Tag Archives: Post-Postmodernism

Trust in Poetry

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The currency of trust

The conversation of poetry takes many forms. The following three types of conversation are metaphors that illustrate some of the trust dynamics at play in contemporary poetry. See if you recognize them–both the actual conversations, and the experience of the conversation, transposed onto the experience of reading certain poems.

The first is a conversation with that friend who is always at the effect of some terrible circumstance. They tell you, in detail, the latest mishap, and with such conviction that it would be difficult not to feel sorry for them–if you were naive enough not to realize, after mishap after mishap, and tale after tale, that with them, the drama will never end. But the more you try to inure yourself to their tales, the more dramatic they become. In the end, you can’t help but feel emotionally manipulated. Even if this person believes their own story, it is hard to trust them not to tug excessively hard, fast, and often at your heart strings.

The second kind of conversation is one among acquaintances, perhaps a group of smart freshmen undergraduates getting to know themselves and each other in uncertain new circumstances. Here wit is the currency of the conversation, a constant repartee. In this atmosphere of intellectual one-upsmanship, conversation is designed to hold the others at emotional arms’ length, never risking anything intimate unless it is couched in a sarcastic tone. Any sense of trust in what is being said is constantly subverted by clever, fast-paced ripostes. I have often left such gatherings with a deep sense of alienation.
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Poetry and the Information Age

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Visual Cortex Diagram courtesy Wikipedia

Visual Cortex diagram courtesy Wikipedia

I have been questioning my preference for reading poetry on paper versus digital text for some time now, wondering what might underpin these instincts. It recently occurred to me that the difference in mental state I experience when reading a book versus surfing the web may actually have a basis in science. The advent of digital text has made a staggering amount of information available to us, and thereby altered forever how we learn. The further proliferation of digital text through the internet, and especially now with blogging and social networking, has made our ability to filter through words a survival skill. We must read faster than ever in the information age, skimming for nuggets of meaning or amusement.

Just how have we learned to read faster in the information age? Short of a research grant, an EEG machine, and plenty of literate volunteers, I have only a sample size of one, and my subjective methods of self-observation to guide me. But my theory is that we bias the visual processing centers of our brain, instead of the auditory centers, when surfing the web. This theory is supported by speed-reading courses that attempt to eliminate sub-vocalization and auditory processing to teach people to read faster. And yet, poetry has been an aural medium for centuries.

What are the implications for our poetics when readers stop listening to poetry in their head? Continue reading →

The Death of Loftiness in Poetry

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What follows is my subjective analysis of a statistically insignificant data set. That said, I did not conduct my experiment in search of hard-and-fast conclusions. Instead, I created a simple poll about poetry and prose titles, and asked participants what, if anything, surprised them about the results. I wanted to be surprised myself, to discover something new about how people relate to poetry. And I was.

Obviously, people got questions wrong, individually and collectively. In fact, the collective wisdom didn’t end up being that much more reliable than a coin toss. But far more interesting, and unexpected, was the difference between the answers that poets and non-poets gave about which titles they thought were poetry, and which were prose. Continue reading →

Poetry Book Titles: a Quick, Fun Poll for Everyone

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I have been reflecting on postmodernism and poetry, and came up with the idea of a quick, easy poll to help develop some of these thoughts.

Care to help me out? You don’t have to know a thing about poetry to participate. For each title in bold, simply click “poetry” if you think it sounds like the title of a poetry book, or “prose” if you think it sounds like a prose book’s title.

Ready? Here we go.

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Post-Postmodernism and Hope

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“Every evening / words /–not stars–light the sky. // No rest in life / like life itself.”

“I hear that the axe has flowered, / I hear that the place can’t be named, // I hear that the bread which looks at him / heals the hanged man, / the bread baked for him by his wife, // I hear that they call life / our only refuge.”

-Paul Celan, “I Hear That The Axe Has Flowered,” trans. Michael Hamburger

I find myself drawn to poets who survived The Second World War. This, in combination with frequently watching the remarkable BBC series Foyle’s War in the evening, as well as, on a more personal note, the recent passing of my wife’s uncle, Sven–a Marine who was at Normandy, and a man of whom I was fond–has got me thinking about the profound and continuing impact of WWII. Even as Czeslaw Milosz says that Communism was the only possible response to the atrocities of the Industrial Revolution, so, too, it occurs to me that Postmodernism may well be a kind of understandable, almost logical response to the atrocities of WWII.

Part of my thinking has been fueled by researching Seamus Heaney, including a number of essays in The Art Of Seamus Heaney wherein various critics attempt to place him, as an accessible, intelligent, lyric poet, within the context of the Twentieth century, and the decline of centrality, gentility, and structure. These abstract thoughts have gained specificity through reading selected works of Paul Celan and Umberto Saba. Both men, in the face of profoundly difficult personal circumstances, heightened their attention to language in their poems. Yet in the case of Celan, the attention presses ever more inward, into a symbolic and even cryptogrammic relationship to German; whereas with Saba, his Italian becomes more specific and spare in a way that promotes universal resonance.
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