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

Avant-Garde Pieties

Avant-Garde Pieties offers a sustained critique of the ideologies that fueled historical avant-garde formations, while proposing a method for rethinking the social 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 uncertainty. Any U.S. American poetic design in debate with itself about itself will have engaged questions of ascendency vis--vis stateside exceptionalism, white supremacy, 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 without 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 Mexicos 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-gardenow more than a century oldpersists 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 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 iswhat 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 traditions 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 Presocratic Blues, as well as the critical study Reading as Belief: Language Writing, Poetics, Faith. He coedited, with Eric Selinger, Ronald 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-Vizcano and Ins 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.

First published 2018
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2018 Taylor & Francis

The right of Joel Bettridge to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
CIP data has been applied for.

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 authors 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 OLeary, 2013, reprinted by permission of the Cultural Society.

Claudia Rankine, excerpts from Dont Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. Copyright 2004 by Claudia Rankine. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Graywolf Press, www.graywolfpress.org.

All materials by CAConrad are reprinted by permission of the author.

Selections from On Vanessa Place, Gone With the Wind, and the Limit Point of Certain Conceptual Aesthetics, By John Keene. Copyright John Keene, 2017. All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-138-59971-0 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-47107-0 (ebk)

Typeset in Sabon
by codeMantra

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 achievementsthanks, then, to Juliana Spahr, David Buuck, Kaia Sand, Peter OLeary, 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.