Postmodern poetics respond to the condition of the world. In an age of instant telecommunications and metropolitan life, the postmodern serial and procedural forms attempt to accommodate the overwhelming diversity of messages and the lapse of a grand order that is replaced by an arbitrary personal order.

I. Language

A.  In postmodern poetics, there is a paradigmatic shift from the idea that language is
transparent to the disclosure of its physicality, its intimacy, its obdurate persistence, and its paradoxical fragility. (M 43)

B. Reader—poem:

The reader's position is contingent upon the poem and the poem's existence hinges upon the reader and the varieties of knowledge the reader brings to the poem…The adequation of thing and sign has lapsed with the realization of the arbitrary condition of language. (M 43)

[top]

II. Self

A. Contemporary poetry:

1. Contemporary poetry positions its perspectives from a persona (who is often autobiographic) within a defined narrative structure.
2. Contemporary poetry avoids self-criticism and establishes itself as a singled unified voice. (M 48)

B. Postmodern poetry:

[top]

III. Modernism

A. The central tenet of modernism, as propounded by Clement Greenberg, is that no textexists outside and beyond itself. (M 44)

B. There is a desire for organization coherence, a focus of locale, a central narrative persona, and unifying themes are present.(M 48)

C. In modern works, there is the interruption of poems by pose arrangements, but the modernism prose fragments imply a cultural community or artifacts constituting a whole. (M 48)

[top]

IV. Postmodernism

A. Postmodern world

1. It presents a technological person divorced from an environment that he gamely attempts to "manage" or "condition."  Postmodern form responds to the conditions of the modern world. (C 16)
    
2. Postmodern world is aware of what has generally been perceived as the lapse of
   governing orders in our existence. The postmodern artist has little confidence in
   suprahuman orders, and she will readily concede that whatever order may be apparent in the world is largely a projection of the human mind. (C 17)
    
3. The universe is ineffable. We are that much more inclined to disbelieve the fictions of its coherence. (C 17)

1. Working through such modes as appropriation, synthesis, recombination, mutation and generation, postmodern poetics expresses a commitment to the dialogical, social world. (M 44)

2. Postmodern art constitutes a significant and deliberate break with the "spatial form" of modernism in its paradoxical use of self-conscious art, not to separate itself from, but to refer to and engage the dominant discourse of hegemony. (M 44)

3. The abandonment by science of a unidirectional system of causation for a multidirectional field of possibilities encourages a corresponding shift in the arts from closed to open forms. (C 19)

C. Postmodern poetics

1. Despite its frequent recourse to a renewed formalism, postmodern poetry rejects the notion of an autonomous poem, self, or culture; while truth or identity can not be anchored, the poem offers through its very inception the possibility of transformation. (M 43).

3. Artifice is…the recognition that a poem or painting or performance text is a made
thing—contrived, constructed, chosen—and that its reading is also a construction on the part of its audience. (M 45)

[top]

V. General concepts of serial and procedural forms

A. Serial form

1. Poets such as Creeley, Opeen, and Spicer have discerned a serial order that is "protean" and provisional. It incorporates random occurrences without succumbing to formlessness. (C 11)
2. In a "protean" order the poet as Menelaus struggles to capture the incessantly changing, fluid, and contiguous phenomena as they occur. (C 11)
3. Poets tend to make "a quick graph" of the acknowledged disorder as it occurs. Seriality is a somewhat desultory topological map of the "ground" of existence. (C 17)
4. Serial works are characterized by the discontinuity of their elements and the centrifugal force identified with an "open" aesthetic. (C 42)

1. Poets such as Ashbery, Mathews, and Cage have entertained a procedural order that is "proteinic" and predetermined. It employs arbitrary constrains to generate the content of the poem instead of merely containing it, as in traditional fixed forms.
2. In a "proteinic" order the poet initiates an encoded structure or network that builds on itself, replicates with variation, and produces the text. (C11-12)
3. Poets enlist an admittedly arbitrary and personal order as mediation between the mind and its environs. Proceduralism produces a grid transparently superimposed on—and as easily lifted from—existence. (C 17)
4. Procedural works are typified by the recurrence of elements and a centripetal force that promises a self-sustaining momentum. (C 42)

[top]

VI. Serial form

1. Prototype—William Carlos Williams' Spring and All (1923)—consists of twenty-seven numbered, untitled poems interspersed with prose arguments. Williams's demand in one argument that poetry be "new form dealt with as a reality in itself." …the series distinguishes itself from the neoromantic sequence principally because it forgoes the linear, thematic development of that form… Williams's book can be considered the prototype for those poems whose form is both discontinuous and capable of recombination. (C 20)

B. General characteristics

1.The open form of the poetic series is defined by its limitless set of relations; it takes itshape from the diverse ways in which items come together. (C 15)

3. The serial form in poetry is one of "those works," as Barthes puts it, "whose fabrication, by arrangement of discontinuous and mobile elements-or their resistance to a determinate order. (C 21)

1. The series does not aspire to the encompassment of the epic; nor does it allow for the reduction of its materials to the isolated perfection of the single lyric. The series demands neither summation nor exclusion. It is instead a combinative form whose arrangements admit a variegated set of materials. (C 21)
2. The series is an open form in large part because it does not require the "mechanic" imposition of an external organization. It is not, however, an "organic" form. (C 22)
3. In a series the reader is encouraged to select any of these "passages" as an entrance. (C23)

VII. Procedural form

1. The ability of procedural forms to sustain their own momentum derives from their relationship to the "paradigmatic consciousness." … It sees the sign in its "profile" and thus pays particular attention to the formal relations of signs and to the regular constraints of a work. It is attention to the system. (C 41) One is caught, forced to move in the direction that the form dictates. (C 42)
2. A procedural form is "closed" by virtue of its entirely predetermined structure. It is not dictated by tradition, but assembled as a set of choices that can be disassembled or reconstituted according to the poet’s assessment of their effectiveness. Form is not "endowed" by some suprahuman or historical authority, but "fabricated" with an emphasis on displaying the poet's artifice. It asserts the very arbitrary system of organization … It claims the devolution of intellectual authority to personal decision. (C15)
3. The procedural form is a generative structure that constrains the poet to encounter and examine that which he or she does not immediately fathom, the uncertainties and incomprehensibilities of an expanding universe in which there can be no singular impositions. (C16)

[top]

VIII. Lorine Niedecker's finite serial form: "Lake Superior"

1. Objectivism

1. The Objectivist poetics pays an acute attention to particulars and details—the hard, clear

1. Cyclical form
    
   1. "Lake Superior" is a series whose individual poem deserves a certain degree of autonomy. They are not to be stacked on top of one another as if they are stanzas of a single continuous poem. Niedecker seeks to express not a single chain of cause and effect but an "awareness of everything influencing everything" by stressing the autonomy of the poems which form a cyclical structure.
       
   2. Every living thing once was stone, and the living will turn to stone again. On this cycle of the organic and inorganic, minerals and stone are the recurrent figures in the series, as they are in nature. Within the cycle of stone-leaf-stone, the recurrent thing does not extinguish itself or encounter a full stop, but returns in a new and separate environment.
       
   3. Niedecker had eliminated the Roman numberals which order the poems in the original arrangement. Her spare use of punctuation throughout the series also reinforces this concept of an endless cycle: there are no full stops, no periods.

[top]

Questions:

1. Does postmodern poetics break completely from modern and the Coleridgean theory of organic form?
2. How does postmodern poetics correspond with theory of postmodern fiction?

References

Conte, Joseph M. Unending Design: the Form of Postmodern Poetry. Introduction.
McCorkle, James. "The Inscription of Postmodernism in Poetry"

(external) Literary Criticism Databank: Postmodernism and Urban Space ;
Postmodern Theories and Texts