Hmmm....
I don't think I was really talking about a perpetual avant garde, just I think some sense of the poem as a discovery rather than a re-telling of something I already know. Even if that discovery is by way of being a re-discovery. Ashbery (not flavour of the month here, but nevertheless) once said that telling people something they already knew was an insult to their inteligence.
And I'm not terribly interested in novelty either; not for its own sake. Like I said, it's not the versification that's a problem; maybe it's the sense that I'm being talked at rather shared with.
As for James Tate, well, he's written some good poems (The Lost Pilot) but probably too many. Anyway, it's a personal opinion; I can't like everything
.