As she recounts it, genres blend and schools contend as needed, and the result is a world of poets and artists arguing with the inherited past and drawing from a newly awakened past and present. It's extraordinarily well laid out and true to the experiences of those of us who found a space there. 'In this extraordinary book, Sophie Seita has mapped the postwar poetry avant-garde with all its complexities and contradictions. Charles Bernstein, author of Pitch of Poetry Her case studies are as exemplary as they are illuminating.' 'Sophie Seita's marvelously detailed examination of avant-garde and contemporary little magazines lays bare the infrastructures of innovative poetry.

Her deeply informed readings of these periodicals and her astute theorizing complicate those narratives through a richly textured assessment of the form's importance to avant-garde poetics.' 'Investigating modernist and contemporary American little magazine communities, Seita persuasively challenges conventional notions of the avant-garde as oppositional, militant, and closed. In the process, she addresses fundamental questions about the intersections of aesthetic form and politics and about what we consider to be literature and art. By focusing on the avant-garde's publishing history and group dynamics, Sophie Seita also demonstrates a new methodology for writing about avant-garde practice across time, one that is applicable to other artistic and non-artistic communities and that speaks to contemporary practitioners as much as scholars. Paying particular attention to neglected women writers, artists, and editors alongside more canonical figures, it shows how the study of little magazines can change our views of literary and art history while shedding new light on individual careers. Innovative in approach, Provisional Avant-Gardes focuses on the medium of the little magazine-from early Dada experiments to feminist, queer, and digital publishing networks-to understand avant-gardes as provisional and heterogeneous communities.

What would it mean to be avant-garde today? Arguing against the notion that the avant-garde is dead or confined to historically 'failed' movements, this book offers a more dynamic and inclusive theory of avant-gardes that accounts for how they work in our present.

This extraordinary notion meaning