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The Postmodern Condition in Contemporary Poetry

[Note: I have edited this post, after a breakfast-time meeting with Charles Bernstein, today, and have therefore updated the date of the post. He and I discussed the fascinating work that Redell Olsen is doing, as in her work researching women poets. We also discussed the various ways in which American popular culture can be usefully reworked and considered, within an innovative practice. He also reminded me of the more severe strain of poetics that leans to Adorno, with Adorno's dislike of Jazz. We also discussed how comedy has long been "broken" into innovative North American poetic practice, as shown by works by Christian Bok, or, for instance, Deer Head Nation.]

According to Redell Olsen, in her thought-provoking, engaged chapter "Postmodern poetry in Britain" (from The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century English Poetry), there has been, and remains, an "important and decisive split in post-war poetry in Britain".

This split, I believe, still festers, while in America, there are moves to think beyond 20th century quarrels and divisions. As Lisa Sewell writes, in her Introduction to American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics, the poetry wars, in America, may be somewhat over, as: "the line between innovation and tradition, between experiment and expression, is no longer clear or easy to draw." She then goes on to observe that, "Innovative, materialistic practices have been absorbed by both the lyric mainstream and the multicultural poetries of identity politics: writers on either side of the ostenisble divide employ interruption, parataxis, fragmentation and disjunction."

Ostensible divide. This is a key issue, especially for "late modernist" British poets, to consider. Since at least the 1960s, the "British Poetry Revival" drew partial sustenance, and positive guidance, from American poets like Dorn and Olson, and from anthologies like Donald Allen's classic 1960 The New American Poetry. It is therefore intriguing, and even perplexing, to note that, while American poetics is beginning to accept that the demarcations between innovation and use of the lyric are ambiguous, even problematic, many of the late modernist writers currently at work in the UK seem to want to hold on to a simpler, more schematic model of poetic antagonism. In otherwords, how ostenible, for Olsen, is the divide?

At the heart of this divisive project is arguably a radical misinterpretation of what British postmodern poetry is, and who is a postmodern poet, in Britain. In America, "postmodern" poets might be those drawn from the Allen canon: Olson, O'Hara, Ginsberg - all hugely (and paradoxically) influential on the sort of poetics that Olsen valorises. Yet, instead, she chooses to typify "postmodern" as a label as safe and embedded in late capitalism and other conservative values: "the Movement poets of the 1950s are the postmodernists of twentieth-century poetry". Well, not quite. The "postmodern" linguistic turn might begin with Stevens, or Olson, or the Beats, or even the Objectivists. It seems unfair to brand postmodernism with Larkinesque qualities. It also, of course, draws a line between the American, and English, way of reading the 20th century and Modernist poetics.

One of the misreadings here is the one that simply equates "the Movement" with the "mainstream" (Olsen calls them "the Movement and its successors") - as if this monolith singlehandedly opposed innovation in poetry. As Olsen puts it: "the 1950s produced innovative hostilities to Modernism". This is true, to a degree, but what she fails to mention (by displacing the emphasis onto a decade, or a school of poetry, rather than individual poets and critics) is that, at least in Britain, there was always hostility to Modernism, even during the height of its success, and critics such as Leavis, and major journals such as Horizon, were always ambiguous, at best, with regards to how they read and evaluated the Modernist project (which was, of course, several projects, as Marjorie Perloff and Peter Nicholls have recently shown).

It is inaccurate to suggest that Larkin and his pals had all the fun knocking down Modernism in British poetry; indeed, Empson was a hero to the Movement, and Empson can hardly be said to have avoided avant-garde Modernist elements in his own poetry of the 30s (no other Modernist poet, arguably, is more difficult). Almost the entire critical apparatus (including that erected by Eliot and the New Critics) of the period contributed to opposing modernism's later stages.

Olsen's reading of postmodernism / late modernism is in danger of becoming just as culturally dismissive as the New Critics, who infamously ruled mass culture out of their realm. As Mark Jancovich writes in his recent essay, "The Southern New Critics", in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume VII: Modernism and the New Criticism, "the New Critics were attempting to establish the superiority of the pure gaze over other modes of cultural appropriation" and, a la Bourdieu, trying to claim that their definition of poetry was an essence, not a norm. For Bourdieu, as Jancovich points out, "the pure gaze is directly related to the economic situation of dominant social groups."

The serious definition of poetry (worth reading and writing) offered by Olsen as her alternative to the "monolinear" utterances of the so-called mainstream, is no less limited (perhaps mandarin) than that of the Fugitive New Critics of the 1930s and 40s - though of course different in kind. However, both she, and they, seem to be drawing an inside/outside for poetic texts of interest or significance, with those engaged with "postmodern" (or mass culture/pop cultural) texts being more out than in.

The main thing the argument disdains is mass, or popular culture, infected as it is with capitalist ideology (and I share this mistrust of capitalist entertainment product, but not the means of resistance). She quotes Drew Milne as bemoaning the "hot air balloon debates of postmodernism" in which "Madonna and Public Enemy fight it out for critical attention."

Milne seems to be expressing exasperation with how famous entertainment figures have received more critical attention, recently, from academics, interested in reading film, TV, and music product as "textuality", while seemingly marginalising, even ignoring, the rather austere "late modernist" poets of the UK and Ireland, like J.H. Prynne. This complaint is somewhat paradoxical, since Prynne, as Olsen openly indicates, represents a turn away from capitalist modes of artistic production (entertainment) in the first instance - so critics wishing to study popular culture (Madonna/Public Enemy) can hardly be blamed for selecting those "artists" who practice in such fields - i.e. pop stars.

However, something else is at issue here - a something of signal importance for how 21st century British poetry criticism will or will not falter - and the issue is not elitism, but cultural arrogance. Frankly, most people I know "enjoy" TV and radio, iPods and film. Public Enemy, for example, are extremely significant cultural figures in American music, for sociopolitical reasons that, to a degree, reflect concern with capitalism (even if they at times seem to validate as much as question it); and, Madonna, for all her many faults, is the supreme example of one sort of capitalist-feminist hybrid ("Material Girl") and can hardly be swatted away with a sneer. America, and American popular culture exists, to an extent dominates the landscape - and has done so, since 1945.

The category error is in thinking that a pure poetics of resistance is best or even possible - when, in fact, the American postmodern course was to adopt an impure gaze, that engaged with, and interogated this postmodern media minefield, often using rebarbative tactics. This impure move derives from William Carlos Williams, of course, who wanted to work with the American grain, with all its impure, unEnglish, non-canonical diction.

What is at stake is high. Olsen's essay implies that any poet who might lay claim to being postmodern now would be allied to "delusions of cultural capital and a culture industry which is intent on commodifying intellectual labour". It seems hard to know where to place Paul Hoover's Norton anthology of Postmodern poetry, in this landscape. As such, they would be generating a poetry that demands little of the reader but "passive acceptance". This is a misreading of even the most soporific forms of current mainstream entertainment, let alone lyric poetry.

Olsen's essay resists some of the more perplexing ambiguities circulating around current questions of entertainment, and digital media (including piracy), in the global arena: that is, people no longer interact with even capitalist-created cultural product passively. They mash-up and mix music - they alter it - engaged, as readers, with the text. Some of these activities (copyleft and further) can hardly be categorised as anything but anti-capitalist. It might be hard for a British linguistically innovative poet to say so, but elements of popular culture are fun, can be ironically and politically transformed by engagegement with their discourse(s) - and the use of shifting registers in innovative American poetics often relies on a knowledge of "Madonna and Public Enemy" as it were - or Spielberg and King.

In this way, a genuinely radical postmodern poetics can be located. But not easily, in the UK. For, even as a Cambridge school of austere poetics continues, one admirably, if narrowly, resistant to postmodern techno-cultural engagement (which would include a serious, intelligent response to the new digital multimedia platforms emerging, from YouTube to Google to Facebook and beyond), the so-called mainstream lyric poets of Britain, too, tend to shy away from all things popular. Peter Porter recently told me he despised all forms of pop culture, including most films and TV - and he was the head judge of this year's TS Eliot Prize! There is a near-total anxiety, in British poetry, about who owns the label "postmodern" - but worse, this complex, rich, and poetically-sustainable zone, with a deep poetic canon since the 40s (Ginsberg, O'Hara, Trinidad) - is barely engaged with now, in British poetry.

True, Armitage and Lumsden, for instance, dip their toes in. But American Postmodernism is radical, does interrogate, and offers resistance-as-fun - as with the Flarf group ("fun" perhaps in the radical, creative and stylistic sense that Welles means it in Citizen Kane). Fun (another form of play that rises in the 40s, related to often-American pop culture) for too-often serious readers of poetry in Britain, may be the last taboo. Bourdieu would, I suspect, have a field day considering how this says more about the bourgoise cultural needs of the critic, than the essential failure of fun as a category.

I would like to propose that a new attempt to engage with the tricky, ambiguous histories of British poetic modernisms be essayed, one that does not shy away from popular culture, clownishness, humour, the silly, and radical, sometimes rhetorical shifts in register (indeed tone, form, and genre too) - from high to low, from silly to serious, from sincere to artificial, from syntactically modern to lucid - indeed, that foregrounds debates about what is postmodern, in the period where, indeed, the question actually emerges: the fractured decades (sic) of 1940-1950 - with its "iron curtain" slash of 1945.

In this decade can be located a route to British postmodernism (early W.S. Graham, Lynette Roberts, Moore, George Barker) that was more or less neglected by all sides of the so-called "divide" that Olsen identifies. In fact, I would argue, it is not the 1950s that are postmodern, but the 1940s, in Britain. It isn't the period 1950-2000 only, that saw the poetry wars erupt in the UK. Indeed, it was during the war years, and just after, they came to a head.

Comments

The Editors said…
Todd,

A really interesting article, this. I agree that the schisms between the 'mainstream' and the 'avant garde' - both very 'ostensible' terms in their own right - has ruptured the critical consideration of contemporary British poetry, debasing the whole thing into an increasingly vicious war between opposing factions. I liked that you read the debate in relation to postmodernism, and postmodernism's relation to pop culture. The issue is, I think, one of isolation: considering poetry purely as poetry doesn't really answer the important questions about postmodernism, and to posit fun as one possible avenue out of this (New-New Critical) trap seems particularly liberating. We don't need another aricle on Tom Raworth and the New York school, but an article comparing him to Ian Dury might be genuinely innovative. (I'm serious about that, too: the are similarities in delivery that might allow the critic brave enough to point to similarities in content and method, too; but I digress...)

Simon Turner @ Gists and Piths
Sean Bonney said…
The reason anatogonism between radical and conservative aesthetics continue in this country is largely because there is still a real political commitment implied, and as this entails different world views no rainbow-alliance style 'healing' is really possible. Its also worth noting that most of the 'antagonism' has come from the right-wing: remember the collective heart attack the mainstream had a few years ago when Poetry Review starting timidly publishing a few of the 'radicals'.

I'm not sure how much austerity there is in radical poetry right now - there's still a few distasteful fits of pomposity to be heard, but mostly its youthful, excited, and yes, fun. But the problem with that 'fun' for you, I guess, is that it (1) engages with a non-mainstream pop-culture: underground, noisy, argumentative and not particularly interested in boring capitalist has-beens like Madonna, and (2) it is still ludicrous enough to actually be politically committed, and to believe that a real commitment does lead to divisions. That is, someone who is really on the left is not going to be able to put aside their differences with a capitalist or a fascist and sit down for cocktails, and the same goes for poetics.
Sean Bonney said…
In reply to Simon Turner: those sort of articles have been written for ages. John Wilkinson published one discussing Raworth in relation to Lee Scratch Perry a few years ago. Allen Fisher is able to cite Kurt Cobain, Guy Debord and William Blake in the same piece. Perhaps its a case of the mainstream projected its own cultural poverty on the rest of us.
Ah! Swift, see they return
O glorious the vain-winged
Uber intelligence of Olsen
Entertaining with practice
Innovative *managing editor*

she describes herself as, at least i presume it is her own blurb on the Holloway university web-page detailing her practice.

You certainly convinced me of the position, that she is a bit out the loop as regards what the actual state of play is behind the mytho-poetics of two *ostensible" factions of, lets face it, mainly academics; whose warring occurs in an entirely non-material mental theater, from which we all launch ourself into the fictional fray of an imagined readership editors, critics and the poets alike, seek to speak for as a bore with a parish.

Olsen, certainly Charles would, is suspect, concur with a creative critical mind noting a very, perhaps salient, but at least factual truth of this managing editor's poetic practice that would make any fellow critic and rival poet stop and record, that from April 200, to January 2004, Olsen advertsies in the "Selected Readings", that she read 12 times, all at academic gatherings in universities.


Now, i find this more perplexing than any of her blather, as it suggests her rhetoric is basing itself on a very narrow seam of live experience. And i know Charles would agree with me, indeed did when he and i first met as equals, spinning one another our wares in the Writers Centre in Parnell Square, several hours after Charles had made his own first appearance in the city with most practical claim to being the most innovative home for practitioners of the English language, in all forms, not least verse; that one must recite in as many spaces as one can contextualise as the nemeton or oak grove. Even a street corner anywhere in the English speaking world, can serve as stage or pulpit from which the innovative poetries Olsen claims to represent, but which the live evidence suggests is highly restricted to a subsidised, niche audience, whose own audience, is itself.


Small wonder the immense theoretical density apparent in her critical pronouncements, and you have done a marvelous job in exposing the perch on which she sits, is far from a truly authoritative one.


Indeed, i was in the throes of composing a response to the unedited version, before Charles and you hooked up, when i was alerted to a blog-piece by a one of the amateur poet-novelist hacking at the Guardian books blog, Morrison, J. An exquisite chap, testing himself, unafraid to seek the wisdom of yourself and Byrne in his quest of a career, and i immediately went there to practice, the hours spent here cooking up a response to this, acting as the silent measure which gave a weight of register when addressing Jonathan which only the way it happened could have produced, and i thankful, that commenting on a three day old blog, lead me to todays news, and upon returning here, discovered this was back on the front page.

Anyone who recites live only once every three months in a public setting i think we all know, cannot reach the higher ridges they who do it week in and out do; as Byrne, Bernstein, Swords and Swift are not the type to stand on ceremony, but four minds in the high-blown proclamation biz, seeking and advocating, love and peace..
Sean Bonney said…
Are you suggesting that we shouldn't read Adorno because he didn't like jazz? I hear he quite liked Sun Ra.
Sean Bonney said…
Dear Todd,

I wonder if you are aware how nakedly hypocritcal the changes to your blog post on 'postmodernism' are: where previously you dismissed Dell Olsen (who is in any case a far better poet than you will ever be) with a limp and patronising sneer, she is now 'thought-provoking' and 'engaged', essentially because you found out that Bernstein approves of her work. and as for your feeble little quip about Adorno - perhaps you should actually read him. the times call as much
for his 'severity' (a more knowing reading would call it 'provocation') as they do for your spurious notion of 'fun', and your laughably limited knowledge of pop culture. but I guess the connections between Adorno, jazz, punk and hilarity are beyond you.

smugly, you completely ignore the fact that there is more 'fun' to be had in radical/experimental/avant (whatever) poetry than there is in the dreary horrors of the mainstream. but then, for you, fun doesn't seem to exist outside of what you can see on the TV, or read about in the Daily Telegraph. obviously, it suits you to pretend that radical poets don't engage with pop culture, but the fact is that the only pop culture you know about - on the evidence of your blog - is absolutely mainstream, and usually quite mediocre. you obviously don't think it matters that James Bond, for example, is imperialistic, racist and very boringly misogynistic, and the only reason you can think that is because of a belief that artworks are nothing more than entertainment, which is of course a highly right-wing view. hence your own craven desire for fame, which totally replaces the desire to write a
good poem. and hence your blatant arse-licking of
anybody who you think might be helpful to your career, and the insipid patronising tones you use about anyone you've never heard of.

I do always read your blog, and have at times wondered if you are some kind of satirical fictional character. pompous, essentially dim, but in your imagination the James Bond of a poetry world that is simply too ungracious to recognise your genius. like most stupid people, you imagine that you are highly intelligent, because you cannot conceive of an awareness and perception that goes further than your own limitations.

Christian Bok, by the way, is an imbecile. he's almost as bad as you,

regards, Sean
mashed prophet said…
Came by way of this post via the Guardian Book blog. What caught my eye was the reference to mash-ups. I'm not sure that what I'm beginning to play with at http://mashedlit.blogspot.com/is involved with "radical postmodern poetics", but the idea that both pop culture and "high literature" can be appropriated to a mash-up/remix genre of writing is simply appealing in the fun that it gives through textual play and in the fun that it provides through writing practice. But for me there is also the hint of "prophetic" profundity that a mash-up might offer if and when the right texts were brought together. Another interesting piece of mash-up writing is Apocalypse of Jude (mashes Eliot, Dante and Biblical texts) at http://www.aofj.info. American writer Noah Cicero has also just published a work that remixes Chekhov.

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