Avant-garde poetry looks dynamically at the world through anarchic approaches to language. With the knowledge that implicit linguistic structures shape ontology and epistemology, the contemporary avant-garde experiment inherently concerns itself with the political. My own poetry investigates various avant-garde methods of challenging the status quo. Such crimes against poetry allow us to rethink and recalculate our relationship to language’s organizing principles and its rippling impact within aesthetic and socio-political spheres. Where the avant-garde project once saw strong collective-based organization, locating these poetry groups today poses a challenge. This research explores the loss of collective presence in a decentralized avant-garde, the movement’s relationship to today’s crisis of subjectivity, as well as the viability of a contemporary avant-garde in consideration of neoliberalism’s impact on the individual as creator.