The Postmoderns: The new American poetry revised

by Donald M. Allen (Other)

This anthology includes many of the major poets to have emerged and gained pre-eminence since World War II, and whose writing reflects not only the significant changes in this nation’s postwar history, and the coming to grips with a nuclear age, but also an entirely new way of looking at and structuring reality. United by their “postmodernist” concerns with spontaneity, “instantism,” formal and syntactic flexibility, and the revelation of both the creator and the process through the writing itself, these 38 poets represent very diverse strains of an essential American individualism. Included are many of the poets whose work first gained widespread national attention with the 1960 publication of The New American Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, Paul Blackburn, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan, and others. Among the poets included here for the first time are Anne Waldman, Diane di Prima, Ed Sanders, Jerome Rothenberg, and James Koller. In addition to a new preface by Allen and Butterick, the book provides autobiographical notes of all the poets and listings of their major works.

Genres: Poetry, Anthologies

436 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

This anthology, or maybe the original 1960s version, was the Bible of my PhD program, so much so that it's hard for me to know whether anyone else still ranks this book at all. It's full of some great poet who came to publishing after WW2, mostly poets who either come out of the Black Mtn School or else the San Francisco Renaissance, which is certainly a fertile group to bring together. But selection is really important in any anthology, and this book has a lotta lotta male poets and very few women in here.... I'm sure there are historical reasons for this, as well as ones where Allen would argue the remit of his book, with a focus on those descended from Howl and Olsen's projective verse, didn't give him a lot of women to work with. But I don't think that's especially valid. Where's Alice Notley and Bernadette Mayer, for example? Patti Smith was born a year after the last poet in this book. And I'm just pulling names out of the air. It really mars this book when you turn the page and are confronted by another poet who seems qualified to be in this book only because he's got a dick. It's maddening and makes it hard to engage with this book for its poetics; it makes me newly sad for the women in my PhD program who must have felt, rightly, that there work didn't rank the way mine would.

The funniest part is that there's a savage takedown of Gary Snyder's shitty views on gender by Diane di Prima in this book, maybe fifty pages after Snyder's own poems appear, blowing up his zen shtick. I don't know if Allen felt like this covered over his other sins of omission or he couldn't see his way to leaving that one poem out even when he didn't see its point, but it's weird.

Here are some poets who I appreciate better after reading this anthology: Jackson Mac Low, James Schuyler, Jack Spicer, Diane di Prima, Anselm Hollo, and Joanne Kyger.

The headnotes, which I think are either written by the poets themselves or by Allen and maybe George Butterick, who co-edits this version, who have some fairly intimate knowledge of the poets, are incredible. Strange and revealing, irreverent and nonsensical, occasionally I think totally fabulated. If I remember right, they used to preface the poems, but here, for some reason, they've all been moved to the back, along with helpful bibliographies. Don't skip them if you do read this volume.