“The End of Art” - ETD - University of Notre Dame

PREFACE
In his talk poem “what it means to be avant-garde,” David Antin says that being avant-
garde is not, as we might expect, about having the most advanced poetic practice, but rather
about the need to “occupy the present.” 1 He explains, “all that unites us in this country is /
the present and the difficulty of recognizing it and / occupying it which is why its so
easy to slip into / prophesy and the emptiness of the future that is so easy / to occupy
because of its emptiness.” 2 The study that follows is one way to think about the attempt “to
occupy the present.” I look at three poets, Ezra Pound, Charles Olson, and especially Susan
Howe, who write historical poetry in ways that directly concern how each understands his or
her life in the present. I argue that if we follow these poets in assuming that the self is a
product of history, then their historical poetry becomes, in effect, a new form of
autobiography. This shifts the emphasis of autobiography from a self that precedes or
anchors its history to a self that “comes out” of history. In my view an “inherited self”
reinvents the form of autobiography, and this provides an entirely new way to read the
historical epics of Ezra Pound and Charles Olson and the historical lyrics of Susan Howe.
The chapters that follow are my attempt to consider the implications of seeing avant-
garde historical poetry as a new form of autobiography. I begin with an ars poetica of the
inherited self in the work of Henry Adams, whose crisis of self-understanding on the eve of
1 David Antin, what it means to be avant-garde (New York: New Directions, 1993), p. 53.
2 Ibid., p. 52.
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