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

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 interesting, provocative, meaningful, and moving poems, despite its profound cultural failings and its self-devouring theoretical compulsions. It can do so because a humanistic 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 thoug...