Abstract: Richard Brautigan, the American poet of the Beat Generation, has a dual identity as poet and novelist. His poetry contains the distinctively novelistic features in its poetic narrative with the intent to borrow and renovate some of the key features from full-length novel, such as contemporaneity, incompleteness and multilinguality, mainly through parody and fusion of different genres. The new type of text based on this kind of poetic narrative carries several features of novelization, including the conflict of time consciousness, the portrayal of multi-faced protagonist who controls the entire story, and the adoption of novelistic structures. Brautigan's novelized poetic narrative provides a new mode of the defamiliarization of poetic language, effectively expands the capacities and possibilities of poetry, and reflects the social and cultural psychology of the youth group well represented by him during that time. It is an important reason not only why Brautigan's poetry could transcend the Beat Generation movement and gain great attention around the world, but also why it could provide new possibilities for the current poetry writing and research.

Key words: Brautigan, Postmodernism, poetic narrative, novelization, the mechanism of poetic formation