"We walked the long late Sunday afternoon / the Bloomfield downs of Sonoma / / David said, did you know / Max Douglas is dead, of an overdose . . . " These lines from Kenneth Irby's long poem To Max Douglas seem to propose as much a periodization of poetries as to announce the elegiac subject of his poem.  While observers of the sixties have routinely argued that the decade really ends in the seventies, often pointing to the disaster of Altamont as synecdochic terminus, there has been little agreement about the contours of cultural shadings as the sixties slid into their successor era.    This paper will take the moment announced in Irby's opening lines as a point of departure for an examination of the ways in which the assumptions grounding the postmodernisms of the New American Poetry began to be overtaken by a differing set of deferments and drafts.  Ed Dorn, in introducing Irby's poem, remarked that the young Max Douglas had been "able to modify Olson's procedures to fit his own situation."  And yet, Douglas in the end could carry neither Olson nor himself any farther.  Starting from this moment in Sonoma in which the two older poets, David Bromige and Kenneth Irby, ruminated over the loss of Douglas, we can see how the modification of Olson's procedures to fit new situations comes to be seen as less and less Olsonian.  Having, in a sense, overdosed on Olson, these poets move towards an increasingly radical poetics that will find kinship in the later postmodernisms of the post-seventies.