After Post-Avant

Ron Silliman's recent post declaring his intention to "get his head out of the eighties" by looking more skeptically at his Quietist/Post-Avant dichotomy was heartening. Silliman is right to recognize that this way of thinking about poetry is a relic of the anthology wars of the 1950s and early 1960s. His most persuasive evidence for looking beyond such a division is his own blog, which as he suggests, contains links to poets representing a wide array of aesthetic and political commitments. Indeed, the fact that I, a dyed-in-the-wool product of the American MFA system, default to his blog for poetry links is part of what makes his investment in labeling a diverse school of poets "quietist" so troubling. The whole idea of the anthology wars only makes sense when attention (readership and publication) exists in an economy of scarcity. Since the advent of the web, that hardly seems to be the case anymore, though of course one can argue about prizes and the like, as Silliman does, if one is so inclined. Still, the whole idea of a movement, as Raymond Williams argues, stems from the need to brand one's art to better achieve recognition and sponsorship. Achieving this identity through the centralizing gesture of movements, and particularly a few massive competing movements, seems better suited perhaps to Fordism of the last century than the distributed networks of this one.