The Avant Writing Collection focuses on a group of primarily North American writers, most of whom became active starting in the 1970’s. They are primarily interested in poetry and visual poetry, but are also writing prose, and in numerous transgeneric forms not easily classified. Many of them are also involved with visual arts, photography, sound art, music, performance, conceptual art, mail art, and/or artists’ books. These writers are all quite unique, but almost none of them are associated with any of the prevailing literary or institutional establishments of the day. Although it is difficult to identify anything like a “school” or “movement” among this group of individualists, most of them know and communicate with each other, publish in the same venues, and are involved in numerous collaborative writing projects. In fact, collaborative writing – often involving numerous and proliferating pseudonyms – is one of the hallmarks of this group of writers. It is also important to note the significant international character of the collection. It includes writers and artists from all over the world, most of whom interact and collaborate on a daily basis. Some of this is due to the ease of communications created by the internet, but internationalism has been a characteristic of avant garde movements throughout modern history.

It is important to collect these writers because, as has been the case over and over in the history of literature, the best and most innovative writing, the writing that advances the art and that in the future becomes the classic and defining work of a period, is almost always the work of outsiders. As has been the case in numerous pasts, it is the case today that the best writing, especially the best poetry, is not to be found in the bookstores, in the mainstream publications, in classrooms, nor in many of the libraries. The Avant Writing Collection seeks to remedy this situation as much as possible, by collecting, archiving, and making available a largely hidden, but extremely important, body of literature, so that in the future, scholars and readers will have a place to find it, to do research on how the work was created, on the writers and artists who created it, and on its bibliographic history.

It is significant that the Avant Writing Collection be housed in The Rare Books & MSS Library at OSU, because the same library also houses the world’s largest collection of materials by and relating to William S. Burroughs. Many of the writers of the Avant Writing Collection have been great admirers of Burroughs, and have in various ways been encouraged and/or influenced by his work. Burroughs’ papers here, in fact, contain publications, manuscripts, and correspondence from many of the writers in this collection.

The collection includes major archives of papers, MSS, and publications from Sheila E. Murphy, F. A. Nettelbeck, Jim Leftwich, Scott MacLeod, Scott Helmes, Lee Ballentine, Marilyn R. Rosenberg, K. S. Ernst, Jon Cone, John M. Bennett, Thomas L. Taylor, Allen Bramhall, Alan Sondheim, John Perlman, and others, and is constantly growing, making a list like this almost instantly out-of-date. It also includes thousands of individual books, serials, and other materials which can be accessed through the Library’s central catalog. To see a list of many of those materials, go to http://library.osu.edu/ and do a “Keyword” search for “Avant Writing Collection”. Work by some of the artists and writers in the Avant Writing Collection may also be found in the Libraries' GRANARY BOOKS COLLECTION. To find these, do a keyword search for "Granary Books" and "Granary Books Collection" in the Libraries' electronic catalog. More information on many of these writers can be found on the Avant Writing Collection Links page. Guides to individual collections in the Avant Writing Collection may be found through the Finding Aids links.