Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde

[✂️ Clip]

Avant-garde poetry’s attitudes towards race have been no different than that of mainstream institutions. Of course, I am aware that I am erecting an artificial electric fence between two camps that many argue no longer even exists. Poetry’s current aesthetic styles bear a closer resemblance to an oscillating Venn diagram and there are plenty of indie presses and magazines that have outright and rightly rejected these ossified two poles, not to mention that to argue what is and is not truly avant-garde now, based on say, Peter Burger’s definition of the avant-garde, would be a mind-numbing, self-defeating, and masturbatory exegesis.
.
.
.
The voices have returned (they've never gone anywhere) as a matter of survival, and also as minstrelized, digitalized, theatricalized artifice, speaking in a mélange of offshoots, with multiple entryways and exits through the soaring use of aberrant vernaculars. The form is code-switching: code-switching between languages, between Englishes, between genres, between races, between bodies. As Derek Walcott said, "there is no nation but the imagination," and poets like Kapil create the geopolitical imaginary, building worlds to critique world-building. Conceptual writing is, for all its declarations, pathetically outdated and formulaic in its analog need to bark back incessantly at the original.