Charting the Flow: Positioning John Ashbery

Abstract

ecent literary history tells us that there are two John Ashberys. These figures correspond to two traditions of contemporary American poetry, traditions alive in polemic now for some forty years. Donald Allen's 1960 The New American Poetry presented various recent groups of poets as postwar American avant-garde, the of modern movement in American unified by a total rejection of all those qualities typical of academic (xi). Allen's avant-garde anthology was revised and reissued in 1982 as The Postmoderns: The New American Poetry Revised. The title marks shift in categories: while earlier rejection of academic verse might be read as signaling claim that modernism in its full range of radical energy remained open-as almost-religious fervor of phrase true continuers suggests-by 1982 new term, postmodernism, had been added to polemical lexicon; and with this change came shift in emphasis, from synchronic picture of contemporary moment in poetry to periodizing, historical view. The concept of postmodernism has tended, unsurprisingly, to do work more polemical than analytical in debates over canons of post-World War II American poetry. In his introduction to 1994 Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, Paul Hoover asserts that postmodernism is today's avant-garde and defines it in terms of opposition to vaguely described mainstream or centrist values; value of term postmodern for him seems to lie (paradoxically?) in evoking both new dominant mode and new openness of practice-a marginal domi-