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Yes, your message got through Pierre:)   You should be able to check by looking here: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=BRITISH-IRISH-POETS



>>>Olson used the word, & was indeed possibly the first one to do so — but not as a noun, i.e. “the post-modern,” or “post-modernism”  but as the adjective “postmodern” as in “postmodern man.” A major difference, I would argue — & a very useful one. 


Pierre


p.s. still can’t see the posts I post — though haven’t done any in some days. If this one gets to the list can someone respond on the list?


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The poet: always in partibus infidelium -- Paul Celan
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On Feb 6, 2018, at 6:48 AM, [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]> wrote:


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.