World Class Poetry Blog

Modern, Postmodern, & Post-Postmodern: Why Poetry Is No Longer In Disintegration Mode
23 June 2008, the poet @ 5:15 pm

The Postmoderns damn near killed poetry, with the help of their Modernist forbears. Prior to the Modernists, the last great school of poetics was the Romantic School, the lone adherents of which in U.S. poetics were Edgar Allan Poe and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. This is noteworthy because both poets were widely popular in Europe where the Romantic movement reigned supreme and both poets owe their developments in poetry to the Europeans more than their American predecessors, however few there were.

Between the Romantics and the Moderns we find the Victorians, who can just slide into history unnoticed. Outside of the Christian Church, not many people consider the Victorians very important and even then the people who consider them important couldn’t name any of them. Thomas Hardy is perhaps the most important of the poets from that era and I think his fiction is better than his poetry.

Modernism: Who Is Responsible For That Mess?
The Modernist poetic can be narrowed down to two postulates that define who they were and what they were about:

1. Use few metaphors, but treat all subjects as “real” as possible
2. Economy of words in a language of American vernacular

In other words, traditional forms were out and poetry must look, act, and feel like a slab of concrete. When you read the Modernists you get a sense of emotional detachment in just about everything they write about. The strengths, what I would call the positives, of the movement are

1. The emphasis on brevity
2. All subjects are worth writing about
3. Poetic music does not need to be metronomic (ie “monotonous”)

If we consider these the contributions to contemporary poetics to be the major achievements of the Modernists then we can judge their importance. But the things they themselves considered essential to their poetics are their weaknesses and we primarily have Ezra Pound to blame for the great bulk of it. And it’s important to note that Ezra Pound is still worshiped today in the halls of academia and among most experimental poets. In terms of poetic achievement, I would say his most important contribution to literature was the encouragement of T.S. Eliot. Otherwise, his contributions led to the disaster that was Postmodernism.

Postmodern Poetics: The Death Of Meaning
The Postmodern poets consciously sought to end all meaning. They were successful. And that’s the biggest shame in literary history. Where the Moderns sought to make the reader an important part of the poetic process, the Postmoderns took that to the next logical level. They sought to replace the writer with the reader and make the reader a co-creator in the poetic process. This was done through the onerous critical schools of thought called Deconstruction and Reader Response. Let the reader infuse a text with his own meanings, pre-judgements, experiences, and all the nuances of thought that humanity are capable of. It was a way for writers and creators to alleviate themselves of any responsibility. If they were misunderstood, it was the reader’s fault. If they were misinterpreted, it was the reader’s fault. If the poem fell on it’s face (which it quite often has) then it was the reader’s fault.

The Postmodernists maintained the Modernist idea that all subject matter is equal, but where the Modernists were more reserved and modest the Postmodernists were not. Instead of restraining the imagination, Postmodernists let it out of the bag. The result has been a poetics not grounded in any reality at all. While the Modernists sought to capture reality in the language, Postmodernists have freed language from all reality whatsoever and in the process have destroyed the language that they seek to use. Modernists placed reason over faith. Postmodernists replaced reason with faith, but not a religious faith, a more sinister type of faith, one based on nothing. The Postmodern faith is a faith in the fusion and melding of creative minds with nothing in common to create something out of nothing that has no value for anyone or that refuses to retain any value for any purpose at all. Where Rousseau would say, “I think therefore I am,” the Postmodernists have said, “I am therefore I don’t think.” The only values are values that refuse to acknowledge values are important. If we value nothing then everything has value; it’s the most meaningless creed ever devised. And it’s the failure of the Postmodern mind.

Post-Postmodern Poetics: An Equilibrium Of Mind
While Postmodern poetics has been an utter failure, there are things to admire. For one thing, language is freed from the past restraints of form and diction. Postmodernists are not afraid to create new language. There is some value in imagination, but the value of imagination comes in when it is used to provide value to oneself or others. The way Postmodernists have used imagination is to destroy value altogether and thus meaninglessness has become the primary value of the Postmodern mind.

Post-Postmodernist thinking, which is still in its early stage of development, seeks to put meaning back into language and seeks to provide a balance between faith and reason. Rather than emphasize one over the other as Modernists and Postmodernists have done, the Post-Postmodernist is concerned with putting faith in Man, in God, and in Value back into poetics, back into language, and back into living (these are not necessarily valued by all, but each is valued by some and all respect the judgments of each). It is the John Nash a la “A Beautiful Mind” way of addressing linguistics, poetry, art, and creation. The audience is not co-creator with the artist, but the artist creates with the idea that his creation is equally beneficial to both the audience and the creator. There is a purpose and it must be achieved; otherwise, why bother?

Like Modernists and Postmodernists, the Post-Postmodern creator sees all subject matter as equal. There are no taboos. But unlike the Postmodernists, we seek to provide meaning to the subject matter as creation. Unlike the Modernist, we are not restrained to just putting images together for the sake of putting images together. Every image must serve a purpose. We don’t just string things along because they look good together.

To the Post-Postmodernist, all forms are equal. We have no prejudice to form. The Modernists preferred free verse forms to traditional; but there was no reason to. Both are equally permissible. The Postmodernists were not afraid to re-invigorate the old forms, but when they did so they did so without a purpose. It was as if the form itself was the purpose and sonnets were written just for the sake of writing a sonnet. But a form and subject matter are inextricably linked. They have a connection and it’s important for the creative mind to match the right form with the right subject. There may be more than one match, but experimentation is not limited to language as it has been for much of the 20th century. Today, experimentation can as much be about form or presentation, or language, or subject matter, as it can be about anything else. But it’s experimentation with a purpose.

Millennial Poetics: The Post-Postmodern Future
This is not a discussion in a vacuum. I have been referring to the Post-Postmodern mind, but I prefer to call it Milllennialism because it is a testament to our era. We are at the turn of the third millennium. This is not only a new age historically, but technologically, creatively, and politically. The advent of the Internet in the last 20 years has opened doors that before have never been opened. This is the Gutenberg Press of the 21st century. A new millennium, by definition, only arises every 1,000 years. No one alive today will ever experience it again. But some of us may see a new century.

New developments in politics, literature, science, and every branch of thought will follow from the technological advances of the last 20 years. This is inevitable. No one can stop it. We are at the dawn of a new epoch such that no imagination, even the best imaginations, cannot capture. The potential for poetry to be innovative and to capture the hearts, minds, and attention spans of common people - people who would not have spent a nickel of monetary unit or a dime of time on it in the past - is incredible. The only questions left to answer are, Will we do it? Who will do it? and When will it be done?

The 10 Columns Of Millennial Poetics
A repeat and re-insistence of principles for the new era:

1. Craft is of utmost importance
2. There is no room for prejudice
3. Form is just another element of craft
4. Creativity and craft go hand in hand
5. No topic is taboo
6. There is no such thing as language that is too archaic
7. All poems are individuals
8. There is no acceptable method to writing poetry
9. All convention should be shunned
10. Technology is your friend

And with that, let’s not only agree to disagree, but let our disagreements be viable, vibrant, and lead us to greater poetry.

5 Comments a “Modern, Postmodern, & Post-Postmodern: Why Poetry Is No Longer In Disintegration Mode”

1. Gary R. Hess — June 23, 2008 @ 8:57 pm
   

   Great read, and I agree. Although, I must say sometimes I do write a little too much concrete ;\

2. Gary B. Fitzgerald — June 24, 2008 @ 3:35 pm
   

   Amen!

3. Gary B. Fitzgerald — June 24, 2008 @ 5:45 pm
   

   “…the last great school of poetics was the Romantic School, the lone adherents of which in U.S. poetics were Edgar Allan Poe and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.”

   1. How would you classify Wordsworth and Whitman?

   2. Maybe it would be helpful if you listed ten prominent poets who exemplify each of the referenced schools.

4. the poet — June 24, 2008 @ 9:58 pm
   

   Wordsworth was English. Whitman is iconic. I would not call him Romantic in the institutional sense. But I was really talking about, though I didn’t state it, the early 19th century, pre-death of Poe.

5. nyein way(myanmar) — October 9, 2008 @ 10:45 am
   

   Ten dimensions of post-postmodern poetics or millenial poetics
   1.materiality instead of material such as language or things to make poetry(materiality in the sense that essence of materials are emerged as a functional meaning in the social and cultural context)
   2.no stylistic contents but multistylistic happenings
   3.visionary decision-making for chance operation
   4.using site-specific realization in individual zone
   5.quotidian experiences are communication channel for making poetry
   6.no social self but spiritual ever-changing one
   7.language not as a system but as a automatic machine
   8.self-revelation through life exprience with high concentrated mental potential
   9.solitude of wiadom
   10.abstraction with surreal awareness in contemporeity
   10.

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