Avant-garde or arriere-garde in recent American poetry

This essay attempts to work through what seems most obviously problematic i n current self-ascriptions of avant-garde status in order to specify what m ay remain culturally productive and even spiritually necessary in taking on those old identifications for a new world? If contemporary aspirants to av ant-garde status are to avoid being identified with "mere" modernist aesthe ticism, they have to stress their social agendas, yet they cannot pursue th ose social agendas as directly as did the early avant-garde because in our culture shock value is clearly a force manipulated by the established econo my. Instead, the contemporaries have still to rely on modernist rhetorics f or the role of experiment, even as they worry about being swallowed up with in the aestheticism now associated with such rhetorics. There arises then t he danger that "avant-garde" will become primarily a defensive label used t o ward of other ways of relying on modernist strategies. So it becomes nece ssary to show how there is in the best non avant-garde contemporary poetry like the work of Robert Hass a scope, intensity, and intelligence that prov ides and active and often unrecognized challenge to avant-garde ambitions t o speak for contemporaneity. But then one can use the measure of contempora neity that one gains by reading the non-avant-garde sympathetically in orde r to show how Charles Bernstein in fact offers imaginative stances that do powerfully address a considerably larger set of contemporary concerns than is recognized when he is kept within the logic of boutique coteries that th e academy tends to impose on avant-garde ambitions.