Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Post-Modernism

Postmodernism (1945 →) is an attempt to rethink the cultural landscape with theories taken from linguistics, psychiatry, continental philosophy, and left-wing politics.

To many readers, Postmodernist poetry is not poetry at all. Postmodernism is hard to define and there is little agreement on the exact characteristics, scope, and importance of postmodern literature.

Tends to be an art of:
Fragmentary (consisting of small parts that are disconnected or incomplete)
Solipsist (the view or theory that the self is all that can be known to exist. )
Provisional
Paradoxes
Pastiche
Employs Metafiction
Questionable Narrators
Opposed to the 'great themes of art' and saying anything definite.
Styles are simple
Anything goes.

Themes:
Iconoclastic (a person who attacks cherished beliefs or institutions.)
Groundless
Formless
Populist (seeking to represent the interests of ordinary people using politics)

Poets:
Julia Williams
Michael Boughn
Gary Barwin
Kate Hall

Post-Modernism
by James Galvin


A pinup of Rita Hayworth was taped
To the bomb that fell on Hiroshima.
The Avant-garde makes me weep with boredom.
Horses are wishes, especially dark ones.

That's why twitches and fences.
That's why switches and spurs.
That's why the idiom of betrayal.
They forgive us.

Their windswayed manes and tails,
Their eyes,
Affront the winterscrubbed prairie
With gentleness.

They live in both worlds and forgive us.
I'll give you a hint: the wind in fits and starts.
Like schoolchildren when the teacher walks in,
The aspens jostle for their places

And fall still.
A delirium of ridges breaks in a blue streak:
A confusion of means
Saved from annihilation

By catastrophe.
A horse gallops up to the gate and stops.
The rider dismounts.
Do I know him?

No comments:

Post a Comment