Tao and Kenny G.

Matt and Francois,

You guys raised many good points. I'll get to it later. Mostly I think the notion of an "avant-garde" in the present is not so useful.

Here's something to think about:

Exhibit A:
Kenneth Goldsmith's writing has been called some of the most "exhaustive and beautiful collage work yet produced in poetry" by Publishers Weekly.

Exhibit B:
{That same Publisher Weekly's review of Tao Lin's "you are a little bit happier than i am"]
Chatty, frivolous, impatient, depressed, alienated, lovelorn and prone to outbursts, the poems in 24-year-old Tao Lin's print debut (another collection appears online) will appeal to the reader's inner adolescent... gesture, quite obviously, toward teenage angst. If Lin sometimes manages to fall short of this already low goal ("4:30 a.m." repeats the line "i am fucked existentially" no fewer than 60 times)... he surprises, here and there, with a flash of emotional complexity... The book would have gained much, however, from analyzing its anxieties rather than just acting them out.(Nov)

So it appears that PW is more challenged someone who inflates the "romantic author" person to the bursting point than one who claims to do away with said artifact. Of course Goldsmith might say that this troubling is part of my Romantic notion of art. And I might just agree.