I confess I've heard of him almost exclusively as an initiator of the Black Mtn "school" of poetry but never as one of its important poets. I'm not sure I ever thought of him as a poet in his own right. Of course, there are many people who have a huge impact on poetry as editors or publishers or teachers or critics of poetry instead of through their work as writers of poetry. They also should be celebrated. It is a shame that he died so young. I'm sure he would have gained more recognition had he continued writing. I like how you teased out the images and allusions in the second poem you read. You've introduced me to another anthology I wasn't aware of. In fact, searching for postmodern poetry on amazon created a bit of a rabbit hole. However, I've always been skeptical of the term postmodern. It's very non-defining. And using it for the titles of anthologies of poetry strikes me as a great way to prevent a book being found by anyone other than academics. I don't think I have ever searched using that term before (because of my aforementioned attitude toward it). And yet using it as a search term reveals that publishers have considered it a good title for decades. So I may have to tackle some "postmodern" volumes in the future.
In the decades to come, I have my doubts that the term postmodern will be in use describing just about anything it is currently used to encompass. The problem with the term is that it was developed to describe contemporaries, and so it encompasses too much. I have my misgivings about the phrase as you do. Most people do, and no one more so than the authors themselves who found themselves being accused of postmoderns. Donald Barthelme once poked fun at the term "postmdoern," and his being grouped into it, by inviting many of the fiction writers pegged as postmodernists to a postmodernist dinner party (everyone showed up except Pynchon). As you said yourself, it's non-defining. A nearly empty phrase. And reading the works of many of these authors shows that there are almost no unifying characteristics among them, and that better ways of framing this period of literary history are available, and better ones still will come to be available in the future as literary scholarship on the period will evolve, develop, and mature with time. I think the phrase came to be used by academics to describe several sudden developments that were all taking place simultaneously and out of a desire to understand what it was that was going on created this term to encompass a lot of different things that really don't fit very well together. With time, more understanding into all of the exciting writing from this period will come.
I confess I've heard of him almost exclusively as an initiator of the Black Mtn "school" of poetry but never as one of its important poets. I'm not sure I ever thought of him as a poet in his own right. Of course, there are many people who have a huge impact on poetry as editors or publishers or teachers or critics of poetry instead of through their work as writers of poetry. They also should be celebrated. It is a shame that he died so young. I'm sure he would have gained more recognition had he continued writing. I like how you teased out the images and allusions in the second poem you read.
You've introduced me to another anthology I wasn't aware of. In fact, searching for postmodern poetry on amazon created a bit of a rabbit hole. However, I've always been skeptical of the term postmodern. It's very non-defining. And using it for the titles of anthologies of poetry strikes me as a great way to prevent a book being found by anyone other than academics. I don't think I have ever searched using that term before (because of my aforementioned attitude toward it). And yet using it as a search term reveals that publishers have considered it a good title for decades. So I may have to tackle some "postmodern" volumes in the future.
In the decades to come, I have my doubts that the term postmodern will be in use describing just about anything it is currently used to encompass. The problem with the term is that it was developed to describe contemporaries, and so it encompasses too much. I have my misgivings about the phrase as you do. Most people do, and no one more so than the authors themselves who found themselves being accused of postmoderns.
Donald Barthelme once poked fun at the term "postmdoern," and his being grouped into it, by inviting many of the fiction writers pegged as postmodernists to a postmodernist dinner party (everyone showed up except Pynchon). As you said yourself, it's non-defining. A nearly empty phrase. And reading the works of many of these authors shows that there are almost no unifying characteristics among them, and that better ways of framing this period of literary history are available, and better ones still will come to be available in the future as literary scholarship on the period will evolve, develop, and mature with time.
I think the phrase came to be used by academics to describe several sudden developments that were all taking place simultaneously and out of a desire to understand what it was that was going on created this term to encompass a lot of different things that really don't fit very well together. With time, more understanding into all of the exciting writing from this period will come.