Avant-Garde Pieties: Aesthetics, Race, and the Renewal of Innovative Poetics

221 Pages·2018·2.923 MB·English

by  Joel Bettridge

Avant-Garde Pieties
Avant-Garde Pieties offers a sustained critique of the ideologies that fueled his-
torical avant-garde formations, while proposing a method for rethinking the so-
cial energies and processes that animate contemporary poetic practice. Bettridge
offers a perspective into what feminist theologian Catherine Keller refers to as an
“apophatic” understanding, a relational ontology grounded in “disciplined uncer-
tainty.” Any U.S. American poetic design in “debate with itself about itself” will
have engaged questions of ascendency vis-à-vis stateside exceptionalism, white su-
premacy, and racial violence. And embodied justice is the poetic response to failures
of the overarching enterprises imagined by the historical avant-gardes. Bettridge
writes from a situated perspective that makes visible his own commitments but with-
out ever disavowing the self-entangled stakes of whiteness in the enabling stories
that structure literary studies.
—Roberto Tejada, author of Exposition Park and
National Camera: Photography and
Mexico’s Image Environment
This book establishes Bettridge as a go-to authority on the fraught contestation of
innovation in poetry, and as an adroit critic of an unfolding terrain of formidable
originality in current poetics. His focused, and reliable, attention to detail as well as
the larger arcs of theoretical issues is commendable.
—Jed Rasula, author of The American Poetry Wax
Museum and Syncopations: The Stress of
Innovation in Contemporary American Poetry 
Avant-Garde Pieties tells a new story about innovative poetry; it argues that the
avant-garde—now more than a century old—persists in its ability to nurture inter-
esting, provocative, meaningful, and moving poems, despite its profound cultural
failings and its self-devouring theoretical compulsions. It can do so because a hu-
manistic strain of its radical poetics compels adherents to argue over the meaning of
their shared political and aesthetic beliefs. In ways that can be productively thought
of as religious in structure, this process fosters a perpetual state of crisis and renewal,
always returning innovative poetry to its founding modernist commitments as a way
to debate what the avant-garde is—what it should and does look like, and what it
should and does value. Consequently, Avant-Garde Pieties makes way for a radical
poetics defined not by formal gestures, but by its debate with itself about itself. It is a
debate that honors the tradition’s intellectual founding as well as its cultural present,
which includes aesthetic multiformity, racialized and gendered modes of authorship,
experiences of the sacred, political activism, and generosity in critical disagreement.
Joel Bettridge is the author of two books of poetry, That Abrupt Here and Presocra-
tic Blues, as well as the critical study Reading as Belief: Language Writing, Poetics,
Faith. He coedited, with Eric Selinger, R onald Johnson: Life and Works. He is an
Associate Professor of English at Portland State University.
Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature
83 Milton and the Early Modern Culture of Devotion
Bodies at Prayer
Naya Tsentourou
84 TransGothic in Literature and Culture
Edited by Jolene Zigarovich
85 Latin American Gothic in Literature and Culture
Edited by Sandra Casanova-Vizcaíno and Inés Ordiz
86 The Literature of Remembering
Tracing the Limits of Memoir
Edited by Bunty Avieson, Fiona Giles, and Sue Joseph
87 From Mind to Text
Continuities and Breaks between Cognitive, Aesthetic and
Textualist Approaches to Literature
Bartosz Stopel
88 Attachment, Place, and Otherness in Nineteenth-Century
American Literature
New Materialist Representations
Jillmarie Murphy
89 Shame and Modern Writing
Edited by Barry Sheils and Julie Walsh
90 Provincializing the Bible
Faulkner and Postsecular American Literature
Norman W. Jones
91 Avant-Garde Pieties
Aesthetics, Race, and the Renewal of Innovative Poetics
Joel Bettridge
For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com.
Avant-Garde Pieties
Aesthetics, Race, and the Renewal
of Innovative Poetics
Joel Bettridge
First published 2018
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“Life Is A Dream” from Your Name Here by John Ashbery. Copyright © 2000,
2017 by John Ashbery. All rights reserved. Reprinted by arrangement with Georges
Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author’s estate.
“Today is the last day/of your life ’til now,” from Recalculating by Charles
Bernstein © 2013, reprinted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
“Hinge Picture’’ By Susan Howe, from FRAME STRUCTURES, copyright
© 1974, 1975, 1978, 1979, 1996 by Susan Howe. Reprinted by permission of
New Directions Publishing Corp.
Juliana Spahr and David Buuck, excerpts from An Army of Lovers. Copyright
© 2013 by Juliana Spahr and David Buuck. Reprinted with the permission of The
Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of City Lights Books, www.citylights.com.
Remember to Wave, Kaneohe, HI: Tinfish Press, 2010.
Material from Phosphorescence of Thought by Peter O’Leary, © 2013, reprinted
by permission of the Cultural Society.
Claudia Rankine, excerpts from Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric.
Copyright © 2004 by Claudia Rankine. Reprinted with the permission of The
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All materials by CAConrad are reprinted by permission of the author.
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
1 Problems and Propositions: On Where We Find the
Avant-Garde 1
2 Justice from the Ashes: On Juliana Spahr and
David Buuck’s An Army of Lovers, and Kaia Sand’s
Remember to Wave 22
3 A Sacred Metaphor and the Values of the Avant-
Garde: On Crisis, Renewal, and Multiformity 53
4 Case Studies: On Peter O’Leary’s Phosphorescence
of Thought, Kenneth Goldsmith’s The Weather, and
Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An
American Lyric 108
5 Conclusions and Implications: On Accepting
Friendship, Giving Up on Moralism, and the Poetics
of Generosity 163
Bibliography 201
Index 207

Acknowledgments
This book could not have been completed without a wide community of
friends and colleagues.
I want to thank Jennifer Abbott at Routledge for her interest in the
manuscript and her professionalism in bringing it into the world.
I am grateful for the labor of the poets whose work I attend to in
these pages, for the poems they made have occupied my imagination,
and the pleasure and challenge of engaging with them has only increased
my admiration for their achievements—thanks, then, to Juliana Spahr,
David Buuck, Kaia Sand, Peter O’Leary, Kenneth Goldsmith, Claudia
Rankine, and CAConrad. I am also thankful to them, and to David
Kermani, John Keene, and the editors at New Directions, The University
of Chicago Press, Tinfish Press, the Cultural Society, Graywolf Press,
and City Lights Books, for permission to reprint work here.
I also want to thank the English Department at Portland State University,
and Christine Thompson especially, for development funds that helped me
complete this project. I would be remiss too if I did not thank my colleagues
who listened to a portion of this manuscript at our faculty research salon
and provided invaluable feedback. Particular thanks go to Susan Kirtley and
Alastair Hunt for organizing these events, which have provided thoughtful
camaraderie.
I owe a unique debt of gratitude to Charles Bernstein and Marjorie
Perloff, who have been for many years sources of great support and en-
couragement, as well as insightful readers of early drafts. A number of
other friends have also shepherded this book at pivotal moments in the
development of my thinking and writing. While I am sure they under-
estimate their own roles in the final outcome of this book, I do not,
so special thanks to Rodney Koeneke, John Beer, Jed Rasula, Anoop
Mirpuri, David LaRocca, and Hank Lazer.
Finally, I want to express my profound thanks to Kim Evans, Richard
Deming, Robert Tejada, Dale Smith, and Liz Ceppi. Their intelligence
and generosity, and their sustained, critical response and conversation
have helped make this book the best possible version of itself. Their un-
ending willingness to talk and read could only have been the result of a
care that humbles me; they have been, to borrow a phrase from Robert
Creeley, good company.

1 Problems and Propositions
On Where We Find the
Avant-Garde
“Since we started dating, I realize that I like poetry a lot less than I
thought I did,” she said, causally, as we were doing the washing up after
dinner, and I had to admit she was onto something. Just a few hours
earlier, we attended a poetry reading in which a young man read one-
and two-syllable words while varying their pitch, duration, and volume;
naturally, he took long pauses between words, and naturally we were, as
he said, only being treated to selections of a much longer work, although
I think he managed to convey its scope superbly. Liz, the woman who
confessed to poetry’s downgrade in her affections would shortly become
my wife, and although I did not marry her for her taste in poetry, it is,
I think, quite good. She loves Walt Whitman and Wallace Stevens; she
also has a PhD in American literature and is not inclined to dismiss dif-
ficult texts of any kind—so I took her comment to suggest more than her
personal evaluation of the quality of the poems we had just endured. It
was not just that they were bad (which they were), but that they were en-
tirely recognizable—they were experimental only in the sense that sim-
ilar poems had once been thought so; true, their lack of narrative might
surprise the casual reader of poetry, although it is equally true that no-
body at the reading that night had likely heard anything approaching a
story at a similar event in years. Standing there, I would have liked to
have mentioned to her John Cage’s remark about trying something that
is boring for four minutes, then eight minutes, then sixteen minutes,
then thirty-two minutes, until you discover that it is not boring at all,
but I didn’t think that was fair. The poem was boring in the most boring
sense: dull, but crafted, and mind-numbingly familiar.
And it is this word familiar that often emerges as one of the more
cutting or condescending adjectives to let slip when reading a recently
published poem, or talking to a contemporary poet, who claims affinity
with the avant-garde, or employs self-defining adjectives such as innova-
tive or disjunctive. That is at least the impression I get from my fellow
literary professionals who, when they encounter such confused zombies,
casually remark that more than a century has passed since M arinetti
published his first manifesto. And you can hardly blame them. If what
we might call the avant-garde is merely a collection of well-known