Critics speak of avant-gardes, artists rarely do. Just who counts as avant- and who as rear guard is sternly contested by critics – and rightly so. The term avant-garde, which is widely abused in the promotion of everything from pullovers to poets, expresses a critic’s dream of social and cultural opposition, of a progressive alternative culture, and a consumer’s lust for novelty. By my count, four literary avant-garde scenes since 1945 have mattered to poetry: Black Mountain College (1950–56); Greenwich Village (1950–63); the Black Arts Movement (1962–70); and the Language poets of New York and San Francisco (1979–89). The definition I employ has four elements: 1) avant-gardists are motivated by a will to produce the dominant art of the future, not just by a desire to receive recognition of their own talent; 2) to this end, they form a public confederation of artists in different media, 3) who oppose the established conventions of a contemporary art community. Finally 4) an avant-garde has an explicit view of the relation between art and society.

The literary avant-garde of 1950–56 followed avant-garde movements in painting and in jazz, which by 1950 had already taken on their own shapes. The abstract expressionist painters of the mid- and late 1940s (Pollock, Rothko, deKooning, Hofmann, Kline, Motherwell and others) were recognized by poets as having produced an avant-garde painting, and the bebop jazz musicians of the same period (Charlie Parker, Thelonius Monk, Kenny Clarke, and Dizzy Gillespie) were even more often acknowledged by poets as forerunners.