Postmodern American poetry was a fragmented—and occasionally fractious—cultural development, and its practitioners were often associated with various avant-garde movements or groups. The Black Mountain School poets—named for their association with Black Mountain College in North Carolina—developed a new poetics in which the poem was intended to transfer the rhythm of the poet’s breath to the page. This “Projectivist Verse,” as Charles Olson called it, was all about energy and movement: “always one perception must must must MOVE, INSTANTER, ON ANOTHER!” In San Francisco following the Second World War, Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer became central figures in a new generation of poets who valued political radicalism, sexual liberation, Renaissance erudition, and magic. As students at UC Berkeley, Duncan and Spicer contributed to a “Berkeley Renaissance” that eventually blossomed into the San Francisco Renaissance of the later 1950s. In New York, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery and co. developed their interest in Abstract Expressionist painting and French poetry into the poetics of the New York School. In the 1960s and ‘70s, Gwendolyn Brooks and Amiri Baraka combined postmodern aesthetics and Black Nationalist politics into a new poetic idiom intended first and foremost for an African-American readership. In the ‘70s and early ‘80s, Language writing emerged as arguably the last major avant-garde formation of the century. Poets like Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman and Charles Bernstein constructed disjunctive, theoretical texts informed by leftist politics and structural linguistics.

In this course, we will attempt to understand these various poets and movements in both historical and intertextual terms. That is, we will try to get a sense of how individual poets were shaped by historical pressures, by cultural milieu, and by the work of other poets. By reading American poetry in a historically “thick” context, we will explore not only the poetics of the last century but also the complexities of American (literary) history, canon formation, cultural capital, and avant-gardism.

Texts:

• Paul Hoover’s. Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology.
• course pack.