I think someone once told me that the term postmodernism, literature-wise, originally meant Olson and the first NY School. Obviously it has been co-opted since to mean anyone's wacky eclecticism or soft surrealism.
I think post-modernism is still important as a description of where culture is now. Makes particular sense to me (as such broad labels often do) when I think about something I don't know much about, such as art or music. But even in poetry. When I read Eliot or Pound (nb, that's pretty much never), it's a dead world as far as I'm concerned. When I read Some Trees, I feel like sort of mentally rolling-up my shirtsleeves. I recognize the issues. Yup, this is how it is, this is here and now, these are still our questions today.
Though, I must add, I probably think that less confidently now than I did fifteen years ago. I feel we're in a new phase of culture now, though I don't have a word for it, but connected with crisis, conflict, assertions of fundamentalism and the rise of the right. The new phase mainly impresses me as profoundly toxic to things like poetry, but maybe it's a challenge that can be responded to, somehow.
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