Modernist avant-gardes, even those that seem now arriérre garde, offer their strongest rationales in terms of what they oppose. This is in part because they are still in the process of discovering what this opposition will produce. I want to approach Lyn Hejinian’s The Proposition under this rubric for two reasons. First her early poetry offers a brilliant defining of what in her mind a new poetry has to reject. And, more important, I think we see in what she builds from these rejections a plausible model for her subsequent work. That work will vary and complicate the model I propose in various interesting ways. But underlying these ways there is a poetics based on what I call a “conative realism.” “Conative” stems from Spinoza’s idea that every animate being tries to protect and extend a space of intimate engagement where it can elaborate the powers that have been conferred upon it. Then on the basis of this concern for the conative, Hejinian can elaborate the realism she discusses in her preface. This realism is not based on representations of something external to language but is anchored in qualities of feeling for the deployment of efforts to establish habitation in moments of maximal happening. Consciousness comes to exist in this orienting ourselves toward the real and in caring how those moments can be realized. Such concerns obviously point to the possibility of poetry establishing one important version of such a realism because its basic concerns go beyond accurate naming. Much of our best poetry is concerned primarily with the kinds of activity that can make the real appear in its potential for satisfying the desires that it elicits.