Postmodern poetry

Question 1

Postmodern poetry
Social poetry

Answer 1

-Doesn’t interrupt modernit projects of Eliot, Pound and Williams.
- 1930s and 1940s: rise of two idiosyncratic modernists
1. Luis Zukpfsky (objectivism)
2. Charles Olson (projective verse)

1 + 2 + Eliot, Pound and Williams = POSTMODERNISM

Question 2

Postmodern poetry
Characteristics (5)

Answer 2

• Social poetry + application of ideas from the visual arts to poetry.
• Extremely fragmented and plural.
• Huge number of poets.
• 5 groups:
  
  • Black Mountain
  • New York School
  • San Francisco Renaissance
  • Beats
  • Independents
• General tendencies:
  
  • Modernism reruns
  • “Personalist”, more cerebral, abstract, “de-personalized” poetry

Question 3

Postmodern poetry
New York School 1950s-1960s
Authors (5)
Style (2)
Influence
Characteristics (8)

Answer 3

Authors
- John Ashbery
- James Schuyler
- Kenneth Koch
- Frank O’Hara
- Barbara Guest

Style
- Ironic (at times humourous) and irreverent towards established culture.
- Experimental and quite intellectual.

Influence: French poetry (Baudelaire, Apollinaire, surrealism, S-J Perse, Raymond Roussel)

Characteristics:
- Personal and diaristic, often intimate.
- Fascinated with city life.
- Often record their own making.
- Narrative/dramatic bent.
- Self-imposed constrictions.
- Randomness.
- Start poems from an advertisement, quotation, overheard sentence.
- Receptive to popular culture.

Question 4

Postmodern poetry
New York School
Frank O’Hara (NY)
Characteristics (5)
Work (3)

Answer 4

• “Personism”
• Colloquial language, at times obscure.
• Elliptical syntax.
• Line enjambment, irregular rhythm.
• Abundant personal and local allusions.

“Meditations in an Emergency”
“Lunch Poems”
“Collected Poems”

Question 5

Postmodern poetry
Language poetry 1960s-70s-80s
Against
For
Style (8)
Authors

Answer 5

Against
- Personalism
- Unified sense

For
- Denseness and opacity (non-transparent language)
- Language in process.
-Reading should be constructive, an active decoding-work.

Style: exclusive attention to language (styles, idiolects, sociolects, particular usages)
- Blurred, modified, de-automatized, pushed towards obscurity.
- Poem = gathering of voices.
- Difficulty and opacity.
- Against simplification.
- Vague anti-capitalist critique.
- Clear texts, standard languages equate meaning with consumption.
- Authoritarian.

Lynn Hejinian, Charles Berstein, Ron Silliman

Cindy Sherman
John Baldessari