New British Schools

Abstract

That the millennium brought on new forms of apocalyptic thinking not from within the US avant-garde but rather about it was, for me at any rate, a surprise (as I suppose any respectable apocalypse should be). Peter B ü rger’s 1970s’ thoughts on the fate of the neo-avant-garde have returned like its prophecy in numerous book introductions to contemporary art and poetries, and oxymorons like “post-avant”are now rather complacently used to describe the generation after Language poetics. Keith Tuma pictures the scene in spectacularly deflationary terms in his essay “After the Bubble”: “There is no such thing as an avant-garde now.”¹ And some, like Peter O’Leary, are taking advantage of the situation, calling for the return of what he sees as the last properly visionary apocalyptic poets put forward in the 1990s by the short-lived mag apex of the M, reminding us that they predicted this state of affairs blamed by many on “the academic institutionalization of both traditional workshop poetry and Language poetry” in the States. ² Judging Language poetry’s extraordinary impact as having been not even “remotely radical,” such new groups—would we call them “avant-garde”?—see “a way forward for poetry” by turning back to “mystical and prophetic traditions, as well as romanticism.”³ Others in the US make the argument that the newly leveled playing field between mainstream and once-radical contingents represents progress, a kind of new Jerusalem of democracy, individual choice, and agency: precisely that earlier state of US affairs that Language poetics and theory critiqued as illusory.