The Academic Avant-Garde: Poetry and the American University by Kimberly Quiogue Andrews

© 2026 Johns Hopkins University Press

The distinction between poetry and theory is academic. I’ve always believed this, so when I finally sat down to read The Academic Avant-Garde: Poetry and the American University, I was glad that it began with Ron Silliman's infamous 1990 declaration that “the university is the 500 pound gorilla at the party of the poets.” Now, “three decades later,” Quiogue Andrews writes, “the gorilla is still very much in attendance-—one might, in fact, go so far as to say that it’s eaten enough snacks and poured enough drinks to become a proper 800-pound gorilla, the host of the whole affair” (1). This opening might make you think that a) poets just want to have fun, b) academia is an intrusion into their party, only comically acknowledged, or c) the party is over. But the good news is that this book goes on to say something else entirely. While it is easy to think of poets as creators (that’s what the word means, after all) and critics as responders (ditto), what if it’s the other way around? What if academic literary studies over the last century has created the discourse that makes poetry possible? This great book goes on to demonstrate that another party has been happening all along, and we may have been missing it. Not only have poets become more academic (in their education and employment in creative writing programs, in their allusions to Federici and Heidegger and Wilderson and Fernandez and Baudrillard), but academic literary critics have become more poetic. What if we always were?

To be fair, I am already putting the case more strongly than does Quiogue Andrews, who likes to party with the poets. Her book’s focus is less on “the poetic possibilities of literary studies” (2) in relation to criticism than in relation to poetry. While the book does sketch some of the ways in which “poetry and literary study came to share a space” (7), that space is not (as in Mark McGurl’s influential The Program Era) first and foremost the material conditions of the modern university—though Quiogue Andrews alludes to those—and it is not the larger discourse of literariness either (as my own Foucauldian version of the argument might prefer). Instead, the book follows the conventional literary critical monograph’s five-chapter norm as well as the norm of focusing each chapter on a particular poet: Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, Jorie Graham, John Keene and Claudia Rankine, and Susan Howe. Structurally, criticism here—including Quiogue Andrews’s own—is secondary to the poems. The arc is modernist, post-modernist, contemporary, American, and predictable (including the one non-white chapter). What is not routinely chronological, canonical, or predictable is the ingenuity of the readings, which often go further to reverse or collapse critical and poetic discourse than the structure of the book might suggest. Stevens did not just “align his reflexive poetics and his institutional situation” (35) by accident; as Quiogue Andrews shows, Harvard in 1901 was a hotbed of poetic speculation, and Stevens’s relationship to Santayana clearly began what developed into a taste for aesthetic philosophy and a resistance to utilitarian thought. Ashbery also began his career at Harvard, but Quiogue Andrews is less interested in that critical history (which would include Frank O’Hara and Reuben Brower and Robert Frost through a back door) than she is in how and why so much critical discourse continues to circulate around Ashbery. “Ashbery has, as we know, a lot of explainers,” she writes, “more of them, perhaps, than any other American poet in recent history” (49). Why? She suggests that after New Criticism, a “shared sensibility about the (de)valuation of literary-interpretive labor” emerged, and “Ashbery is a foundational figure in introducing this form into contemporary poetry” (53). This may be going the long way around to make the argument, but one takes the point: critics came to love reading Ashbery because Ashbery was speaking the language of criticism.

But what is the language of criticism? Quiogue Andrews is too canny to answer that question directly, but she does say that for many late twentieth-century critics, “Ashbery’s style of poetic thinking registered either as an assault upon or a paean to not only what poetry ought to be doing, but also what criticism saw its most pressing task to be” (60). Again, I wish she would just say that Ashbery sounds like lineated post-structuralism, but instead she writes of “the nexus of communality between Ashbery’s multivocal, auto-analytical aesthetic and the troubled imaginary of the academic literary community in which his work has found such a secure home” (71). I’m not sure what “nexus of communality” means here, but I am sure that lines like

Yet the writing that doesn’t offend us

(Keats’ "grasshopper" sonnet for example)

Soothes and flatters the easier, less excitable

Parts of our brain

from Ashbery’s 70-page 1979 poem “Litany,” could be Barbara Johnson, or her mentor Paul de Man, or her peer Cynthia Chase. Helen Vendler would not have loved Ashbery as much as she did if she had seen that, but she did suggest that “every Ashbery poem is about poetry.” The metalanguage that characterizes Ashbery’s style may be the language of criticism, but no one would call him a critic. This is where the intimacy on which this book wants to insist gets sticky and interesting: perhaps “nexus of communality” means that poetry and criticism can share a discourse but not a genre. That is certainly the lesson of the chapter on another of Vendler’s favorite poets, Jorie Graham. Here, Quiogue Andrews turns from “conditions of reception” to “sites of production, and this is where the book will remain” (90). What this means is that while Stevens and Ashbery are understood in this book as poetry-thinkers, Graham is read as a poetry-teacher. Of course, Graham’s poetry is also “ostentatiously thinky” (in David Orr’s faintly damning phrase), but for Quiogue Andrews “this ‘thinkiness’ is overdetermined” (93), since it is caught in the contradiction that characterizes the teaching of creative writing: “it cannot be taught even as it is being taught” (91). “The subjective focus of poetry such as Graham’s,” Quiogue Andrews writes, “brings into view, even in its formal abstraction, the processes of systematic formation and resistance to systematicity that forms the social imaginary of the humanist and poet in the academy” (119). That's a very general observation, since who doesn’t occupy such a social imaginary (which may be why the grammar here is glitchy)? I love the thinkiness of Graham’s poetics, and while I appreciate the context of expanding MFA pedagogical ideologies, I also think there is a feminist theoretical perspective on Graham’s gorgeous abstraction that gets lost in this chapter.

That said, the next chapter on John Keene and Claudia Rankine gets the relation of poetics to theory exactly right. “A full account of vanguardist African American poetry requires sustained attention to the ways in which Black poets theorize” (121), Quiogue Andrews writes, and you can’t argue with that. As Black Studies has been pointing out for some time, Black poets have always practiced metalanguage, so this vanguard has a long history. Still, Keene takes metapoetics to new heights, as in his 2006 “Analysis II”:

So we were talking about the idea and utility of distance, you know, and

we got onto

the theory that the crust and upper mantle are broken between successive

 

how just before you perceive something as an identifiable object, indexed

by the reality

felt as a rolling or rocking motion, more or less fluid, but constantly

moving

in which you regularly live and function. . .

The break in the enjambment between the first couplet and the third line is genius, as is the punch line at the beginning of the third couplet. Keene zeroes in on the intersection of perception and cognition that informs post-idealist philosophy and twists it this way and that, exposing “the racist blindness that has erased the presence of people whose existence is being discussed,” as Keene wrote in a post on his blog J’s Theater in 2014. The ways in which “you perceive something as an identifiable object” has everything to do with that erasure.

Keene is doing far more than asserting “a radical poetics of Black subjectivity in which that subjectivity lays irrepressible claim to a mode of discourse typically considered to be outside of the boundaries of its literary expression,” as Quiogue Andrews writes (144). What Keene’s work does is to expose the concepts of blackness, of subjectivity, of possessive boundaries, of literariness, of expression as all part and parcel of how the intersection of perception and cognition gets raced in the first place. Consequently, Keene is deeply invested in abstraction for abstraction’s sake. In contrast, Claudia Rankine’s “books follow a neat trajectory in which each book becomes more recognizably ‘experimental’ than the last” (148). The subtitles of two of Rankine’s best books do not contain the word “Lyric” for nothing. As Quiogue Andrews writes, “Rankine, unlike Keene . . . faces head-on the subject of the Black experience in America” (151), but like Keene, Rankine’s “affiliations with the academic humanities are closely bound to her sense that a dense complex of difficult intellectual conditions is precisely the ‘tool’ that she found she needed in order to ‘address race’ in her poetry” (160). Again, I would go further: both Keene and Rankine are in conversation with literary critical theorists (more should be made here of Rankine’s intimate dialogue with Lauren Berlant), so much so that their work is not just poetry that is influenced by critical theory. Their work is critical theory. The fact that the one chapter in this book on Black poetics is the chapter that makes this point most clearly is not a coincidence.

This makes me wish the book might have ended with two chapters on Keene and Rankine rather than one on a Black poetics they are made to represent, but the final chapter on Susan Howe makes sense, too. Like Rankine, Howe is an essentially lyric poet, and like Rankine, Howe is an egghead. Yet while Rankine’s archive is contemporary US political and aesthetic life, Howe’s archive is historical. Further, Quiogue Andrews argues, for Howe “the authorization to speak autobiographically emerges from a methodological commitment to historicism and a concomitant access to the archival materials that universities offer their faculty and students” (167). The fact that Howe had such access enabled the material conditions of her historical work —“she needed the Sterling Memorial Library to write My Emily Dickinson” (189)—but it is also the case that Howe managed to poeticize future criticism on Dickinson in the process (as my own book on Dickinson testifies). In academic archives, “Howe could discover ‘outsiders’—from Edwards to Dickinson to Peirce—and reconstruct their histories as her own” (167), but in doing so she has also influenced academic literary historicism, and that is no small feat. A quick look at poetry studies today will tell you that Rankine has had such an influence, too. The Academic Avant-Garde ends with an invocation of intellectual melancholia, lamenting the fact that “in a world that has pressed the notion of criticality into the service of a toothless centrism . . . a life of artistic or humanistic intellection will never be broadly available as a form of life, as a pursuit that allows one to live” (214). Yet this important book actually gives one hope: maybe that life is already here for the taking if we know where to look. Perhaps the party has just begun.