This course provides an intensive introduction to postmodern American poetry, covering the years 1945 to 1980. We will be focusing on the genre's extraordinary investment in forms of community-- real, imagined, and utopian. This micropolitical approach will help us navigate the period's sea of labels--Beats, Black Arts, Black Mountain, Confessional, Deep Image, New York School, San Francisco Renaissance, Umbra--and enable us to think through the relationship between the pervasive literary rhetoric of "movements," "generations," and "tribes" and then-emergent forms of sociality (the antiwar movement, black nationalism, gay liberation, and radical feminism). We will be discussing such topics as the Anthology Wars, the mimeograph revolution, coffeehouse culture, "composition by field," and the founding of the St. Mark's Poetry Project. Students will become acquainted with the period's marquee names--Ashbery, Baraka, Creeley, Ginsberg, Lowell, O'Hara, Plath, and Rich-as well as a many other, less well known figures. The quarter will end by reconsidering the Marxism and poststructuralism of the influential journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E in the light of later, revisionist statements on poetry, politics, and community made by such Language writers as Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian, Erica Hunt, and Bob Perelman.