Following on the heels of attempted, definitive (for now) renderings of Neo-Romanticism, the Creatrix, and the Philly Free School, it stands to reason that something should be said about post-avant, a term which floated around extensively in avant-garde circles in the Aughts. When poets and pundits in the Aughts employed the term post-avant, they generally seemed to mean anything au currant which took things further, formally or conceptually, than previous generations of avant-gardists. Post-avant was thus a catch-all phrase, and vague. As of 2009 and 2010, I tried to pin it down, as is documented in Stress Fractures. This paragraph, from Stoning the Devil, does what I hoped would be a definitive rendering trick:
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 Language Poetry 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....
The connection of post-avant to Language Poetry does a genie-from-the-bottle trick of manifesting exactly what the Aughts were like in avant-America. Lang-Po, as we referred to it, still loomed as a formidable presence, under the aegis of post-modernism, and an elders-created gauntlet which had been laid down. Post-avant thus became our attempt to take Lang-Po and make it more felt, more real. As terms, both Lang-Po and post-avant hover around uncertainly in 2025. But just as something, possibly ephemeral, that colored all of our lives twenty years ago, a note of notice is not uncalled for.
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