Postmodern Poetry

'Postmodern' is one of those terns and concepts that I can only hold onto the meaning for about ninety seconds. It's all got-it-got-it-don't-got-it.

Do you have an easy way to stamp its meaning on my tiny brain?

'modern' makes me laugh - especially when it refers to poets from the early to mid 20th century. The post modern sounds interesting, considering it's for the Millenium...hang on, the last millenium count was 11 years ago -- shouldn't it be pre-modern?

See? It all gives me a headache. If it's only referencing a time frame, whoever put that stamp on any particular set of years is a silly bugger.

It's not really about years so much as style and outlook, I think. When Picasso painted "Nude Descending a Staircase," it's not the time that made it modern, but the fractured outlook and multiplicity of possible views of the same thing even over multiple periods of time. When Freud described his theory of the tripartite mind, it was taking respectable notions of sexuality and a simple, unassailable surface consciousness that was only ever exactly what you said it was and showing them to be a cover story for reality rather than a description of it, a sort of repressive and quite purposeful sham, even if the purpose served might not be a conscious one. Modernism not only permitted the fracturing of narrative, but insisted it had been fractured all along, and we were just catching up.

I would contend that in doing so, it not only allowed a lot more of art and indeed life's complexity to be held up to the light, it also made possible like never before a derailing of art into lazy obfuscation, private languages and other world-beating pretensions, and dreary, mechanical solipsism. It made it possible to claim anything as art, and to make art with no intention to appeal or even be intelligible. Given the opportunity, people have in such large numbers taken it and run with it that poetry, for one, has been all but killed off permanently.

Others might contend that it has been reborn.

Perhaps; but if so, nobody is selling any books, except to each other. It's not the destiny I would have chosen for the art form.

Reborn? Really? Most people say they don't like poetry or don't get it or both. Or simply that it's a waste of time.

Nude Descending a Staircase No 2, I think, was painted by Marcel Duchamp in 1912. It doesn't affect your argument, just giving proper credit.

Oop my bad. Been too many years since it's come to mind.

Shakespeare endures alongside Byron, Yeats, Akhmatova, cummings, Plath, Angelou, Ferlinghetti, Brautigan and Omar Khayyam.

Poetry is not a horse and cart. And thank goodness for that. It changes, which means it must be alive.

Thanks, Steppe, for these links.

More importantly, thank you for urging us to read more broadly of poetry, and not just what we already know.

Modernism was a catch-phrase in the 20th Century referring to anything new but in the art world, it referred to something specific: the use of machines to aid the development of art and having the art reflect that. Modern Warfare began in World War I and ended in the Vietnam War. Modernist Architecture began as an offspring of Futurist art from the 1890s and had its first examples produced in the 1910s and had fallen out of favour by the late 60s.

Post-modern art refers to looking for solutions beyond the machines but still aided by machines. It begins somewhere around the 1960s and reaches full steam by the 1980s. In literature, this is most visible with the punk genres.

Blarg said:

Others might contend that it has been reborn.

Perhaps; but if so, nobody is selling any books, except to each other. It's not the destiny I would have chosen for the art form.

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ajc said:

Reborn? Really? Most people say they don't like poetry or don't get it or both. Or simply that it's a waste of time.

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What else is new? Is that a marked change from any other age? Has the literary community ever been much different? One might just as well say that it's a sign of the elevation of conditions of the general populace that they even are exposed to poetry at all.

And you can hardly blame poetry for the demise of Borders.

Was Jim Morrison a poet? Chuck D, from Public Enemy? Tom Waits? Jack Kerouac was a talisman for a generation only decades ago. Abbie Hoffman. Laurie Anderson.

If you're expecting poets to match sales with Stephen King, or U2, you might be expecting too much.

If you are talking about bottom-level what the largest part of the general public wants, it is execrable Rod McKuen type stuff and probably always has been. I don't care for it and don't believe we should "write down to it," but there it is.

Stuff like haiku has never been big in America at least. A poem by Richard Brautigan (he of Trout Fishing in America) called Haiku Ambulance about sums that up:

Haiku Ambulance

A red leaf fell
from the salad bowl
So what?

Americans traditionally tend to think of poetry in, well, traditional ways, and are still pleased by the traditional measures of it -- meter especially -- as they have been for thousands of years, when it first came from song. Much of poetry has come about because it's simply how language works.

Experimental stuff? Obscurity as virtue? That's a dog's breakfast for most readers, and likely a huge part of why, for the average person, poetry has tumbled from arguably the zenith of literature to its nadir.

Re the present-day value or intelligibility -- or even popularity -- of Shakespeare, a first read-through of Hamlet likely astonishes, many of its phrases still so much a part of common speech that they could have been uttered on the fly by some wise-cracking kid for the first time today. Shakespeare's preferred meter is how we tend to speak even today. Shakespeare's ubiquity and, despite his own celebrated variances, unusual consistency in spelling played a large part in winnowing his day's chaotic spelling into a generally agreed-upon order. And he provides a masters course in using enjambment as casually as the rest of us warble out tuneless lyrics about scrubbing our armpits in the shower. Shakespeare's work is a prime example of things being good enough to stand the test of time.

It's surely not up to anyone to decide what anyone else should like. But most new attempts to dethrone the eternal verities of poetry are lost causes precisely because they are more the cyclical outburst of being enraptured with something new than, in themselves, something lasting. Live long enough and you see this happening in field after field, many times over. New is easy, and always the very most important thing in the world -- no, REALLY, this time; lasting is hard. Steer too far afield and you eventually flounder; then the ship rights itself and sails on.

The only questions are how amusing the side trips might be while they last and whether anything useful or of any but the most obscure and narrow appeal will be left over after all the scrabbling about. The former is anyone's preference to determine, but on the latter count we generally come up wanting.

Which would be fine, being the normal run of things and all, if we hadn't seemed to get stuck somewhere along the cycle while no longer caring that we did -- no longer caring about poetry's broad appeal. It looks to me like we have been spending the past half century writing poetry into some combination of irrelevance yet perfectly fitting subject of a rolled eye and dismissive, caustic joke. It may never have had such a committed downward trajectory. I hope we will not all write it into an unintelligible memory together.

My feeling is that traditionally poetry had patterns which made poetry easier to memorize like rhyme, alliteration, meter, syllable count, etc. The further poetry moves away from these traditional roots, the less relevant it is. Poetry with none of these patterns is much more of an intellectual enterprise. Valid, surely, but perhaps less accessible because it is harder to relate to.