many flows

Look closely at the mainstream and you’ll see the many currents, eddies and wavelets.

mainly blah

The mainstream could throw up a thousand books a year just as good as this one and just as undistinguished.

false dualities

Beware nevertheless of false dualities: classical and romantic, real and ideal, reason and instinct, mind and matter, male and female—all should be merged into each other (as a Taoists merged their Yin and Yang in the Tao) and should be regarded as two aspects of one idea. […]

Yet ridiculous as may seem the dualities in conflict at a given time, it does not follow that dualism is a worthless process. The river of truth is always splitting up into arms that reunite. Islanded between them, the inhabitants argue for a lifetime as to which is the mainstream.

—Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus (Persea Press, 1981; first published in Curwen Press in 1944)

required rebel

Slavishly we imitate; and slavishly, rebel.

—Mignon McLaughlin, Aperçus: Aphorisms of Mignon McLaughlin (Brabant Press), introduction by Josh Michaels.

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.

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.

wrong from the gitgo

He was never going to write the right poetry.

running scared

The avant garde is always running scared, like the Israelites fleeing not through a parted Red Sea but the Mainstream about to close over them.