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Postmodernism and Poetry:
Final Disintegration and Hope for Renewal

“The only way forward from Postmodernism is as a reaction against it—not a reaction in the sense of destruction (what could be more Postmodernist than destruction of destruction?), but reaction as ‘backing away from the edge.’ Postmodernism is the abyss of nihilism, a place with nowhere further to go, and in which going only leads to more nothingness. The abyss consumes, convincing those who gaze on it that it is the truth—but it is not inescapable. We can back away from it.”

by Adam Sedia

(note: a file with full references can be found at the end of this post)

Postmodernism is both a school of philosophy and an artistic movement influenced by its worldview. Poetry, the intersection of art and philosophy, unavoidably followed the trends of postmodernism. But what is “postmodernism?” One of its philosophers, Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998) defined it as “incredulity towards meta narratives.” To explore what he meant, an understanding of its origins and concepts is necessary.

Postmodern thought has two sub-schools, both firmly in Karl Marx. The first is Critical Theory, a comprehensive application of Marx’s economic theories to culture, famously expounded by the Frankfurt School, a collective of largely Jewish intellectuals who fled Nazi Germany to the United States, where they developed their ideas at Columbia University in the 1940s and 50s. Its members included Max Horkheimer (1895-1973), Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), Theodor Adorno (1903-1969), Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), and Erich Fromm (1900-1980).

“As neo-Marxists, these scholars were specifically concerned with forms of authority and injustice that accompanied the evolution of industrial and corporate capitalism as a political-economic system.” Critical theorists saw rationality as the product of “systems of domination and alienation.” Thus, culturally and ideologically developed narratives are imposed to become “real.”

The second Postmodernist school originated in France. This was Post-Structuralism, with its roots in linguistic theory, though later adapted to Marxist political theory. While Critical Theory attacked authority and reasoning as illegitimate products of unjust power structures, the Post-Structuralists examined “writing as the paradoxical source of subjectivity and culture, whereas once it was thought to be secondary.” Louis Althusser (1918-1990) and Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) applied Structuralist analysis to Marxist political and economic theory, Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) to Freudian psychoanalysis, and Roland Barthes (1915-1980) to literary theory.

Although he rejected the label, one of the Post-Structuralists who became one of the pillars of Postmodernist thought was Michel Foucault (1926-1984). Foucault, argued that systems of knowledge are structured by which concepts and statements make sense together and how they are organized, which of them count as serious, who is authorized to speak seriously, and what questions and procedures assess who is to be taken seriously. Thus, knowledge itself is a product of human power relationships.

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), is considered the quintessential Postmodernist because he took Post-Structuralism to its logical end of deconstruction. According to Derrida, “texts literally deconstruct themselves in their impossible attempt to employ language as a ‘transcendental signifier,’ that is, as a way of ‘pointing’ at some eternal truth or other.” Thus, deconstruction “is nothing, it is not a method, not a technique, not even an act, because a deconstructive reading attends to the deconstructive processes always occurring in the texts and already there waiting to be read.” Language, essentially, conveys no meaning because a text can always be read to say something other than what it purports.

For this reason Postmodernism is imbued with a deep sense of irony. “There was never yet a Postmodernist who did not claim to be an ironist in one form or another,” except “irony” in that context means skepticism—“a conscious skepticism towards grand narrative and towards a whole range of other possible things.” Irony, which “started off as a sense of hidden meaning” became “an idea of the superiority of the ironist; in other words, a kind of almost self-flattering affectation.” Thus, Postmodern irony depends less on an idea of hidden meaning than on a relationship between author and reader “in almost the way” the Postmodernists themselves deny.

Such irony manifests itself nowhere better than in Postmodernist art, especially architecture. The Postmodernist style that came to prominence in the 1980s blends past styles in a critical or ironic way. It is most readily visible in the colorful, gaudily eclectic architecture of Michael Graves, Philip Johnson, and Frank Gehry and in the interior design of the Memphis Group, with its geometric shapes and bright colors.

In poetry, at least in the United States, Postmodernism has its remote origins in the poems and theories of Charles Olson (1910-1970), who used the term “postmodern” as early as 1951. According to Olson, “Art does not seek to describe but to enact.” The poet, therefore, must replace (in Olson’s terms) the “classical-representational” with the “primitive-abstract.”

In a 1950 essay, Olson envisions “open” (i.e. “free”) verse as a “field,” with the ear determining the syllable and the breath determining the line, which “brings us up, immediately, bang, against tenses, in fact against syntax, in fact against grammar generally, that is, as we have inherited it.” Instead, the “law of the line” overrides “the conventions which logic has forced on syntax . . . .” Olson stops there, though: “But the analysis of how far a new poet can stretch the very conventions on which communication by language rests, is too big for these notes.” He leaves the problem of grammar to future theorists.

Olson’s poetics predate the major writings of Lacan and Derrida and their influence on poetics. Still, we can see in his ideas the germ of what would become postmodern poetics: the language of the poem itself as paramount to anything outside of it. Olson even anticipates the postmodern treatment of grammar as an artifice forced on raw language, but seems daunted by that idea, choosing instead to leave the issue open for the future.

Olson’s theory has its roots deep in modernism, with its shifting of the meaning of the work of art from within the artist (or poet) to the viewer (or reader), treating the work itself as an “objective” medium—in the sense that it is a mere object, with the active role taken by the reader. Olson takes this idea to its logical extreme, where the poem as an object transcends even the rules of logic as embodied by grammar.

By the end of the twentieth century, Olson’s ideas, nourished by the French postmodernists, dominated discussion of poetic theory—as well as the poetry being produced, which was now being written largely by academics. Three Postmodern treatments of poetry are identifiable: (1) as irony, (2) as deconstruction, and (3) as “wordplay.” Both the poetics and the poetry written according to each treatment are now analyzed.

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Postmodern Poetry as Irony

In her 2000 essay “The Rejection of Closure,” the poet Lyn Hejinian discusses the unreliability of language in the context of “closure” in a literary work. For her, “the limits of language are the limits of what we might know.” But language struggles “to depict or express . . . our overwhelming experience of the vastness and uncertainty of the world . . . .” Thus, language both induces a “yearning for comprehension,” and at the same time is incapable of “clos[ing] the gap between ourselves and things.” Thus, poetry does not match the world, but provides an avenue to “discover structure, distinction, the integrity and separateness of things.”

For Hejinian, the inadequacy of language renders it a means of playing with ideas—really another way of saying deconstruction. Because language is unreliable, its faultiness allows, as per Derrida, an exploration of unintended or alternative meanings. This playfulness of the poetic subject matter leads to irreverent irony of the same type displayed in Postmodernist architecture.

An early example of irreverent irony in poetry is the famous and often anthologized 1967 poem “The Dover Bitch” by Anthony Hecht (1923-2004). Written exactly a century after Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” it responds to Arnold’s poem:

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The Dover Bitch

A Criticism of Life: for Andrews Wanning

So there stood Matthew Arnold and this girl
With the cliffs of England crumbling away behind them,
And he said to her, ‘Try to be true to me,
And I’ll do the same for you, for things are bad
All over, etc., etc.’
Well now, I knew this girl. It’s true she had read
Sophocles in a fairly good translation
And caught that bitter allusion to the sea,
But all the time he was talking she had in mind
The notion of what his whiskers would feel like
On the back of her neck. She told me later on
That after a while she got to looking out
At the lights across the channel, and really felt sad,
Thinking of all the wine and enormous beds
And blandishments in French and the perfumes.
And then she got really angry. To have been brought
All the way down from London, and then be addressed
As a sort of mournful cosmic last resort
Is really tough on a girl, and she was pretty.
Anyway, she watched him pace the room
And finger his watch-chain and seem to sweat a bit,
And then she said one or two unprintable things.
But you mustn’t judge her by that. What I mean to say is,
She’s really all right. I still see her once in a while
And she always treats me right. We have a drink
And I give her a good time, and perhaps it’s a year
Before I see her again, but there she is,
Running to fat, but dependable as they come.
And sometimes I bring her a bottle of Nuit d’ Amour.

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To understand Hecht’s treatment fully, a word must be said about the poet behind “Dover Beach.” Matthew Arnold in his 1880 essay “The Study of Poetry,” cites Aristotle for his proposition that the superiority of poetry as a literary genre lies in the “high seriousness” of the treatment of its subject matter.

Hecht takes exactly the opposite approach from Arnold, trivializing Arnold’s poem, from transforming “Beach” in the title to “Bitch,” to ridiculing Arnold’s facial hair, to transforming the addressee of Arnold’s elevated discourse into a vapid and sensuous woman who really just wants “a good time” and a drink. Hecht’s playful trivialization of Arnold’s serious discourse deconstructs the original poem, knocking the classic off its pedestal without replacing it with anything else. Arnold and his discourse are made ridiculous, when all the “Dover Bitch” wants is casual sex and a drink.

Hecht was not the last postmodern poet to “play with” a classic. Laura Mullen (b. 1958), like Hejinian, insists that “that which is felt in a poem is created by words, words, unreliable words.” Her 2011 collection, Dark Archive, refers to a concept that “comes from the digital world and refers to a copy of a data set to which almost no one has access and that is retained in remote storage against the possibility of disastrous loss.” The following poem comes from that collection:

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I Wandered Networks like a Cloud

That floated o’er my couch, remote
In one hand, drink in the other, as a crowd
On the screen (frightened, enraged)
Fled the tanks beneath the leaves
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine,
These wars, these displaced “refugees,”
Filmed in never-ending lines
Along the margins and at bay.
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Hurrying nowhere, like worried ants.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Bent weeping over loved bodies:
A poet could not but be gay,
Far from such desperate company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that satellite dish
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
To channel surf the world’s ills.

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Here Mullen paraphrases Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.” Like Hecht, she inverts the classic she paraphrases. Wordsworth’s poem addresses the concept of the ideal, and how the image of the daffodils continues to provide solace long after the perception has ended. Mullen, by contrast, addresses the presentation of tragic events as entertainment viewed on television from the comfort of home. For her, what matters is the real, not the ideal. Like Hecht, Mullen trivializes Wordsworth’s philosophical discussion by “recontextualizing” it among the banalities of everyday contemporary life. Wordsworth’s observation of the daffodils is transformed into watching television.

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Postmodern Poetry as Deconstruction

In a 2000 essay, the poet Steve McCaffery (b. 1947) brings Olson’s problematization of grammar to its full fruition. Relying on French postmodernism and the Marxist roots underlying its theory of language, he defends the unreadability of a text as an ideological departure from consumption to production, “a shift for writing away from literature and the readable, towards the . . . critique of the ideological contamination operative upon the very order of sign production.”

McCaffery directs this critique against what he calls two major “fetishisms” in language—with “fetishism” defined in Marxist terms as “a mechanism of occlusion” that detaches commodities from their meaning as products of labor and presents them as self-perpetuating “things” that take their place within social circulation as an exchange value.” The fetishisms are grammar, which “acts as a mechanism that regulates the free circulation of meaning,” and reference, which is the idea that “language must always refer beyond itself to . . . some extra-linguistic thing,” and therefore “wants a message as a product to be consumed.” To break free from grammar, language writing operates as “an expenditure of meanings” in the isolated parts of the text “for the sake of the present moment,” and to break free from the referential fetish, it “shifts away from literary concerns band back to the ground of semantic production.”

John Ashbery (1927-2017) has been called the “leading poet of his generation.” Influenced by French avant-garde, his poetry “is often considered difficult” because “in its inconclusiveness and linguistic play, Ashbery’s poetry captures the philosophical spirit of the age, as otherwise reflected in the thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Jacques Derrida.” His poetry reflects indeterminacy as “the conditionality of truth” and demonstrates “a tendency away from finality and closure; the text is in a state of unrest or undecidability.” The following 1981 poem illustrates Ashbery’s indirect style and postmodernist outlook:

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Paradoxes and Oxymorons

This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level.
Look at it talking to you. You look out a window
Or pretend to fidget. You have it but you don’t have it.
You miss it, it misses you. You miss each other.

The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot.
What’s a plain level? It is that and other things,
Bringing a system of them into play. Play?
Well, actually, yes, but I consider play to be

A deeper outside thing, a dreamed role-pattern,
As in the division of grace these long August days
Without proof. Open-ended. And before you know
It gets lost in the steam and chatter of typewriters.

It has been played once more. I think you exist only
To tease me into doing it, on your level, and then you aren’t there
Or have adopted a different attitude. And the poem
Has set me softly down beside you. The poem is you.

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Ashbery here achieves—ironically for a postmodernist—a clear and concise manifesto of postmodern poetics. His poem is about itself. Like “Dover Bitch,” its tone is playful, but instead of addressing a particular classic, this poem addresses the very concept of language. It begins by describing the poem “talking to” the reader, but the reader misses it. The gulf between the poem and the poet is inseparable because of the faultiness of language. All that remains to the poet, Ashbery concludes, is “play,” which is “open-ended.” With poetry as endless wordplay, the poet and the reader are equivalent, and the poem becomes the reader. The poet’s play becomes the reader’s, with the poem as a mere object. This open-endedness reflects the eschewal of “closure” discussed by Hejinian.

Charles Bernstein (b. 1950) studied philosophy and became a “leading theorist of language poetry,” and produced many essays on the subject. The following 1999 poem addresses some of Bernstein’s theoretical views:

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This Line

This line is stripped of emotion.
This line is no more than an
illustration of a European
theory. This line is bereft
Of a subject. This line
has no reference apart
from its context in
this line. This line
is only about itself.
This line has no meaning:
its words are imaginary, its
sounds inaudible. This line
cares not for itself or for
anyone else—it is indifferent,
impersonal, cold, uninviting.
This line is elitist, requiring,
to understand it, years of study
in stultifying libraries, poring
over esoteric treatises on
impossible to pronounce topics.
This line refuses reality.

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Bernstein here echoes Ashbery. While Ashbery deconstructs the poem as a whole, Bernstein focuses on the line. Illustrating the postmodern concept of language as inherently unreliable because of the power structures behind it, Bernstein’s poem is devoid of content. “The line” does not exist; instead, each line is a recitation of what postmodernism views as the forces at work behind language: eurocentrism, hierarchy, historical context. Bernstein states the postmodern dogma that the line is self-referential only, and states it as a poem to illustrate that point.

This deconstruction is taken further the following 2005 poem by Linh Dinh (b. 1963), a Vietnamese poet who emigrated to the United States as a refugee in 1975:

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Vocab Lab

This word means yes,
however, maybe, or no,
depending on the situation.

This word means desire,
love, friendship, rape, or a sudden urge
to engage someone in a philosophical
conversation.

This word is unlearnable,
its meaning hermetic to all outsiders.
It can neither be pronounced
nor memorized.

This word is protean and can be spelled
an infinite number of ways.
Its meaning, however, is exact.

This word is also protean,
and may be used in place of any other word,
without loss of meaning.

This word can only be hinted at, implied,
and thus appears in no books,
not even in a dictionary.

This word can neither be spoken nor seen.
It can be freely written, however,
but only in complete darkness.

This word means one thing when spoken by a man,
and another thing, altogether different, when said by a woman.

This word means now, soon, or never,
depending on the age of the speaker.

This word means here, there, or nowhere,
depending on the speaker’s nationality.

It has often been said that the natives
will only teach foreigners a fake, degraded language,
a mock system of signs
parodying the real language.

It has also been said that the natives
don’t know their own language,
and must mimic the phony languages of foreigners,
to make sense out of their lives.

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Ashbery deconstructed the poem and Bernstein the line. Here Dinh deconstructs the word itself. “This word”—which may or may not refer to a single word throughout—always has exaggerated nuances and cultural contexts that render meaning impossible to derive. Dinh’s perspective as a non-native English speaker likely contributed in no small part to such views on the difficulty of language. But here Dinh extends the concept of untranslatability to all language. Not just the poem, not just the line, but the word itself—the basic unit of language—is unreliable because it lacks any fixed meaning. Anything the reader can derive from the word is false because it fails to account for the myriad nuances and contexts behind it.

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Postmodern Poetry as Wordplay

Building on McCaffery’s production/consumption dichotomy, Kenneth Goldsmith (b. 1961) in his essay “Conceptual Poetics” discusses conceptual or uncreative writing—which he illustrates by real-life examples of infusing a chemical alphabet into the DNA sequence of a bacterium and retyping an entire edition of a day’s copy of the New York Times as a 900-page book. “Freed from the market constraints of the art world or the commercial constraints of the computing & science worlds,” he writes, “the non-economics of poetry create a perfectly valueless space in which these valueless works can flourish.”

In conceptual poetry, “it’s the machine that drives the poem’s construction that matters”—that is, “the mere trace of any language in a work . . . will carry enough semantic and emotional weight on its own without any further subjective meddling from the poet . . . .” As a result, “traditional notions of a poem’s meaning, emotion, metaphor, image, and song are subservient to the raw physicality of language.”

Goldsmith goes on to anchor the roots of conceptual writing in the “densely unreadable texts” of Gertrude Stein, which were “designed to be skimmed” instead of read, “to delight the eye (in a visual sense) while holding the book—presciently predicting current reading habits. He also finds influence in the “procedure compositions” of composers John Cage and Jackson Mac Low and the films of Andy Warhol, which Warhol himself said “were better thought about than seen.”

In sixty years, from Olson’s essay to the first decades of the new millennium, poetic theory underwent a total breakdown. Olson’s original germ of an observation that grammar restricted the expression of poetic language transformed into a mistrust of language itself as a means of communication, and with it a shift in poetry away from being a medium of expression to a pure object, where the language itself is a sort of toy to be played with.

Ronald Johnson (1935-1998) is postmodernism’s epic poet. He began his epic, ARK, in the early 1970s and published the entire work in 1995. It consists of three sections of thirty-three poems: The Foundations (made up of “Beams”), The Spires, and The Ramparts (made up of Arches). “Over these, as a metaphorical dome, rests ARK 100, a rewriting of Paradise Lost by excision.” ARK 100 appeared in 1977 as RADI OS, which Johnson said was inspired by a Lukas Foss record in which a Handel piece was excised to give it “a modern, modish feel, but it was definitely Handel.” “[T]he next day,” Johnson said, “I went to the bookstore and bought a Milton Paradise Lost. And I started crossing out. I got about halfway through it crossing out anything because I thought it would be funny. But I decided you don’t tamper with Milton to be funny. You have to be serious.”

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from RADI OS

O tree
into the World,
Man

the chosen

Rose out of Chaos:

song

outspread
on the vast
Illumine.

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Johnson’s work embodies Goldsmith’s idea of “conceptual poetry”—poetry as assembled rather than created. As with Hecht and Mullen, Johnson “plays with” a classic, except here instead of inverting the subject matter, Johnson attacks the text itself, defacing it, and leaving for the reader fragments that ostensibly carry a meaning independent of the original work. Yet Johnson does not regard his methodology as mere play; he “ha[d] to be serious” to “tamper with Milton.” The “seriousness” of the work, then, lies in its treatment of the original. Like all postmodern work, “conceptual poetry” makes a statement about what it sees as the inherent unreliability of language. Here, like the excising of Handel that inspired it, the poem remains unmistakably Milton, yet assumes an entirely new meaning. For example, the phrase “the chosen / Rose out of chaos,” can constitute a statement about language, how from the inherent chaos of meaning the poet chooses specific words—much like the process by which Johnson redacted Milton.

K. Silem Mohammad (b. 1962), an original member of the Flarf Collective, a California-based cyberpoety school compared to Dada, which used computer search engines to write purposefully bad poetry. In his collection, Sonnagrams, written between 2008 and 2011, Mohammad used Shakespeare’s sonnets to generate his own material according to a procedure he describes thus:

I feed Shakespeare’s sonnets one line at a time into an anagram engine, thus generating anew group of words from each line, which I then paste into a Microsoft Word document. This initial textual output gives me a bank of raw material that is quantitatively equivalent to Shakespeare’s poem at the most basic linguistic level: the letter. At the same time, it sufficiently alters the lexical structure of the original poem so that I am not overtly influenced by Shakespeare’s semantic content. I click and drag the text generated by the anagram engine letter by letter until I am able to rework it into a new sonnet in iambic pentameter, with the English rhyme scheme . . . . The letters that are inevitably left over are used to make a title.

Mohammad’s transformation of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 47 according to this method yields the following result:

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The the the the the the the the the the Death (Hey Hey)

Hell yeah, this is an English sonnet, bitch:
Three quatrains and a couplet, motherfucker.
I write that yummy shit to get me rich:
My iambs got more drive than Preston Tucker.

I also got that English rhyme shit straight,
That alternating shit the verses do.
Word: every foxy mama that I date
Feels how my goddam prosody is true.

And I don’t mess with no Italian shit:
I only blow your mind the one way, ho.
I line it up four-four-four-two, that’s it:
That’s how I do my sonnet bidness, yo.

My mad Shakespearean moves are “phat” or “def”:
They weave my pet eel Lenny—what the eff?

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Here Silem combines both trends of postmodernism: pure wordplay with subversion of classical forms. Silem’s methodology has a “conceptual” element much like Johnson’s; he took a preexisting text (in this case Shakespeare) and transformed it via a process looser than an algorithm, assembling a new text as a result. At the same time, Silem writes a classic Shakespearian sonnet, but trivializes the form with highly colloquial, profanity-laced “street language.” An ancient and revered poetic form is fitted with phrases like “yummy shit” and “my . . . bidness, yo.”

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Analysis & Conclusion

In Postmodernism we see the final breakdown of not just poetry, but of language itself. With Foucault, reason itself is reduced to a mere expression of power structures. And with Derrida language loses all meaning, and all linguistic expression is nothing more than wordplay. Poetry as a linguistic expression is subject to deconstruction as much as any other text. Given the futility of poetry as expression, it would seem Postmodernists would abandon poetry altogether as pointless. Yet—perhaps counterintuitively—rather than abandoning the craft, Postmodernist poets persisted in writing poetry. But what were they left with to write about? With Postmodernism’s denial of the ability of the text to communicate anything outside of itself, the only thing left to the Postmodernist poet was to write poems about the poems themselves, turning them into self-deconstructing works—at once self-referential and nihilistic.

The triad of deconstructive poems by Ashbery, Bernstein, and Dinh exemplify where Postmodernism has taken poetry. Ashbery’s poem is about the poem itself, while Bernstein’s is about its constituent lines and Dinh’s about its very words—the basic building-blocks of the poem. Each poem affirms that it really has no meaning. Thus, it cannot really be about anything other than itself; a discourse rather than a poem.

In one sense, this is an outgrowth of Modernism, in which the work of art derived its meaning from what the viewer or reader assigned to it. Except a meaning assigned by a viewer is still a meaning and still acknowledges the communicative function of language. Postmodernism takes the final step and denies even this, stripping the poem of any remaining sense of meaning. All left for the poem to do is play with its own language (and we have another word for playing with oneself . . .).

It has frequently been observed that Postmodernism does not withstand its own scrutiny. If texts are unreliable, mere impositions of power structures, then the texts conveying the ideas of Postmodernism are themselves unreliable. Yet if the reader is to accept Postmodernist ideas from their authors’ texts, then language does indeed convey meaning and the entire premise of Postmodernism collapses. The true Postmodernist is one who writes no text at all.

Postmodernist poetry therefore seems superfluous—especially for an art form come to be regarded by many already as superfluous. What point is there in writing a poem when it can convey nothing, when even the words by which it plays with itself are unreliable? It is really a pointless exercise, and an embodiment of why poetry has come to be irrelevant except to those who write it. Yet it would be a mistake to consider Postmodern poetry a mere sideshow or curiosity; it has been profoundly influential, and poets like John Ashbery have enjoyed widespread renown and influence in the literary world.

But Postmodernism has another, more sinister side. In works like “The Dover Bitch” and “I Wandered Networks like a Cloud,” reference to great poems of the past is irreverent, but not in a way that criticizes them or adds a new understanding. Instead, the later poems trivialize the former, with Hecht reducing Matthew Arnold’s great mourning of the loss of faith to a boring old man who needs to have more fun and Mullen comparing Wordsworth’s contemplation of the Platonic ideal to channel-surfing news stations. And Mohammed’s sonnet, strictly Shakespearean, takes an actual Shakespeare sonnet and transforms it through a Google search into a profanity-riddled street-boast. Postmodenism does not stop at deconstructing language, but—and this is the Frankfurt School’s primary task—it deconstructs the mystique of the works of the past, trivializing them, overlooking the messages that made them into enduring works, and rendering them instead objects of ridicule viewed from the vantage of a supposedly more enlightened present day.

As early as the mid-1990s cultural discourse began to refer to Post-Postmodernism, Trans-Postmodernism, Post-Millennialism, and so forth—as developments from and, in some cases, reactions to Postmodernism. It is hard to see how Postmodernism can develop further. Deconstruction represents the ultimate degradation of art, philosophy, and even language. Any further breakdown, such as that seen now in the sciences with biological concepts subject to deconstruction, is only a further iteration of Postmodernism.

The only way forward from Postmodernism is as a reaction against it—not a reaction in the sense of destruction (what could be more Postmodernist than destruction of destruction?), but reaction as “backing away from the edge.” Postmodernism is the abyss of nihilism, a place with nowhere further to go, and in which going only leads to more nothingness. The abyss consumes, convincing those who gaze on it that it is the truth—but it is not inescapable. We can back away from it.

Backing away from this abyss necessarily amounts to backing into meaning—and into an understanding of poetry that has existed across all cultures through all of human history. That function is to find meaning in the world through beauty—expressing the inexpressible in words. In this respect, ironically, poetry implicitly acknowledges the Postmodern doctrine of the insufficiency of language. But that has never posed an insurmountable problem until Postmodernism. All prior poetry used the language available to express as closely as it could the ideas that inspired it. As Shelley writes in his essay “A Defence of Poetry,”

A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as relates to his conceptions, time and place and number are not. The grammatical forms which express the moods of time, and the difference of persons, and the distinction of place, are convertible with respect to the highest poetry without injuring it as poetry; and the choruses of Aeschylus, and the book of Job, and Dante’s “Paradise” would afford, more than any other writings, examples of this fact, . . . .

Yet to acknowledge meaning is to reject not only Postmodernism but Modernism, too, and return to the reality that Mankind knew until just over a century ago: of fixed truths and of language and art as a means to reach it, however imperfect of means they were. As Robert Frost famously put it, poetry is “a way of remembering what it would impoverish us to forget.”

Such poetry is far from a lost art. Despite Postmodernism’s cultural dominance, the timeless tradition of poetry continues to thrive and, if anything, is receiving increased attention. Two striking examples of poets who buck the Postmodernist trend and write poetry with meaning, at least in America, are Richard Wilbur and Dana Gioia.

Richard Wilbur (1921-2017), a contemporary of Ashbery and other Postmodernists, rose to prominence and actually served as United States Poet Laureate in 1987 during the Reagan years. His poems, including the following poem from his 1987 collection New and Collected Poems, provide a refreshing antidote to contemporary Postmodernism:

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Transit

A woman I have never seen before
Steps from the darkness of her town-house door
At just that crux of time when she is made
So beautiful that she or time must fade.

What use to claim that as she tugs her gloves
A phantom heraldry of all the loves
Blares from the lintel? That the staggered sun
Forgets, in his confusion, how to run?

Still, nothing changes as her perfect feet
Clock down the walk that issues in the street,
Leaving the stations of her body there
As a whip maps the countries of the air.

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This poem describes a fleeting moment of beauty, at once ephemeral and profound—with its profundity paradoxically emphasized by its ephemerality. There is no wordplay here. The language conveys an idea, and the idea—the paradox presented—is timeless. Another striking feature is that Wilbur uses rhyme and meter to convey his idea, linking the poem to the origins of poetry in song.

Another poet writing alongside and in spite of Postmodernist poets is Dana Gioia (b. 1950), who also achieved renown, serving as Poet Laureate of California and chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts from 2003 to 2009. Importantly, Gioia has also been an advocate for poetry and poetic craft, authoring the influential 1992 book, Can Poetry Matter?

The following poem comes from Gioia’s 2016 volume 99 Poems:

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The Road

He sometimes felt that he had missed his life
By being far too busy looking for it.
Searching the distance, he often turned to find
That he had passed some milestone unaware,
And someone else was walking next to him,
First friends, then lovers, now children and a wife,
They were good company—generous, kind,
But equally bewildered to be there.

He noticed then that no one chose the way—
All seemed to drift by some collective will.
The path grew easier with each passing day,
Since it was worn and mostly sloped downhill.
The road ahead seemed hazy in the gloom.
Where was it he had meant to go, and with whom?

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First, form and tradition are respected, not mocked. Gioia unironically presents a tried-and-true Petrarchan sonnet, and uses the form according to its traditional structure: octave, followed by sestet that begins with a turn. Nor is there any wordplay: the poem uses proper grammar and syntax to relate to a subject outside of the poetic text—both anathema to the Postmodernist. Gioia describes the sensation of feeling bewildered as life “happens to” us—and presents as its turn that not only the subject but everyone feels this way: “no one chose the way.”

Anyone reading Gioia’s poem understands the sentiments he is conveying and relates to them. A Postmodernist might deconstruct the poem by exhaustively interpreting line by line and word by word, revealing micro-level inconsistencies and non sequiturs. Even so, no hyper-exhaustive reading detracts from what the reader receives from the poem and what is readily intelligible on a first reading. Any analysis that goes beyond that is mere sophistry, mired in a radical egalitarianism that presumes the validity of all meanings readable into a text, even those inconsistent with what the language in its overarching use conveys.

Not only does the clarity, simplicity, and lyricism of Wilbur’s and Gioia’s poems stand in stark contrast to the navel-gazing, smug, and ultimately pointless poems of Postmodernism, their poems treat their subjects as timeless—in strong contrast to the ephemerality of the Postmodern poems presented, all of which very much dwell “in the moment.” And there lies the deepest and most important contrast between traditional verse and Postmodern poetry.

Wilbur’s and Gioia’s transform the mundane into the timeless—achieving the “profound seriousness” theorized by Arnold—but also employ traditional form and the musicality of rhyme and meter. Tradition serves as the link with prior generations, stretching into the distant and unknown past and at the same time into an equally distant and unknown future. It is a form of ritual, a constant form in a world that otherwise changes and dies, which by its very immutability serves as a reminder of and a link to the realm of the eternal and changeless. Just as attending the changeless rites of a liturgy transports the worshipper from the grimy streets into the realm of God, treating a novel or contemporary subject in a traditional form removes it from its current time and place and places it in the realm of ideas, eternal and changeless. In this way poetry acts as a powerful mystical force that, as Shelley says, “lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar;” which “reproduces all that it represents, and the impersonations clothed in its Elysian light stand thenceforward in the minds of those who have once contemplated them, as memorials of that gentle and exalted content which extends itself over all thoughts and actions with which it coexists.”

This mystical, quasi-ritual function is poetry’s profoundest aspect, and unites Horace’s dual functions of teaching and delighting into one: the experience itself serves as a glimpse beyond the ephemeral “here” and “now.” Postmodernism—not only in poetry, but in all the arts—actively abhors such ritual significance, as it views symbols and words (which it treats as mere symbols) as nothing more than the oppressive means of power structures and therefore illegitimate. But Postmodernism—quite intentionally—offers nothing to replace the glimpse of the eternal that the human mind by its very nature craves. Thus it is perhaps the cruelest worldview of all: nothing has meaning, so we might as well play.

But ideas always have consequences, and there is little wonder that in the world dominated by Postmodernism suicide has become a pandemic and whole populations have lost the will to reproduce. It appears that civilizations self-destruct under the influence of Postmodernism in the same way that texts self-deconstruct. But the good news is that self-destruction is not inevitable, and the movement away from that abyss begins with poetry. Just as the epics of Homer used the songs of the long-lost Mycenaean world to inspire what would become Classical Greece and Dante’s Commedia Divina fused the long-lost Classical world with Christian doctrine to inspire the Renaissance, the poets of our generation, too, can take all that is good from the past and work with it in the context of the present to build a culture for the future. Bridging time in this way reconnects our world to the changeless and eternal realm of ideas, at once resolving the present crisis of meaning and inspiring new generations to creative action.

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Postmodernism Essay_Sedia

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Adam Sedia (b. 1984) lives in his native Northwest Indiana and practices law as a civil and appellate litigator. He has published four books of poetry and his poems, essays, and fiction have appeared in various literary journals. He is also a composer, and his musical works may be heard on his YouTube channel.

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30 Responses

  1. LTC Roy E. Peterson

    Adam, I look forward to thoroughly reading and responding later to your marvelous essay (marvelous and fantastic lesson from what I have read so far). What a great concept at the beginning to point out the limitations and need to return to basics and roots with the words, “destruction of destruction,” not being a viable option.

    Reply
    • LTC Roy E. Peterson

      Having read your entire missive and contemplating the strange world of modern and post-modern writings that also to me had no meaning, use, or value, what I said in my first comment has been not only solidified, but the object of my greater contempt for postmodernism. This quote was in the introduction and somewhere later in this great lesson: “Postmodernism is the abyss of nihilism, a place with nowhere further to go, and in which going only leads to more nothingness.” That is the perfect assessment and my sentiment, exactly!

      Reply
      • Adam Sedia

        Thank you! I thought it was important to understand what’s considered “mainstream” out there and what we face as poets in the present day.

  2. Daniel Kemper

    That this excellent, excellent article brought back so precisely all the headaches of my recent classes in criticism and theory testifies to its deft distillation. Nailed it. (Maybe add a note about Foucault’s avid consumption of young Tunisian boys.)

    Mohammed’s sonnet seems a bit different than the rest, but it’s still problematic, as you note, for a number of reasons. I think it unlikely to have been composed just as he describes. More likely he just wrote it out. I’d observe that the voice is pretty fake, straight outta… Stanford… in the “hood” of snow-white southern Oregon. “Foxy mama”? Really? “motheR fuckeR TuckeR”? Really? The whole thing rings flat.

    To me, it’s another case of post-modern irony destroying itself. I think traditional poetry is something that Mohammed loves but can’t admit. That’s why he had to find excuses for a sonnet, but still he had to write a sonnet. I dunno. Won’t spend too much time worrying about it.

    Personally, I don’t care about profanity as profanity. I do care about it for these reasons, though: 1. Few people have gone through sufficiently hard times to earn the right to use hard language. 2. It’s basically always stock phrases and filler. 3. It’s often not expressive of any intense feelings, it’s just a fronting, fearful pre-emptive degradation.

    In the end, Mohammed mocks African-Americans more than he does Shakespeare, but to paraphrase Auden, “[post-modernism] is a silent dog who bites his master.”

    The idea of exploring so called poetically inappropriate subject matter and tonality is unoriginal. Catholic and Protestant doctrines in different times and places would have been unpoetic, likewise sensuality of any kind in verse. It’s that flarf does it so boorishly.

    Back to the main from my side bar. An excellent distillation. No one needs a pair of five-hundred-word textbooks, just this.

    Nonetheless, inspired by your article to look flarf on Wikipedia, I found the day’s best encouragement in the opening line.

    “Flarf poetry was an avant-garde poetry movement of the early 21st century.”

    “was”

    Reply
    • Adam Sedia

      Thank you! I really thought everyone here should be aware that there is a sort of logic behind what is considered “mainstream” — a Marxist logic, but one that can be analyzed. Wikipedia’s use of the past tense is indeed encouraging, and as I mention in the essay, Postmodernism itself is becoming passé. What replaces nihilism? Further deconstruction is impossible. We have an opportunity to show that the “tried and true” remains even after the once-avant-garde has grown stale.

      Reply
  3. Elfriede Lentner

    Adam Sedia, you say that the Divine Comedy by Dante inspired the Renaissance.

    What about Plethon, who is said to have jumpstarted the Renaissance as well?

    Reply
  4. Joseph S. Salemi

    Postmodernism and its artistic exhalations will eventually choke themselves to silence, since they appeal to no audience except those who produce its artworks, and those who aspire to join that group in order to receive prestige and promotions and grant money — i.e. on-the-make academics. This circle of initiates and parasites has kept its racket going since about 1920, but at the cost (as Sedia demonstrates) of losing intelligibility, and even any sense of reality.

    I do raise an objection to Sedia’s dismissal of Hecht’s “The Dover Bitch” and Mullen’s “I Wandered Networks…” These two poems are parodies, and have nothing to do with the various poisons promoted by Olson, McCaffery, Derrida, Bernstein, and the other poseurs. Parodies are a traditional part of our poetic heritage, meant to be comic, deflationary, slapstick, and in-your-face. Even Mohammad’s takeoff of a Shakespearean sonnet can be seen this way, and all three poems cannot be understood except by readers who are already familiar with the canonical poems that stand behind them.

    I think we at the SCP value our poetic heritage and the canon of poetry that it represents. But that doesn’t mean we have to treat every poem in that canon as if it were a liturgical text that cannot be lampooned or trifled with.

    Reply
    • Evan Mantyk

      The problem with Hecht’s, Mullen’s, and Mohammad’s poems in my understanding is their over-eagerness to destroy and to jump off the edge, so to speak. There is a time for destroying and a time for building, to paraphrase Ecclesiastes, and the balance is also aesthetically pleasing and meaningful. Once you remove that the quality goes down. To put it another way, is it simply destruction for destruction’s sake and where does that lead? The result is that the meter in the first two is terrible and Mohammad’s has an idiotic title and last line. This is just badly executed poetry, parody or not.

      Reply
      • Joseph S. Salemi

        Well, parody can be done badly, just like any other poetic genre. I don’t carry a brief for Mullen’s poem or for Mohammad’s, since the former is mediocre and the latter is needlessly gross. But Hecht’s poem, regardless of its metrical irregularity, goes after the pomposity of Arnold in a cleverly satiric manner — his vague philosophizing, his fin-de-siecle emoting, his public-school lecture mode, and his plangent sexlessness are all zeroed in on and ridiculed.

        Is it destructive? Sure, why not? It’s also quite amusing, and it requires a reader who is well acquainted with the original “Dover Beach,” and who can follow that poem’s argument and allusions. In any case, we haven’t lost “Dover Beach.” It’s still in our editions of Victorian lit.

        Poets have parodied other poets’ material since ancient times. There’s even an ancient parody of Homeric style and diction in
        “The Battle of the Frogs and the Mice.” Poe’s “The Raven” has been successfully parodied, as have poems by Longfellow, Dickinson, Edgar Lee Masters, A.E. Housman, and a slew of other writers. Archibald MacLeish’s “Ars Poetica” has (by my count) been parodied thrice! Even Shakespeare’s lovely “Venus and Adonis” was parodied in 1598 by John Marston in his “The Metamorphosis of Pigmalion’s Image.”

        I hesitate to mention my own parodies of famous poems:

        “Porphyro and Madeline: The Epilogue by Byron” (a parodic addendum to Keats’ “The Eve of Saint Agnes”).

        “The Second Coming” (an erotic parody of W.B. Yeats’ poem of the same title.”

        “The Skirmishing Line” (a stylistic imitation of Rudyard Kipling’s military verse).

    • Adam Sedia

      I’ll admit: I struggled over including “The Dover Bitch” in here. I like much of Hecht’s poetry (he frequently uses rhyme and meter) and this one is regarded as a “classic,” but I decided to include it because it provides an early example of postmodernist deconstruction.

      I’m not against satire or lampooning: I’ve even done it myself now and then. But I think there’s a difference between spoof and deconstruction. Spoof pokes fun at another work to build something — usually an opposite message. Deconstruction specifically seeks to tear down a work because it denies the ability of language to convey thought and instead sees it through the Marxist lens as the result of “oppressive power structures.” Classic works of literature are a favorite target because as such they are the “most oppressive” in this hierarchical scheme.

      I think Mullen’s work much more clearly falls along these lines; Hecht’s is a much better work. But what does Hecht achieve with it? Arnold may be a stodgy Victorian and his poem highly moralizing, but why attack a century-old poem? Why punch at Arnold, who can’t punch back? It seems like an unfair fight to me. The purpose is to tear down the work without really building anything in its place or setting anything up in opposition to it. That is nihilism.

      Spoof works better if it either (1) mimics a prior work to address a present situation or (2) attacks someone who can fight back.

      Still, I appreciate that you put the time and thought into responding to my piece.

      Reply
      • Joseph S. Salemi

        Well, when we speak of “the world of letters” we mean not just those alive today, but all of its denizens going far back in time. Writers live in their works, long after their deaths. That means they are just as much fair game for criticism, satires, parodies, and lampoons as anyone still breathing.

        Hecht does not “tear down” Matthew Arnold — he simply takes the fictive situation of a man and a girl at the cliffs of Dover, and re-imagines it in terms of a different time, a different attitude, and most importantly a different social class for the female partner and for the narrative voice.

        The “The Dover Bitch” sets up the following scenario: The original speaker (Arnold) is there, in all his Victorian tedium and asexuality, but now we hear what the girl thinks. She is a simple girl, and was hoping for a romantic interlude on this getaway to Dover. But all Arnold offers her is philosophical talk, Sophoclean allusions, Weltschmerz, general pessimism, and a vague promise to “be true.”

        Of course the girl is disappointed and resentful. When you’re expecting casual sex, who wants abstractions and lecture-room gasbaggery?

        The narrative voice in Hecht’s poem is totally in sympathy with the girl, and recounts how he has treated her in similar situations. He sees her now and then for a sexual tryst, he brings her a nice bottle of perfume, and they get along just fine. They are both of the same social class, and understand each other perfectly.

        And if you think that Arnold wasn’t an asexual, highly repressed stick, just read his selection of Byron’s poetry. If it were the only edition of Byron that you knew, you’d think that Byron was a Methodist minister.

  5. Martin Rizley

    Very informative essay, Adam. As you point out, postmodernism is a self-defeating concept. If I attempt to show, through poetry, that language is mere wordplay referring to nothing beyond itself, and its conventions and structures are simply a tool for the “privileged” to maintain their power in a class struggle over the disenfranchised, then I am clearly using language to make a “statement” about the world and thereby referencing a reality that lies beyond the poem itself. I am in fact making a strongly ideological statement about reality rooted in a Marxism vision of the world that is as “meaningful” an interpretation of the world as the meanings that I seek to trash. It is sad to think human beings would waste precious time on earth producing such useless artifacts of intellectual rebellion against meaning and against language itself as an effective tool– which it is– for conveying meaning and expressing truth.

    Reply
  6. Brian A. Yapko

    Thank you for this incredibly well-written, insightful essay, Adam. I would be a liar if I said it gave me joy, but it is brilliant, thorough and has given me much to ponder in terms of the currents that much modern poetry has followed. It is especially interesting to me since I studied linguistics in college and learned a lot about language theory, language ambiguity, meaning shifts and efficacy limitations. But I think that the pretentious denial of meaning is self-sabotaging sophistry. In the real world, it is a mistake to explore the exceptions and then claim the rule has no validity. That annoys me as woke thinking in gender theory, racial theory, historical studies and it obviously exists as well in literary interpretation and creation.

    It is interesting to see the historical antecedents for postmodernism and deconstructionism. But since I greatly value tradition, structure, logic and history, I also find it unbearably sad. It reminds me of the performance art I try to avoid on satiric Youtube channels in which some naked woman with tattoos and a nose piercing flings paint in the air and catches some on her bare legs to Philip Glass music as pretentious art connoisseurs gravely applaud her and remark how she’s outdone Rembrandt. Everyone knows that is rubbish and untrue but they pretend for each others’ benefit. How I’d love to get to the bottom of why.

    In sum, while I admire what you have written and the obvious care you have put into both research and analysis, you have introduced me to a country I would just assume never visit if given the choice. One must know what’s out there, of course. One must know the poetic contrasts and cross-currents to what we strive to do here at SCP. But I almost read this as a PSA about what to avoid if I want to have a happy literary life. Rest assured I will never once again think about “The the the the the the the the the the Death (Hey Hey)”. No offense intended, but to me visiting such work is like visiting the skid row of poetry.

    Reply
    • Adam Sedia

      No offense taken, and frankly I don’t blame you for not wanting to tread into postmodernist poetry. In fact, your read of this as a PSA is spot-on: my whole point in writing this essay was to say, “I read this so you don’t have to.” I think all of us understand that being a classical poet is very much “going against the grain” — I’m just not sure all of us quite comprehend what “the grain” is. I wanted to give everyone here a basic exposure for what passes as gospel in the literary academia. A lot of this brought back memories from my own literary criticism course from 20 years ago when Derrida was still alive and all of this was still avant-garde. As I mention at the end, we’re coming out of the postmodernist phase and we have a chance now to shape the narrative. Maybe I’m unduly optimistic in this regard, but we should try our hardest if we care for our art.

      Reply
  7. Susan Jarvis Bryant

    Thank you for this thoughtful and well-written essay, Adam. It shines a much-needed spotlight on the origins of post-modern literature and its purpose. But being a huge fan of humor in poetry, I am having the same trouble as Dr. Salemi on the parody front. One of my favorite poets is the British poet, Wendy Cope. Her works have been a huge influence on me. One of the highlights of her works are her parodies of prominent literary pieces. Her “Waste Land Limericks” (summarizing the five sections of Eliot’s canonical poem) are witty, intelligent, entertaining, and appeal to many familiar with Eliot’s challenging marvel.

    Not all poetry lovers are looking at the historical and social origins of a poem. They’re seeking something other. They are readers like me – readers who look for wit, variety, striking imagery, joy etc. I favor form, but I don’t rule out any poem that is well done with an element of clever surprise.

    The sad thing is that readers who simply love to read and writers who simply love to write are finding themselves in the middle of a bitter battle that is beginning to suck all the fun out of literature. This is because people no longer have a say in truth and beauty. Snooty bought-and-paid-for know-it-alls are the arbiters of both. An example of this is John Whitworth’s poetry competition entries in the Telegraph, UK. When the readers of the newspaper judged, he won several years running. When the readers were replaced with an academic panel of judges, his winning days were over.

    I worry that this culture war will create such stark divisions and myopic views that ALL will be lost on the battlefield.

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      The Poetry Establishment in the U.K. did everything in its power to stifle and downplay the immense talent of John Whitworth. They paid no attention to his books; they did whatever they could to limit his publication in poetry journals; they discussed him only in snotty and patronizing tones; and of course he was utterly dismissed by academia. I think my review in TRINACRIA of his “Girly Gangs” was the only one he ever received here in the states.

      Susan, the same holds true for you. The hatred that dogged Whitworth is identical with the disrespect and contempt that “bought-and-paid-for-know-it-alls” show for your work.

      This is why I get very angry when people come here to the SCP and start orating about how we have to “reach out” to our free-verse enemies, and “network with them,” and “send out lines of communication to them,” and “build relationships” with them.

      Well, screw that! I’m sick of pious whining about how we have to make friends with people who treat us like dirt.

      Reply
      • Susan Jarvis Bryant

        Joe, thank you very much for this. I fully appreciate your anger. Writing poetry for the sheer joy and wonderment of rhyme and rhythm in a world that doesn’t appreciate form or fun is bloody tough. That’s why it’s so great to belong to a rare gem of a site like this.

    • Adam Sedia

      It’s interesting to see what each reader takes away from the essay. I didn’t expect the satire issue when I wrote this, but it does raise an interesting point (maybe worth exploring in a further essay). Please read my reply to Dr. Salemi’s earlier comment in which I elaborate on the difference between spoof and postmodernist deconstruction. To that I will only add that I’ve read Wendy Cope’s limericks, and what she does is not postmodernist at all. She gives a “Cliff’s Notes” version of The Waste Land in limericks, which if anything explicates the poem and pokes a friendly jab at Eliot’s opacity. She doesn’t seek to tear down the poem as a work by denying meaning or the efficacy of language. Indeed, Eliot’s work already verges on nihilism. If anything, Cope lightens it up.

      Reply
      • Susan Jarvis Bryant

        I agree with you on the clarity Cope brings to Eliot’s challenging work, but how can enlightening the uneducated reader by using a series of “Cliff Note” style of limericks to bring clarity to the obscurity of Eliot’s poem, be anything other than contentious? Cope doesn’t just “poke a friendly jab at Eliot’s opacity” – she highlights all that is problematic with his poem by simply doing this. I was polite to Eliot in my comment because I have great respect for his talent. That doesn’t mean I take all his works seriously or even like every piece he’s written, but to have one of his most influential poems explained in a series of limericks is a stroke of radical genius that’s far from mild. The thing is, the boot is on the other foot here – Eliot verges on nihilism, so Cope’s work is justified.

        It is obvious that Cope’s work is not postmodernist deconstruction. The point I’m making is, it seems from this comments section that what is a spoof to one is postmodernist deconstruction to another. I am certainly no nihilist but this quote springs to mind as I type my comment, “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.” I believe the literary world has reached a level of top-down arrogance that is in danger of crushing all future creativity.

  8. Margaret Coats

    Adam, you’ve made an effort to study and analyze what you say (quite rationally) is not worth reading or being influenced by. I agree, and I’m happy to report that my academic upbringing for the most part ignored this long-drawn-out pretense at literary criticism. Criticism itself, as opposed to what the Modern Language Association called “Theory,” has a tradition reaching back into the classical world. Its purpose was and is to recommend the good, the true, and the beautiful to readers. In particular, good literary criticism is a means of teaching how to read, and thus increasing the audience for literature, by magnifying possibilities for literary pleasure.

    Please allow me to praise two virtues, and identify two potential problems, with this essay of yours. I do not intend to trivialize the extensive scope of your work by doing so. One very important virtue is to identify Marxism as the major backdrop of all postmodernism and its disintegration. It is important to see that postmodernist speech of all kinds, either critical or poetic, derives from a political and economic perspective that may be dominant, but is inimical to the values of many. Second, it is good to understand the attack on language itself as lacking intrinsic meaning, and especially to note the attack on grammar, which claims that grammar is imposed on language for nefarious political purposes. This can have immediate practical value for poets. Whatever our own deficiencies in grammar or vocabulary, we can try to avoid errors in usage. This will contribute to the simplicity and clarity you rightly value in poetic practice.

    However, you go too far in wishing for poetry that is clear on a first reading. That eliminates the beauty to be discovered in most poetry, great or good or middling. Poems not worth a second or third reading are not worth remembering. They are, however, popular at present, because of the thrill of instant gratification. And there exists a major problem of poets objecting to any interpretation of their poems other than their own (or sometimes, objecting to any interpretation at all). Such a poet has decided language is not profound, but merely practical. And language is not a treasure common to speakers and readers, but belongs to an individual who accepts only the meaning he or she intends. That is not the material of poetic art.

    I can’t imagine that you, Adam, are guilty of such a reductionist attitude. There are points in your essay that show otherwise. But take care with that demand for quick lucidity. And please, please do NOT denigrate wordplay. Alliteration and rhyme are wordplay, and it happens on many levels, with each kind of wordplay enhancing the identity of the poem as something other than scientific prose.

    You quote Goldsmith who seems to think wordplay makes poems, “valueless works.” Therefore I think you know that “play” as a characteristic of destructive postmodernism means instead the condescending contempt for creative wordplay of the past.

    I will note as well, since you do not discuss structuralism, that it was an attempt to apply scientific method (somewhat useful in descriptive linguistics) to literature. This turned out to be pointless because science needs well defined limits in order to state or solve any problem. Language and literature have too many variables to make the scientific method useful. I will cite Robert M. Polzin’s “Biblical Structuralism” applied to the book of Job. Polzin created an elaborate critical “structure” to demonstrate a point easily discovered by intuition. Then he claimed (correctly) that the structure had no meaning or value in itself, but only insofar as it came closer to proving his obvious point. As you say about postmodernism, its methods add nothing to the understanding or appreciation of literature.

    Reply
    • Adam Sedia

      Thank you for your thoughtful comment, and you rightfully identify a point that I could have conveyed better. I did not intend to say that a poem should have a clear meaning on the first reading — enough of my own poems have 2 or even 3 possible readings to them. But I agree, I do kind of “come off” as saying that. What I really mean to say is the opposite of deconstruction: that language conveys meaning, and that good poetry conveys ideas. It constructs, rather than deconstructs. Perhaps I was a bit overzealous in making that point and overshot my target. Other sets of eyes are extremely helpful.

      Your comment also raises a point I wish I had added to the essay: in the poems of Ashbery, Bernstein, and Dinh, they assert that language has no ability to convey an idea, but they use language to convey an idea. This goes to the self-defeating nature of postmodernism I did describe.

      This essay is a reworked version of an earlier-published work, and I significantly pared down the background section. In the prior version I did discuss structuralism, but here I wanted to focus more on poetry rather than getting “in the weeds” of theory. So I appreciate your comment that “added back in” an element of the background discussion.

      Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      I think Margaret makes a very important point here. Critical theory, deconstruction, structuralism, and all of the variants that spring therefrom, are all essentially POLITICALLY MOTIVATED. They are not the thinking of anyone who loves literature for its own sake, but the thinking of ideologues whose only concern is to colonize literature, take control of the apparatus of teaching and analysis, dominate the publishing houses, and slowly eat away at the structures of Western discourse and intellectual self-defense until they collapse.

      Yes, Marxism is behind it all, but not just garden-variety Marxism. Sheer nihilism and anarchy (serving the ultimate goal of tyrannical state power) are the real driving forces. I have worked in academia all my life, and have taught in several English and Humanities departments. What hangs over all these places, like a miasmic stench, is the thick hatred and contempt many faculty have for the works that they have been hired to teach and explicate.

      Deconstruction is now out of date, but the reason is its success: now professors don’t even bother to talk about traditional or canonical works. They simply assign worthless, fourth-rate crap written by ideologized writers who share their anti-Western, anti-male, anti-heroic, anti-classical, and anti-European bigotries. And this procedure is ratified by English and Humanities departments, who vote to “de-colonize” the curriculum and to promote marginal authors who share the now-widespread politically correct viewpoints. No faculty members dare to vote against this change, lest they be ostracized and shunned.

      None of this has anything to do with literature, or even the literary sensibility. As Margaret says, it all “derives from a political and economic perspective.”

      And if you bring this point up in argument with others, they will simply reply that “Everything is political.”

      Reply
  9. James Sale

    Really enjoyed reading this essay: full of informative stuff and insights, not to mention a rather judicious selection of examples. I could comment on all of it but I am not going to; perhaps one line says all we need to know about post-modernism: Charles Bernstein’s “This line refuses reality.” As Ayn Rand once observed – to paraphrase – you can reject reality but you cannot reject the consequences of reality. And the consequences in this case are that post-modern poetry is weak at its very best, and appalling, disingenuous, meaningless most of the rest of the time. In fact, it’s not even poetry – it has fallen like the Balrog into inutterable darkness; sadly, it’s trying to take Gandalf, the poet, with it. Notice here, BTW, the ‘it’ pronoun: sometimes there is a point to ‘it’!

    Reply
    • Adam Sedia

      Thank you! I particularly appreciate your comment about the selection. I pored through hundreds of awful pieces to select the ones I thought best represented Postmodernism. That was by far the most unpalatable part of my task. You point out reality’s consequences; let me point out a downstream consequence: nobody wants to read this. Academics might to make a paper out of it, but this is not where people turn when they want to ease their minds after work. I know I would not have read these if I did not set out to write this essay.

      Reply
      • James Sale

        Yes, I do agree: nobody reads this rubbish. Sir Handy (an ex-British Laureate making a living in the USA) features in my HellWard, Canto 11, and this is my final indictment on the poetry he – and others of this ilk – write:

        The hell of it – to come round and be woke:
        That is, to find such papers in his hand,
        Crumbling to pieces from his ego’s shock,

        Discovering no-one cares, or understands
        One stanza or one line he ever wrote –
        That poets be oceans; he is a pond.

        The final proof? Poetry no-one quotes.

        We quote Alexander Pope and a lot of other poets too: but this stuff is just unquotable as well as being unreadable.

  10. Joshua C. Frank

    Thank you for this. Like Brian, I found the poems cited so disgusting that I never want to think about them again. If that’s what passes for poetry these days, no wonder it’s dying. Rather than try to fight their poems with our own, it’ll be easier to let drivel like that die of its own accord and then introduce our own classical poetry to replace it.

    Just one thing: I think the analogy of the Renaissance is flawed. The Renaissance was the beginning of the triumph of egoism, which we euphemistically call “individualism,” over the Christian values that had been the bedrock of Western culture since the early Middle Ages. Protestantism, capitalism, democracy, and Darwinism are this same “individualism” applied to different fields of knowledge: religion, economics, politics, and science, respectively. What you describe hoping for is to reverse the process, which is much harder, if it’s even possible, when the ball has been rolling the other way for over five hundred years. Man’s mind is naturally drawn to vice, thanks to Adam and Eve’s fall.

    (For more, read The Case Against the Modern World by Daniel Schwindt.)

    Reply
  11. Adam Sedia

    Ah, you did catch me. Whenever I speak of the Renaissance, it’s usually a matter of pure aesthetics. There were parts of Europe (Austria, Italy, Spain, and Portugal, for example), where the Renaissance meant only an aesthetic movement, just like the Baroque and Neoclassical times that followed. The Renaissance also produced the Counterreformation. Protestantism and especially capitalism were very English phenomena. How inseparable is the Renaissance from its consequences? That’s an interesting topic to explore.

    I know about, but have not yet read, the book you recommend. I will have to get my hands on a copy.

    Reply
  12. BDW

    A Place to Come
    by W. S. “Eel” Bericuda

    He was another northerner who traveled southward to
    its sunny easygoingness, those skies and seas of blue,
    to Key West with its orange-bright poinciana trees,
    an Indiana Adam coming to the end of these…
    United States, where Wallace Stevens sought out order’s forms,
    where Ernest Hemingway endured its hurricanic storms—
    an old man on the sea, who caught a marlin on the waves,
    and fought to keep his terseness and his sanity, in vain,
    where Robert Frost, was also lost beneath the palms and rum;
    for northern Modernists, back then, it was a place to come.

    Reply
    • Adam Sedia

      It is always flattering to see a poem written about me, let alone one that mentions me in the same stanza as Wallace Stevens, Hemingway, and Frost.

      Reply

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