SOURCE: Hartley, George. “‘endless PROTEANL inkages’: Language Poetry and the Avant-Garde Tradition.” In Textual Politics and the Language Poets, pp. 1-25. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.

In the following essay, Hartley demonstrates the stylistic and ideological connection between Language Poetry and the avant-garde tradition in American poetry.

I begin this essay with an apparent oxymoron: avant-garde tradition. As art critic Rosalind Krauss explains in her essay “The Originality of the Avant-Garde,” one of the key myths of early twentieth-century avant-garde art is its original status, its supposed separation from the “corrupt” tradition (or “institution” as critic Peter Bürger puts it) of art. But Krauss goes on to claim that the avant-garde work—like all works of art—is always already a copy. It is a copy in two senses: (1) it copies formal techniques that can always be found in previous works, and (2) it copies what is already a...