Justice from the Ashes

Historicizing the recent past is a fraught proposition. Although, when it comes to the avant-garde, answering Ralph Waldo Emerson’s old question as to where we find ourselves, it is possible insomuch as it turns on at least two fairly straightforward observations. The first is that the failure of the avant-garde to realize its revolutionary ambitions in the last century led many of its recent practitioners to take up a more focused, albeit theoretical, concern for justice and systems of power. The second is that the rising importance of identity as a category for political actors attentive to leftist politics and social progress allowed the former poets (who are often dedicated activists in their own right) to formulate these poetics with a special concern for racial and gendered embodiment, those familiar vessels of injustice. In the opening decades of the twenty-first century, a significant and influential portion of avant-garde poet activists follow a course similar to the one described by Julie Carr when she writes:

In the tension between the “real life” of the body, which I cannot get outside of, and the fact that such a body belongs not to me alone but also to the social body and the material earth, in this tension between what is “me” and what is “other,” that’s where I find writing most exciting and most necessary.