On Mon, 11 Oct 1999 18:24:07 +0100, Tony wrote:
>I agree with whoever said PoPm was a humpty-dumptyish word.
- 'twas I. In practical terms it's perhaps worth reminding ourselves
what whole classes of anthology-fed students of US poetry have had
bunched as "postmodern" for them, 'cos even if there's no stable
definition (this would seem to be a feature of postmodern argument,
yes?) there has been at least some supermarket-shelf-stacking
coherence for the term ("Blackburn? you'll find him in the chilled
pomo cabinet, between Ashbery and Blaser...")
1. In 1982 "The New American Poetry" became "The Postmoderns: The New
American Poetry Revised" eds Allen n Butterick. In their preface
(where they credit Olson as "the first, in his essays and letters, to
use the term in its present significance") they conclude:
"Post-modernism, then, is more than just the continuation of the
modernism begun in the 1910s. Its proposals are more widely sweeping
than those of imagism and that "revolution of the word" beginning the
early decadees of the twentieth century. Most of all, its chief
characteristic is its inclusiveness, its quick willingness to take
advantage of all that had gone before".
2. 1994: "Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology" ed. Paul
Hoover: he also tags Olson as first source for the term. He says:
"I have chosen "postmodernism" for the title over "experimental" and
"avant-garde" because it is the most encompassing term for the variety
of experimental practice since World War II, one that ranges from the
oral poetics of Beat and performance poetries to the more "writerly"
work of the New York School and language poetry ... Despite their
differences, experimentalists in the postwar period have valued
writing-as-process over writing-as-product ... Postmodernism decenters
authority and embraces pluralism."
Don't shout at me! I'm not proposing that we write any of this in
stone, or even sand, still less that we transport any of it
uncritically to the UK. But it seems to me that there are common
elements here: (a) pomo, as its name suggests, is developmental: it
always has to be seen in terms of something else (something earlier or
elsewhere). It is always "not" something or "more than" something.
Oppositional, even - tho that's reading beyond the passages quoted
above. And (b) because it's developing, linked in some sense to the
unsatisfactory "experimental" or "avant-garde" words, the definitions
of it will shift, it will be hard to get a concensus of understanding
of it. Understandings of it will remain provisional. And (c) the facts
of its "inclusive" and "plural" nature suggest that fine definition is
out of the question anyway, it's never going to be other than umbrella
language.
All this may make it disconcertingly unstable as a term to live
within, potentially misleading as a fixed term to feed to The Young.
But there it is: the developmental beat goes on, poets will keep going
round changing things, and someone's gonna stick tags on them while
they do it, it's only human. You got a better term to put over those
shelves? It's at least a semi-serious question, because there are
poetries stacked there which we can't do without.
OK, so a guy goes into Asda and says, "Can you tell me where you stack
the provisional developmental umbrellas?" ...
RC
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