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On the post modernity question I believe that despite our best intentions it will become a victim of periodisation. Any literature written between say 1950-2000 will be seen as postmodern purely because of the time it was written. This has already happened with modernism. I have seen academic books that describe Evelyn Waugh and Grahame Greene as 'modernist' novelists. This is only explicable because Waugh and Greene were writing in roughly the modernist period. Yeats is routinely discussed as a modernist when I feel this is debatable.  It is an academic pigeonhole.

But what else do you do? I have been reading Paul Hoover's generally excellent anthology, Postmodern American Poets, and wondering why he does not include say Berryman and Rich. Stylistically, a very good case could be made for them being post modernist: they mix high and low, play with referentiality, are often 'difficult' while influenced by the modernists. However they wrote in a different stream, they huddled with Lowell rather than Olson.
But then I thought, why worry, time will do this anyway. In 30m 0r 40 years few outside the experts will really see the difference between Berryman and say O'Hara. Or Rich and Howe.

Sorry


Giles


From: Jaime Robles <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Monday, 12 February 2018, 17:46
Subject: Re: Post modernity

Some (irritating, perhaps) notes:

I like the use of serviceable here, Jamie. The term brings up the issues of definition of practice, which is useful to poets, and categorization, which is useful to academics. I think the former can be exemplified by Rhys’ earlier post where he pointed out a site he was developing on which people could post forms of practice; though he (wisely) didn’t categorize the forms, which were implicit (conscious or not) in his call to post. So in that case, serviceable is neither here nor there. On the other hand, it’s part of the role of academics (bless their little cotton socks in sandals) to define and categorize cultural movements and their various subsets. In those cases, the terms do seem serviceable.

I had trouble with a previous list of poets described as examples of modernism because their actual poetry varied so widely from each other, for example HD and Eliot. So rather than list examples of writers, I tried dealing with the categories.

As to American definitions of modernism and postmodernism (with the caveat that I do not speak for all Americans, the US being a large and wildly variable place). For those I searched out the terms online, mostly because those definitions are the most comprehensive and widely used, and therefore have relevance. The following comes from an North American (Canadian) university course on modernism, which for me aligns to a US (West Coast) definition:

Modernist literature is marked by a break with the sequential, developmental, cause-and-effect presentation of the 'reality' of realist fiction, toward a presentation of experience as layered, allusive, discontinuous; the use, to these ends, of fragmentation and juxtaposition, motif, symbol, allusion.



There are any number of lengthy books defining modernism including Frederick Jameson’s Postmodernism and Linda Hutchison’s A Poetics of Postmodernism. Having read those so long ago that reconstructing them is impossible, I went back online. An online academic study resource offered the following list:

    • Intertextuality 
    • Metafiction  
    • Pastiche 
    • Maximalism  
    • Irony
    • Hyperreality
    • Paranoia 
    • Fragmentation 

For a more detailed definition: https://www.shmoop.com/postmodern-literature/characteristics.html

So what I see in these two definitions is a morphing from modernism to postmodernism that can be characterized by an increased self-consciousness of the writer, and a need to wrangle, or play with the reader’s thought. And that’s my perception, probably sourced in long-ago now-forgotten reading ….

J


jaimerobles.com




______________________________

QS: Let’s return to poetics.
JR: When did we leave?

—From the conversation between Quinta Slef and Joan Retallack, The Poethical Wager





On Feb 11, 2018, at 5:10 PM, Jamie McKendrick <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Only too happy to set the ‘silly squabbling’ aside. Good title for a new thread I hope not to contribute anything to.
  Returning to post-modernism, I’m confessedly ignorant about what it means in relation to poetry, though grateful to have learnt something about its history (Toynbee, Olson etc.). But can anyone explain why it might be a serviceable term or even suggest any poets who be considered examples?
Jamie

On 11 Feb 2018, at 22:50, Pierre Joris <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Lawdy, Lawd, turn your head away from a thread you contributed to for some 48 hours & here are 20 more posts that have nothing to do with the subject header — or is all that silly squabbling post-modern in any way??? Maybe the list would improve if those who want to argue about if to argue or how to argue or not to argue should create a threat called just that — it would simplify reading & save time for some of us.

Pierre


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_____________________________________________________
Pierre Joris 
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http://pierrejoris.com 
Nomadics blog: http://pierrejoris.com/blog/ 
______________________________________________________
The poet: always in partibus infidelium -- Paul Celan
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On Feb 11, 2018, at 3:14 PM, Rhys Trimble <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Yes its a general comment about the list, nothing to do with you as such David maybe you are a symptom, but others too who are quick to bring emotion into what should neutral and if possible light-hearted and thorough (if not mutually exclusive) discussion of poetry and poetics and related topics

anyway back to modernism kids if we can!