To briefly examine the terminology, there is such a state as "postmodern," and we are using it as a word of praise. It means being of one's time, however jittery and out of sorts it may feel; a postmodern poetry presumably takes its energies from our neither-nor place in history, our post-postness. Being post-post doesn't mean your work is without substance or grounding; it's quite the opposite. We have always wanted the magazine to represent the best of the new, which for us tended toward New York School and language poetry, as well as much beyond. We have always been tolerant of difficulty and are sometimes shocked when perfectly accessible writing is condemned for its difficulty. We have never been programmatic. We publish work of so-called opacity and transparency.For much of our lives as editors, the inside in American poetry was utterly distinct from the outside. You were "experimental" or you were not. At my first AWP meeting, in San Antonio, in the 80s, I heard Donald Justice stir up a roomful of Iowa School poets by attacking the "charlatan" Beats, "juvenile" New York School, and the "fascist" Black Mountain poets. Before he began to speak, he asked that the ballroom doors of the hotel be closed and guarded. I had known there were oppositions, but I hadn't realized how keenly the insiders felt the threat of change. At that time, outsiders had no role in the academy, so they congregated at places like St. Mark's Church, Beyond Baroque, The Poetry Center at SFSU, and Chicago's Body Politic. This was true throughout the 70s, 80s, and much of the 90s. Everyone knew what it meant to cross the boundary into academic territory, which unfailingly relied on the received mainstream dominant--for example, the free verse poem of personal epiphany. Those differences have been blurred by the tremendous growth of creative writing programs, the desire for many of the so-called Iowa school poets to join the innovative camp, and the marginalization of independent boheman sites. Whether you call it the mainstreaming of the avant-garde or the vanguarding of the academy, the result is a compromise, or mutual collapse, in which the avant-garde risks losing its signal powers of opposition and originality. At the Palm Springs AWP, 2001, Maxine Chernoff and I walked around looking for someone to talk to and found only Aaron Shurin, who was equally alienated by the Carolyn Kizer / Yusef Komunyakaa program dominant. Now all of that is changed. If you want to locate the avant-garde, you can find it the Nassau Suite at the Hilton, second floor. I don't exclude myself. I'm on two panels at the forthcoming meeting in NYC, one of which I proposed on contemporary Vietnamese poetry. The other is Newlipo: Proceduralism and Chance Poetics in the 21st Century. I'd like to be persuaded that literary professionalism is not dulling innovation's oppositional edge, or, worse yet, subsuming marginal practices in order to make them seem its own. Are Newlipo and Flarf the unrepentant, indigestible poetics of the new? Would it matter if Christian Bök and Kasey Mohammad had tenure-track positions?
I agree with Josh that New American Writing has always convened the "austerities of Language poetry and the ironic 'personal' characteristic of the New York School(s)." In an recent email, I wrote, only half in jest, that Maxine and I have been attracted to the personal characteristics of the language poets, Bernstein's wit and Hejinian's memoirist tendencies in My Life, as well as the abstract obliqueness of the New York School, as seen especially in Ashbery and Guest. As time goes by, the two camps seem all the more of a blend. There are postmodern lyric motives in Palmer, Robinson, and Armantrout, among others, but I don't believe they're specifically Californian. That late Barbara Guest look of the page, suggestive of Mallarmé, is practiced by tons of postmodern coconuts; she was born in Florida and lived most of her life in the Northeast. Our magazine, which publishes all of the above and has been described as "New York School," was published for much of its history in Chicago.
