What is post modern poetry?

http://karenrager.tripod.com/essays/postmodernpoetry.html

Extracts

1

Following World War II, with the bombing of Japan, the cohesive center disappeared for Americans. People began to move outward from the cities and into newly created suburbs. Women did not wish to return to the world of housekeeping after tasting the freedom of war-time employment. Minorities also felt the impact of a newly found freedom. We split the atom, the center of everything, and in so doing we created chaos. The Contemporary Poets reflect this chaos.

2

It is interesting to note that Modern Poetry laments loss and fragmentation, while Post-Modern Poetry celebrates it. There are notions of whole fragments that don’t link to any conclusion. Anne Lauderbach suggests that as our lives are made up of strings of fragments, so is post-modern poetry. Coherence is the falsehood. If we insist on neatness we will leave out something of significance – too neat is false, you experience nothing. Fragments create variety (Lauderbach).

In interpreting Modern Poetry it is not necessary to understand the poets exact meaning. It is sufficient that the reader take from a poem what they need to take, which may not be what the writer intended. But that is okay because the reader takes the feeling, they get in touch with the emotion. To paraphrase John Ashbery, “You, the reader, add the flowers to the field with your interpretation” (Mitchell). The poet creates an openness, an empty field and the reader connects with the emotion and fills the field with fragments, creating a whole. The Modern Poets are teaching us to see the world in different ways than we are used to. Readers have to learn to dance to the new music.

Finally, modern poetry creates a mythology of human psyche and culture by delving into how language works, as well as exploring subject and content. A poem is not a puzzle to be solved but an experience, an event to take part in. The modern poets created metapoems, which are poems about how poems and language operate. They have no fixed center, it is “a hymn to possibility” as John Ashbery says. The modern poet, Anne Lauderbach says, “Depart from the tune – breaking the form is the form. We explore the world through forms” (Lauderbach). By breaking traditional form and exploring the complexities of language itself, the contemporary poet embarks on an adventure of self-discovery, forging new roads into the inner workings of individuals and their societies.

Works Cited

Brooks, Gwendolyn. “a song in the front yard.” Norton Anthology of American Literature. Sixth Edition, Vol. E. Ed. Nina Baym. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003. 2780-2781.

Eliot, T.S. “The Wasteland.” Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. 2nd Edition, Ed. Ellmann, Richard and O’Clair, Robert. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998. 491-504. Lauderbach, Anne. Notes from Lauderbach’s lecture at Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Florida, 1/30/01 Mitchell, Susan. 2001. LIT 3021 Modern Poetry. Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Florida. December 2002