Defining, much less espousing, avant verse for a conflicted era is a daunting task. With so many high-cheekboned grads of first- and second-tier credentialing academies, poetry and publishing, it's, oh you know.. a cross between over-mature, upscale manufacturing for an "informed" demographic and a type of raw, flamboyant guerilla-pandering to younger, trendier appetites.
There was a time when the American avant was stupefyingly inward-directed, outright disenfranchised, far easier to typecast due to the pervasiveness of bad manners that combined streetwise hauteur with a sense of borrowed, uppercrust vulgarity. Avantism's denizens toiled in self-imposed, well-earned obscurity, gaining parcels of notoriety through sheer luck of craft and ironic adherence to a somber code that branded fellow travelers as nonconformist, anti-bourgeois, agnostic. Back in the day, any encounter with tenure or a 9-to-5 job, say, or with organized religion, save a yogi, was grounds for dismissal from the inner circle. Today, the floodgates have swung open. Why, a cathedral-attending youngster with good bones might be a candidate for the new, wage-earning avant if she were to fall into the correct academic environs. The ranks of the avant have swelled, thus "democratized" in that many a well-schooled writer can be enrolled so long as she knows where to find the sign-up list.
Under a mountain of debt, making friends with 'danger.'This explosive growth in elite poetry circles brings a new set of challenges, however, a plethora of scholastic enthusiasms and stylistic 'varietals' that make whacky practice altogether harder to characterize. How do you label a serpentine semantics within a daybook convention of mixed genres? Or how will critics and academics reach consensus for describing a pronoun-less pantoum addressed to a transgendered threesome, an old-chestnut structure with slightly flared inner rhymes and -- rather than couplets -- tercets of repeating diphthongs?
There is in short obvious need for broadening avant categories. This is why this coming season, post-MLA, after months of deliberation and a series of intense strategy sessions, the avant community finally has pulled together its considerable resources and come up with fresh categories, none of them models of linguistic clarity in itself, though many are now splashed bravely, in a self-congratulatory fashion, across 20-pixel-high banners at web portals of avant publishing sites and showoff blogs. Examples of the new categories: "Traditional Cool Avant," "Transitional Asyntactical Avant," and -- perhaps the most inspired -- "Hip Contemporary Avant."
The American poetics community then is starting to contend with the problem of naming or describing work that is designed to defy categorization. In recent years, as practitioners and indie publishers rebelled against the linguistically-based minimalism that held sway in the late 20th century, an individualistic, mix-and-match eclecticism has become fashionable, and is now becoming the norm. This look -- contemporary blank space peppered with antique and craftsy prosody, a bespoke poetics that tweaks traditional forms with unusual syntax and estranged semantics -- has filtered into the collective avant consciousness, thanks largely to self-publishing, e-magazines, and blogs.
For poets like Enid O'Something and Michael Add-on, who helped pioneer the "new avantism," as it has sometimes been called, defining their approaches was relatively simple. O'Something used the phrase "warm modernism" to set her work apart from what she saw as the coldness of minimalist postmodern poetics, and Add-on spoke of "tradition with an avant twist" -- a term that, along with "warm modern," has since been appropriated by legions of bookstore clerks stumped for a way to explain why old-fashioned verse might now be coated in gangsta discourse or robbed of selective vowels for its own sake. (Elaborating recently on his "vision for avantism," Add-on said, "I see no reason not to offer classic pieces for foundation but always done with mod moxie.")
But how to stand out from the pack when rebellion has become the rule? Names and slogans are now "the hardest part of my job," said Red Angle, the vice president for espousal, youth-scouting, and marketing at Century Publishing in Hickory, PA, who oversees the naming of individual pieces and entire collections for up-and-comers. "Literally, every time I do it I want to quit and find a new career." No wonder. Dreaming up a name for one of the new collections "that’s descriptive and engaging -- not to mention hasn’t already been used, isn’t completely banal, and meets the approval of the rest of the avant management team -- is a nearly impossible task," he said.
It's a mix of eclecticisms beneath a towering rock hurtling downhill.Coming up with nomenclature for a collection in a way that is compelling, evocative, and clear can mean the difference -- at least to those charged with doing it -- between attracting an entirely new group of customers and repelling existing ones. Consumers of verse these days "define themselves in different terms than the ones we used to use in the poetry industry," like traditional or contemporary, said Bruce Birnbach, co-chair alternate of the working adjunct poetics transitional avant study subgroup of the MLA. "If we speak to them in our industry terms we're going to miss. You have to be very careful about putting the poetry customer into a box."
Sometimes the high stakes can nonetheless lead to a certain timidity. The marketing team at Century spent more than three months conducting focus groups, researching consumer data, and combing thesauruses before introducing a collection that became available to consumers earlier this year, under the rather predictable rubric "New Avant Traditional."
“The words ‘classic’ and ‘traditional’ are emotionally charged words and mean different things for different people,” Red Angle explained of the struggle. “Twenty to thirty percent of our customers say they want traditional, fucked-up poetry but they don't want their grandma’s or their parent’s discontinuity. They want it to be fresher and contemporized so that it’s their own. They want it to have some kind of classic feel, but they want it to be slightly different."
Smaller presses that specialize in hybrid poetry are also finding the naming process difficult. Christian Plasman started Bolierplate Publishing in 2002 to provide what its website describes as a "select portfolio of classic poetic forms inspired by traditional fine contemporary lifestyles." Three years later, after assembling an impressive collection of poetry volumes packaged in a wide array of avant stratagems, the best title Plasman and his colleagues could think of was "Bolierplate Originals."
