smug garde

He was part of the self-satisfied avant-garde.

avant light

Many of her poems were avant-garde versions of light verse.

two peas

The avant-garde has its own formalism.

not exempt

Even the avant-garde must write within a tradition.

getting ahead of myself

Another one of those self-anointed avant-garde.

soaked up

It wasn’t long before the avant-garde movement was safely absorbed by academe.

establishment

He had settled comfortably into believing himself one of the avant-garde.

those who come after

Let us praise the après-garde, those who come after with brooms & dustpans, sweeping up the debris left behind when others blasted forward, salvaging this scrap & that bit, making simple things from their leavings.

experimental me

One suspects he spends more energy asserting his experimental stance than actually writing anything one would recognize as being outside the pattern and practice of contemporary poetry.

time stamped

Where some see avant-garde and mainstream, I just see poets scrambling and scraping, trying to write poems that will stick beyond the contemporary.

border war

Two writers fighting for the limelight of who is most liminal.

make it like new

One might say it was imitatively innovative writing.

new you know

One would think innovative and experimental work would be self-evident, but it seems necessary for some writers to describe their work that way.

uncommon readers

Most of the avant-garde’s audience consists of mainstream poets. Because they're the only ones who can meet the work at least halfway.

edgy performance

He was so avant-garde he went straight to the edge of the proscenium and fell off the stage into the crowd.

all for one

Let’s all be avant-garde together.

no let up

Avant-garde energy is always to be admired.

one and done

I can admire an avant-garde of one. As a group an avant-garde is less attractive. Something like an art gang.

avant-garde tradition

He was steeped in the avant-garde tradition.

nuance, not new instance

To find the nuance in an emotion/notion, rather than a new instance of artifice. Too often the avant-garde is interested in the latter. Their magazines are full of language gadgetry, like the latest Sharper Image catalog, they have bought into the capitalist fetish for the new thing-a-ma-jig or the slick design of an otherwise common device.