The Feminist Avant-Garde offers a historical and theoretical account of avant-garde women poets in America from the 1910s through the 1990s and asserts an alternative tradition to predominantly male-dominated avant-garde movements. Frost argues that this alternative lineage distinguishes itself by its feminism and its ambivalence toward existing avant-garde projects; she also thoroughly explores feminist avant-garde poets’ debts and contributions to their male counterparts.

If this book makes one thing clear, it’s that the avant-garde is not something you decide to put on like a new dress; instead it is an active and necessary response to a historical and aesthetic moment. . . . The strength of these writers is that they will never occupy a center, a ‘main’ stream. Instead their poems make audible the polyglot rumbling and roaring on the periphery.

– Jena Osman, The Women’s Review of Books

Elizabeth Frost, The Feminist Avant-Garde in American Poetry (Iowa UP 2003).

To encounter the history of avant-garde poetry is to encounter a racist tradition. From its early 20^th century inception to some of its current strains, American avant-garde poetry has been an overwhelmingly white enterprise, ignoring major swaths of innovators—namely poets from past African American literary movements—whose prodigious writings have vitalized the margins, challenged institutions, and introduced radical languages and forms that avant-gardists have usurped without proper acknowledgment. Even today, its most vocal practitioners cling to moldering Eurocentric practices. Even today, avant-garde’s most vocal, self-aggrandizing stars continue to be white and even today these stars like Kenneth Goldsmith spout the expired snake oil that poetry should be “against expression” and “post-identity.” James Baldwin wrote that “to be black was to confront, and to be forced to alter conditions forged in history . . . it is clearly at least equally difficult to surmount the delusion of whiteness.” The avant-garde’s “delusion of whiteness” is the specious belief that renouncing subject and voice is anti-authoritarian, when in fact such wholesale pronouncements are clueless that the disenfranchised need such bourgeois niceties like voice to alter conditions forged in history. The avant-garde’s “delusion of whiteness” is the luxurious opinion that anyone can be “post-identity” and can casually slip in and out of identities like a video game avatar, when there are those who are consistently harassed, surveilled, profiled, or deported for whom they are. But perhaps that is why historically the minority poets’ entrance into the avant-garde’s arcane little clubs has so often been occluded. We can never laugh it off, take it all in as one sick joke, and truly escape the taint of subjectivity and history. But even in their best efforts in erasure, in complete transcription, in total paratactic scrambling, there is always a subject—and beyond that, the specter of the author’s visage—and that specter is never, no matter how vigorous the erasure, raceless.

— Cathy Park Hong, “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde“

Prevailing theories of the avant-garde privilege formal experimentation, radical innovation, and rejection of tradition. These priorities exclude the work of many women writers and artists. The criterion of excellence that defines the historical avant-garde is inadequate to account fully for the range of avant-garde strategies practiced by women. This criterion associates the conventional with middlebrow tastes and feminine sensibilities, so that to write unconventionally is to be marked as unfeminine, while the deployment of conventional themes and forms is disparaged as reflecting bourgeois allegiances rather than avant-garde aesthetics. Accordingly, women writers who defy convention are marginalized, while those who uphold conventions are minimized. Rather than adding women writers and artists to existing theories of the avant-garde, we must change the value systems, reading practices, and paradigms that have justified their exclusion.