Postmodern American Poetry
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Postmodern American Poetry
''Postmodern American Poetry'' is a poetry anthology edited by Paul Hoover (poet), Paul Hoover and published by W. W. Norton & Company in 1994. A substantially revised second edition in 2012 removed some poets and added many others, incorporating additional American poetry movements which came to prominence in the 21st century. The introduction identifies the use of postmodern with its early mention by Charles Olson, and identifies the field chosen as experimental poetry from after 1945. The book contains, besides poems, about 20 short essays on poetics. The first edition joined two other collections which appeared at that time: ''From the Other Side of the Century, From the Other Side of the Century: "A New American Poetry, 1960-1990"'' (1994; edited by Douglas Messerli) and ''American Poetry Since 1950 (poetry anthology), American Poetry Since 1950'' (1993; edited by Eliot Weinberger). The anthology, the goal of which is to "fully represent the movements of American avant-garde ...
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Poetry Anthology
In book publishing, an anthology is a collection of literary works chosen by the compiler; it may be a collection of plays, poems, short stories, songs or excerpts by different authors. In genre fiction, the term ''anthology'' typically categorizes collections of shorter works, such as short stories and short novels, by different authors, each featuring unrelated casts of characters and settings, and usually collected into a single volume for publication. Alternatively, it can also be a collection of selected writings (short stories, poems etc.) by one author. Complete collections of works are often called "complete works" or "" (Latin equivalent). Etymology The word entered the English language in the 17th century, from the Greek word, ἀνθολογία (''anthologic'', literally "a collection of blossoms", from , ''ánthos'', flower), a reference to one of the earliest known anthologies, the ''Garland'' (, ''stéphanos''), the introduction to which compares each of its ...
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James Laughlin
James Laughlin (October 30, 1914 – November 12, 1997) was an American poet and literary book publisher who founded New Directions Publishing. Early life He was born in Pittsburgh, the son of Henry Hughart and Marjory Rea Laughlin. Laughlin's family had made its fortune with the Jones and Laughlin Steel Company, founded three generations earlier by his great grandfather, James H. Laughlin, and this wealth would partially fund Laughlin's future endeavors in publishing. As Laughlin once wrote, "none of this would have been possible without the industry of my ancestors, the canny Irishmen who immigrated in 1824 from County Down to Pittsburgh, where they built up what became the fourth largest steel company in the country. I bless them with every breath." Laughlin's boyhood home is now part of the campus of Chatham University. Education At The Choate School (now Choate Rosemary Hall) in Wallingford, Connecticut, Laughlin showed an early interest in literature. An important i ...
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Frank O'Hara
Francis Russell "Frank" O'Hara (March 27, 1926 – July 25, 1966) was an American writer, poet, and art critic. A curator at the Museum of Modern Art, O'Hara became prominent in New York City's art world. O'Hara is regarded as a leading figure in the New York School, an informal group of artists, writers, and musicians who drew inspiration from jazz, surrealism, abstract expressionism, action painting, and contemporary avant-garde art movements. O'Hara's poetry is personal in tone and content, and has been described as sounding "like entries in a diary".American Council of Learned Societies. "Frank O'Hara" in ''American National Biography''. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) Poet and critic Mark Doty has said O'Hara's poetry is "urbane, ironic, sometimes genuinely celebratory and often wildly funny" containing "material and associations alien to academic verse" such as "the camp icons of movie stars of the twenties and thirties, the daily landscape of social activity in ...
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Kenneth Koch
Kenneth Koch ( ; 27 February 1925 – 6 July 2002) was an American poet, playwright, and professor, active from the 1950s until his death at age 77. He was a prominent poet of the New York School of poetry. This was a loose group of poets including Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery that eschewed contemporary introspective poetry in favor of an exuberant, cosmopolitan style that drew major inspiration from travel, painting, and music. Life Koch (pronounced ''coke'') was born Jay Kenneth Koch in Cincinnati, Ohio. He began writing poetry at an early age, discovering the work of Shelley and Keats in his teenage years. At the age of 18, he served in WWII as a U.S. Army infantryman in the Philippines. After his service, he attended Harvard University, where he met future New York School poet John Ashbery. After graduating from Harvard in 1948 and moving to New York City, Koch studied for and received his Ph.D. from Columbia University. In 1951, he met his first wife, Janice Elwood, ...
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Jack Spicer
Jack Spicer (January 30, 1925 – August 17, 1965) was an American poet often identified with the San Francisco Renaissance. In 2009, ''My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer'' won the American Book Award for poetry. He spent most of his writing-life in San Francisco. Early life Born as John Lester Spicer on January 30, 1925 in Los Angeles, to parents Dorothy Clause and John Lovely Spicer. He graduated from Fairfax High School in 1942, and attended the University of Redlands from 1943 to 1945. While attending the University of Redlands, he became friends with Warren Christopher. After graduation he lived in Los Angeles briefly, and worked as a movie extra and a private investigator. Berkeley Spicer ended up in Berkeley, and lived in a boarding house alongside Philip K. Dick. He spent the years 1945 to 1950; and from 1952 to 1955 at the University of California, Berkeley, where he began writing, doing work as a research-linguist, and publishing so ...
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James Schuyler
James Marcus Schuyler (November 9, 1923 – April 12, 1991) was an American poet. His awards include the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his 1980 collection ''The Morning of the Poem''. He was a central figure in the New York School and is often associated with fellow New York School poets John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, and Barbara Guest. Life and death James Marcus Schuyler was the son of Marcus Schuyler (a reporter) and Margaret Daisy Connor Schuyler. Born in Chicago, he spent his teen years in East Aurora, New York. After graduating high school, Schuyler attended Bethany College in West Virginia from 1941 to 1943, though he was not a very successful student; in a later interview, he recalled, "I just played bridge all the time." Schuyler moved to New York City in the late 1940s where he worked for NBC and first befriended W. H. Auden. In 1947, he moved to Ischia, Italy, where he lived in Auden's rented apartment and worked as his secretary. Between 1947 and ...
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Denise Levertov
Priscilla Denise Levertov (24 October 1923 – 20 December 1997) was a British-born naturalised American poet. She was a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry. Early life and influences Levertov was born and grew up in Ilford, Essex.Couzyn, Jeni (1985) ''Contemporary Women Poets''. Bloodaxe, p74 Her mother, Beatrice Adelaide (née Spooner-Jones) Levertoff, came from a small mining village in North Wales. Her father, Paul Levertoff, had been a teacher at Leipzig University and as a Russian Hasidic Jew was held under house arrest during the First World War as an 'enemy alien' by virtue of his ethnicity. He emigrated to the UK and became an Anglican priest after converting to Christianity. In the mistaken belief that he would want to preach in a Jewish neighbourhood, he was housed in Ilford, within reach of a parish in Shoreditch, in East London. His daughter wrote, "My father's Hasidic ancestry, his being steeped in Jewish and Christian scholarship and mysticism, his ...
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Philip Whalen
Philip Glenn Whalen (October 20, 1923 – June 26, 2002) was an American poet, Zen Buddhist, and a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance and close to the Beat generation. Biography Born in Portland, Oregon, Whalen grew up in The Dalles from age four until he returned to Portland in 1941. He served in the US Army Air Forces during World War II. He attended Reed College on the GI Bill. There, he met Gary Snyder and Lew Welch, and graduated with a BA in 1951. He read at the famous Six Gallery reading in 1955 that marked the launch of the West Coast Beats into the public eye. He appears, in barely fictionalized form, as the character "Warren Coughlin" in Jack Kerouac's ''The Dharma Bums'', which includes an account of that reading. In '' Big Sur'' he is called "Ben Fagan". Whalen's poetry was featured in Donald Allen's anthology ''The New American Poetry 1945-1960''. Whalen's first interest in Eastern religions centered on Vedanta. Upon release from the army in 1946, h ...
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Jack Kerouac
Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac (; March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969), known as Jack Kerouac, was an American novelist and poet who, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, was a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Of French-Canadian ancestry, Kerouac was raised in a French-speaking home in Lowell, Massachusetts. He "learned English at age six and spoke with a marked accent into his late teens." During World War II, he served in the United States Merchant Marine; he completed his first novel at the time, which was published more than 50 years after his death. His first published book was ''The Town and the City'' (1950), and he achieved widespread fame and notoriety with his second, ''On the Road'', in 1957. It made him a beat icon, and he went on to publish 12 more novels and numerous poetry volumes. Kerouac is recognized for his style of spontaneous prose. Thematically, his work covers topics such as his Catholic spirituality, jazz, travel, promiscuity, life in New Y ...
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Jackson Mac Low
Jackson Mac Low (1922–2004) was an American poet, performance artist, composer and playwright, known to most readers of poetry as a practioneer of systematic chance operations and other non-intentional compositional methods in his work, which Mac Low first experienced in the musical work of John Cage, Earle Brown, and Christian Wolff. He was married to the artist Iris Lezak from 1962 to 1978, and to the poet Anne Tardos from 1990 until his death. An early affiliate of Fluxus (he co-published ''An Anthology of Chance Operations'') and stylistic progenitor of the Language poets, Mac Low cultivated ties with an eclectic array of notable figures in the postwar American avant-garde, including Nam June Paik, Kathy Acker, Allen Ginsberg, and Arthur Russell. His work has been published in more than 90 anthologies and periodicals and read publicly, exhibited, performed, and broadcast in North and South America, Europe, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. He read, performed, and lec ...
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Barbara Guest
Barbara Guest, ''née'' Barbara Ann Pinson (September 6, 1920 – February 15, 2006), was an American poet and prose stylist. Guest first gained recognition as a member of the first generation New York School of poetry. Guest wrote more than 15 books of poetry spanning sixty years of writing. In 1999, she was awarded the Frost Medal for Lifetime Achievement by the Poetry Society of America. Guest also wrote art criticism, essays, and plays. Her collages appeared on the covers of several of her books of poetry. She was also well known for her biography of the poet H.D., ''Herself Defined: The Poet H.D. and Her World'' (1984). Born in Wilmington, North Carolina and raised in California, Guest attended UCLA, and then earned a B.A. in General Curriculum-Humanities in 1943 at UC Berkeley. She worked as an editorial associate at ARTnews magazine from 1951-1959. Poetry Barbara Guest wrote more than 15 books of poetry spanning sixty years of writing. "Her poems begin in the mids ...
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Charles Bukowski
Henry Charles Bukowski ( ; born Heinrich Karl Bukowski, ; August 16, 1920 – March 9, 1994) was a German-American poet, novelist, and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural, and economic ambience of his adopted home city of Los Angeles. Bukowski's work addresses the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women, and the drudgery of work. The FBI kept a file on him as a result of his column '' Notes of a Dirty Old Man'' in the LA underground newspaper ''Open City''. Bukowski published extensively in small literary magazines and with small presses beginning in the early 1940s and continuing on through the early 1990s. He wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories and six novels, eventually publishing over sixty books during the course of his career. Some of these works include his ''Poems Written Before Jumping Out of an 8 Story Window'', published by his friend and fellow poet Charles Potts, and ...
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