Skip to main content

Teaching Experimental Postmodern Poetics

While is is fairly easy to the my students to understand that postmodern poetry is a form of critique of normative poetic strategies of the 20th century, often I find that, in an odd way, they don't necessarily see such strategies as normative. They are not normal for them in that way that for most normal people poetry is totally abnormal. I am them left with the need to teach them what normal is so they can see why Ashbery is not normal. Anyway, here is one way I do it. I usually illustrate first with a poem by Heaney, "Digging" "Death of a Naturalist" something horribly late-Romantic. Then get them to read some O'Hara and Ashbery. It always works.
Normative poetry is called variously traditional, realist, late-Romantic, free-verse or voice poetics

Elements of The traditional poem:
Titular Law: the title announces the meaning
Formal regularity and coherence
Thematic coherence
Significant Lineation (rhyme or strong enjambment)
Coherence (narrative, logic, syllogism, end lines)
Move from the particular to universal: e.g. Heaney’s “Digging” from digging to creativity as such
Finitude: poems ends significantly

Within which one finds such things as:
Metaphor
Referential certainty
Transparency
Absorption
Expressiveness
Voice
Depth
Subjective certainty
Humanism

Origins:
Romanticism: recollection in tranquillity, alienated poet, wanders in a landscape, encounters an event, recalls it later, poetry forms bridge between the event as such and wider significance for all (to see into the life of things) [cf. Daffodils]

Free Verse Poetics: spontaneity, open form, apparently artless, reliance on the voice as authentic, tends to ‘lineated prose’, seems to renounce constraint in favour of expression (no ideas but in things vs confessionalism)

Modernism: the eternally transient, poeticisation of the word, new-realism, disjuncture as realism, myth, objective correlative, imagism

Cultural Presuppositions about poetry:
Prosody is dead
Motivation is essential
Organic form is still the ideal
Poetry versus prose, that these are somehow now mutually exclusive
Poetry Makes nothing happen
Poetry performs the truth that philosophy seeks re: singularity of being
Every word counts

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Deleuze, Difference and Repetition

For a long time I have felt that poetics has not taken into consideration a great deal written about issues pertaining to difference and repetition to be found in contemporary philosophy. As poetry's whole energy and dynamic is based on a fundamental relation to differential versus repeated units of sense (sense both in terms of meaning and the sensible), any work on difference and repetition would be welcome. That some of the greatest thinkers of the age, notably Deleuze and Derrida, have made both issues core to their whole philosophical systems is so remarkable that poetics is impoverished if it does not fully acknowledge this. Not that I am one to talk. Although I am aware of the centrality of Deleuze's work to postmodern poetry, I have as yet not been able to really address this but in Poetry Machines I began that work at least. In preparation for the few hundred words I wrote there, here are the 10,000 words I annotated in preparation. Deleuze, Gilles. Difference an...
Post a Comment
Read more

Postmodern Poetry (2)

Postmodern Poetry, A Definition Postmodern poetry is an international phenomena of aesthetic multiplicities as is typical of many postmodern cultural products. It also operates self-consciously, even foundationally, within a philosophical and/or ideological context where categorisation and closed definition are rejected in favour of investigation and free play. A definition, therefore, can only ever be of a general nature and it must always be accepted that such a definition is closer to a strategy or better, as it is poetry of which we speak, a pattern into which the rangy, tireless energy of the poetry has settled for an unspecified but limited period of time. I could, at this point, pass the buck entirely and suggest that postmodern poetry exceeds definition but this would not be true for it operates within an environment still constituted by modernist values of summation and fixity for which definitions are essential. If I do not impose a definition some other agency will perha...
Post a Comment
Read more

Frank O'Hara, Collected Poems pp.201-300 Annotated

Frank O’Hara, Collected Poems (Berkeley, Cal.: University of California Press, 1995) Pages 201-300 Close Readings and annotations of every poem in the collection September 1997 in preparation for In the Process of Poetry: The New York School and the Avant-Garde (Bucknell UP, 2001) Frank O’Hara “In the Movies”, 206-209 · interesting that this poem has not been picked up by the critics for it is an easy point to indicate the importance of films in O'Hara’s aesthetic indicating the dissolves, cuts and montage effects he has been credited with and whilst I do not like to appropriate analogous terms in this fashion the montage of O'Hara is easily distinguishable form the collage of Ashbery in that here it is the movement from image to image in an attempt at seamlessness, a basic synaesthesia of subject in the now of consciousness. · in addition to the basic aesthetic implications of this use of films there are also certain other issues that he raises here but does not rea...
1 comment
Read more