Rewriting the world: Natureand the literature of the Italian neo-avant-garde. You can’t learn about the neo-avant-garde without knowing about the avant-garde. I Novissimi (poetry for the sixties) is the father of the period known as the neo-avant-garde. The 60s and 70s were a time when Italian poets truly attempted to radically renovate and rewrite the literary conventions set in place by institutions. It was started as an effort to take another look at literature, to reconsider it. This time period/way of thinking soon turned into a political experiment that had an unattainable aim of rewriting the world itself. There was a fervent criticism, created by intellectuals, that was aimed at the traditional power structure – the goal was to unmask linguistic strategies that were children of capitalism. The neo-avant-garde time, which could also loosely be called a new form of realism, attempted to change the world in place of merely describing it.