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In an interview on the University of Buffalo program LINEbreak, poet Jerome Rothenberg defines avant garde poetry as “oppositional” and an attempt to “rip apart the present circumstance of language, of art, not to cover over the disease that lies beneath it but to tear the covering away . . .” The circumstance that calls for change is that of attaching conventional meanings to words; we place limits on words by defining them and expecting them to behave in a certain way. Modernist and avant garde poets have worked to remove limits from words. The purpose in eliminating the meaning is to open new possibilities, to “surprise oneself into apprehension of