"Thank You and Other Poems," by Kenneth Koch, published by Grove Press and Evergreen in 1962. It would seem that any discussion of postmodern parody would have to begin with this crucial book. No single book was as influential in the development my own poetics. "Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams" is the most obvious parody in the book. "The Artist" is a hilarious send-up of the impulse conceptual art of the Christo variety, and actually predates a lot of the material it is parodying. "The Railway Stationery" is directed at Raymond Roussel. "Aus Einer Kindheit" refers to Rilke and Frank O'Hara. "The Bricks" resembles the Ashbery of "Some Trees." Not to mention "Fresh Air," a satire (though not a parody per se) of academic poetry of the 1950s, and "The History of Jazz."

Now this book is not mentioned in any of Linda Hutcheon's books on parody and postmodernism. Her primary frame of reference seems to be novels written in English by people like John Fowles and Doctorow. She barely mentions any poet at all, maybe a passing reference to Ashbery. How would her theory change if she had a more inclusive sense of postmodernism? Why the assumption that the novel is the primary vehicle for literary innovation?

The postmodern aesthetic was invented by Frank O'Hara as a student at Harvard. This is a relevant sentence from Brad Gooch's biography of O'Hara: "O'Hara's and Ashbery's innovation was to be able to pass with each other from the high to the low, to gather in their net such disparate fascinations as French Surrealist poetry, Hollwood's 'Guilty Pleasures,' Japanese Kabuki and Noh, Schoenberg's twelve-tone compositions, Leger's geometric paintings, Looney Tunes cartoons, and Samuel Beckett's spare prose."