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Post modernism definition

What is a post modernism definition? Postmodernism is an attempt to rethink the cultural

landscape with theories taken from linguistics, psychiatry, continental philosophy, and left-

wing politics. Postmodernist poetry tends to be a cotery art fragmentary, solipsist and

provisional, opposed to the 'great themes of art' and indeed to saying anything definite. Thereprobably is no post modernism definition per se: anything goes. Contemporary poetry may be

visually attentive, apocalytic, tender, romantic, confessional, or whatever it pleases.

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Postmodernist techniques

To many readers, Postmodernist poetry is not poetry at all, and they are not to be persuadedby any post modernism definition. Yet its styles are simple and indeed enjoy a distinguished

ancestry. Cultivation of inward states of mind is a Symbolist legacy. Imagery drawn from a

contemporary, sometimes tawdry urban, setting derives from Modernism. Ezra Pound's

Cantos replaced stanzas with rhythmic phrasing. William Carlos William's poems ('chopped

up prose') employed everyday language, breaking lines arbitrarily for unusual effects. The

Black Mountain School phrased their lines on a natural tendency to draw breath. Concrete

poetry and experimental layouts go back to Apollinaire's Calligrammes. And so on:

Postmodernism is perhaps only a step towards a more consumerist and proletarian view of the

world.

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Postmodernist themes

As is shown more clearly in the visual arts, Postmodernism is iconoclastic, groundless,

formless and populist. What does that mean? An introduction to John Ashbery and J.H.Prynne is given in PoetryMagic's Advanced section, but you'll need to consult the

PoetryMagic Professional section for argued theory with references. Of course, you may

prefer to simply read the poetry, which you'll find in the periodicals and newspapers listed

under the Book News sidebox. Though classified simply as contemporary, you'll find many of

the poems in Electronic Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets, Light and Dust

Anthology or the magazines listed by PoetryKit and The PoetryMachine exhibit

Postmodernist techniques, even if their content can be fairly traditional.

POSTMODERNISM

Postmodernism in poetry begins with the urge to return the political, ethical, historical; toincorporate the sociological, anthropological, pyschological, psycho-historical, indeed avast gamut of social sciences and humanities material; as well as the physical and

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biological sciences into the domain of poetry. The poem to the postmodernist is anexpression of the narrative and the educative, the serious and the comic, verse andprose. In postmodernist poetry the cry of the heart, as Yeats called it, is being subjectedto the play of the mind and all the worlds complexities. This postmodernist poet alsopaints a great deal of religion and philosophy on his canvass, especially his own religio-

philosophy, the Bahai Faith. -Ron Price with thanks to Marjorie Perloff in Painterly

Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry: The Contemporaneity of Modernism, CharlesAltieri, Cambridge University Press, NY, 1989, p.381.

Constantly amalgamating disparate experiences,as if a thought was itself an event to record, amechanism of sensibility devouring life, devouringit, here, on these pages, making the visible, visible,searching for an articulation of a new plane ofunderstanding, bringing in all that reading, endless

reading, hour after hour, until your eyes could takein no more, could stand it not another minute, while

outside cold winds tore into the snow, hot sands blew

against spinifex and rain poured endlessly in the rainforest.Then came the burnout, as if the brain went on shutdown,and wandered into black-holes of darkness so intense thateven the body could not move: a rest was required. Andnow it seems the work can go on until the final hour, at last.1