Last December Josh Corey posted an account of Peter Bürger's attempt to distinguish avant garde from other art by using a polarity between organic and inorganic structure.* The idea has spread rapidly from blog to blog, being mentioned almost everywhere and treated at some length at several places. It's an odd, and, I think, misleading use of the words, since by "organic" Bürger seems to mean self-referential, self-enclosed: Josh writes
Organic or symbolist works are recognizable by the unity of the parts with the whole: each part is subordinated to that wholeness and is only comprehensible through/in it. The notion of art being a mirror to nature is one of the premises of organic art.
In contrast, "Inorganic" art pushes the audience's attention outward:
the parts do not form a unity: it is an assemblage of pieces between which cracks are visible, and the pieces have some degree of independence from the unity of the total work … [Bürger says] 'In the avant-gardiste work, the individual sign does not refer primarily to the work as a whole but to reality.'
It's odd, and, at first, intriguing because usually "organic" is the term used to indicate value and relevance to a well-lived life. But it's misleading because it fundamentally distorts what it means to be organic, whether in the natural world or in the world of art. Organic things — living things — certainly have an internal structure in which various parts are dependent on each other for their continued existence, but those internal relations have evolved in relation to an external world.
First, that set of dependencies in a living thing only exists because its ancestors were able to interact successfully with their organic and inorganic environments, with other creatures and the utterly indifferent rock and water and sun and air. It is utter nonsense to speak of a living thing as self-contained.
Second, those relations are fragile. We see this most dramatically in cancer, when some set of cells, by ignoring their relationship to the whole creature, dooms that creature's relationship to the world, except perhaps as food for other creatures. But blind cave fish illustrate another point: all things in that set of relations, even eyes, have a price, and when that price is not repaid by value to the rest of the organism through relations to the outside world, not even eyes, which have evolved independently many times and in many lineages, can maintain themselves however beautifully and intricately they are connected to other parts of the creature.
As Laura Carter has noted, this more accurate understanding of organic structure — one which is found through exploration and balance of both internal and external relations — has been used polemically by free verse poets such as Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov in opposition to the metrical tradition. Their argument is effectively demolished in Paul Lake's essay "The Shape of Poetry" (parts 1 and 2).
*The same post contains an excellent short analysis of the Bruce Andrews poem from BAP. We agree entirely on the description — I just think it's an antique method which has proven incapable of conveying any significant range of experience or variety of stance toward that experience. Unlike, say, sonnets, which are even more antique, but which have repeatedly enabled poets and readers to engage whole new worlds of experience. They are a form in which internal structure supports external relations: they ought to be an emblem of truly organic structure as defined above.
Clarification: I don't mean to imply, through my brief description of Paul Lake's essay, that free verse cannot be organic in the sense that I mean, only that Duncan and Levertov, among others, were wrong in thinking that free verse is organic in a more essential way than is metrical poetry.
Further Clarification: Laura Carter quoted Levertov and paraphrased Duncan, but didn't make the claims I may have inadvertantly attributed to her.
1:07:05 PM 
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