Postmodernist Poetry

 

For Postmodernists the world exists only through our understanding of it, and the prime medium of that understanding is everyday language. There is no further or ultimate reality that words point to, and we deceive ourselves by seeking deep spiritual meanings in art. Artists make intriguing creations by juxtaposing contemporary images and concepts, but these have no deeper significance. Contemporary American literature is much too various be called a movement, but can be broadly characterized as iconoclastic, groundless, formless and populist.

Elaboration

Postmodernism began in the sixties with Pop-Art, the Beat generation, the magic realism of Latin American novelists, and the Poststructuralist theories of Barthes, Lacan and Derrida. The angst of Existentialism, the brooding power of abstract expressionism, the worthy objectives of societies building on liberties hard won by Allied victory in 1945 gradually gave way to affluence. Wider travel, television reporting and photojournalism also showed the realities behind government rhetoric, and these realities came to undermine confidence in authority and public language. Underprivileged groups were championed by the young, disaffection spread, and a counterculture was appropriated by commerce. With the fall of class barriers the fine arts were attacked as elitist, as promoting political repression and social injustice by their exclusive autonomy. The professions became more specialized, creating guilds of experts where entry was by approved study rather than wealth or family connections. The arts created hypothetical worlds of their own, protected by abstruse theory.

As poetry became more iconoclastic and experimental, there were appeals to the irrational nature of man supposed by Freudian psychiatry. Devalued by an increasingly technological world, writers made themselves the spiritual guardians of language itself, championing the creative, and indeed arbitrary, nature over its powers to represent, analyze and discover. The appropriation took many forms. Foucault denounced the political repression inherent in public language. Geoffrey Hill wrote of words themselves as complicit with the holocaust. Beckett renounced the world and employed language pared down to its skeletal minimum. Larkin wrote a poetry that expressed the lowered expectations of the law-abiding citizen. Sontag argued for sensory renewal, which coincided with sex made increasingly an individual matter and possibly a consumer commodity.

Suggestions

1. Does the above make sense? If not, take out library books or subscribe to avant-garde magazines.

2. Study Postmodernism in general, and its application to poetry: That good poems negate themselves, obtaining an authority by excluding the outside. That they strive for autonomy, but are dislocated by shifted genre boundaries. That a poem is a sum total of tensions between mimesis and construction. That truth in poetry is not truth to the meaning of words — as it is in philosophy — but an artifact of literary devices or tropes. That they talk about themselves not to evade talking about the world but to enable that world. Be sure you understand the theory behind these statements, where it comes from, and why.

3. Commit yourself to a movement that champions the work you produce and/or admire.

4. Start submitting to small magazines. Attend events. Create your own circle.

 

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