automatically bad.
15. Newness for the sake of newness = planned obsolescence = Windows Vista poetry.
16. Oldnes for the sake of oldness = planned obsolescence = Windows Vista poetry in some number of years.
17. Read #12 again, just because it was vaguely humorous, and I'm getting on my soapbox about now.
18. The nah-vant garde is that which demands newness because what is old must be bad (see 14a and 14b). The nah-vant garde does not admit to itself that it in fact holds power and/or has existed long enough to no longer be avant. It is in, perhaps even behind, the garde.
19. I write a lot of different types of poetry. I read a lot of different types of poetry. Screw the garde.
20. Give me the garden. With Whitman and Futurists. And Anne Carson and Mary Oliver. And Lisa Jarnot and Tom Phillips. And Shakespeare and Aristophanes. And lots of glass walls, because some of these folks would smack the shit out of each other trying to weed out perceived problems.
21. We can train them like sharks in an aquarium.
22. Oh wait, too late.