“..My eighth observation is that there is really no longer a vital, high-art avant-garde in American poetry. Modernism is irretrievably, inarguably dead. It has been dead as a profitable avenue for young poets for at least twenty years, and now almost all of its great practitioners have gone to meet their maker. The university, an institution better equipped to preserve old culture than to foster the creation of new art, has handsomely embalmed the corpse of Modernism — but no one should wait around for the resurrection. If there is an avant-garde in American poetry right now, it is to be found outside of the university and most likely in oral poetry. But locating a true avant-garde anywhere seems problematic. Rap might have started as an avant-garde movement, but its quick assimilation into the corporate entertainment industry gradually turned it into another sort of commercial venture—a naughty one like Penthouse or Hustler, but a consumer commodity equally subject to market forces. Unless you want to define the two major contrarian movements of the eighties and nineties, New Formalism and Language poetry, as the avant-garde, I find it difficult to consider any new poetic school avant-garde—even performance art. The time has probably come to admit that the notion of an avant-garde is no longer useful in discussing contemporary literature. How can there be an avant-garde without a mainstream? Avant-garde de quoi? one must ask. Establishment institutions—universities, museums, foundations, commercial galleries, even the state—have embraced the idea of experimental art for so long that the avant-garde is now a safely domesticated concept, just another traditional style…” [ed. my emphasis added]
-Dana Gioia, at http://www.danagioia.net/essays/ebohemia.htm