you, instead, to use contemporary imagery: it may, for example, be urban,
technological or media-based, and/or involve some icons of popular
culture. You might want to write a poem about the media or about using
the computer. Or you might want to write about contemporary problems,
such as heroin addiction, which inevitably bring with them their own kind
of imagery.
The poem might also deal with a taboo subject. When it was written
‘P.M.T.’ by Dorothy Porter (1991, p. 429) dealt with such a topic: premen-
strual tension. This isn’t a taboo subject anymore, partly because people
have been writing poems about it! But there are other areas of experience,
which are still surrounded with disgust, secrecy or fear, that you might
want to address.
POETIC ACROBATICS, AVANT-GARDE POETICS
Experimentation has always been an important part of writing, and some
writers in all eras have pushed at the boundaries of language and genre.
However, the word experimental has been used more specifically in the
twentieth and 21st centuries to describe certain movements which have
been particularly directed towards experimentation with genre and
language.
The experimental poetry movements of the twentieth century started
with the work of the dadaists, surrealists, futurists and cubists. Although
they were part of the movement known as modernism, these movements
were labelled avant-garde. Avant-garde is a military term which was orig-
inally used to describe the military vanguard. It was adapted to describe
revolutionary art movements which were ahead of their time and leaders
in their field. The activities of these avant-garde movements began in the
early 1900s, and spanned art, music and literature. Particularly important
was the work of Gertrude Stein which had some connections with the
cubist painters, and André Breton who was a leader of the surrealist
movement. Experimentation continued throughout the century (for
example, in the United States, in the work of The New York School of
Poets, the Beats, the Black Mountain Poets, and the Objectivists, in the
1950s and 60s).
But throughout the 1980s and 90s, a number of experimental poetry
movements arose in America, England, Australia and Canada which
involved a massive reconsideration of the expressive, linguistic and politi-
cal use of language in poetry, and these continue to be extremely
influential on experimental poetry worldwide today. In America this
movement was known as ‘Language Poetry’. The Language Poets were a
Postmodern poetry, avant-garde poetics 167