I've seen several recent articles online discussing why various writers believe modern poetry is missing something: "not as good as" ... "not for most people" ... "not what (fill in blank) likes ... " et cetera.
The "thank Lawdy" AB English degree I got in 1977 has left me with this: the answer lies in "posts." Allow me to explain what I mean (and remember, I got a C in Expository Writing, so ... .)
"Modernism" is usually cited as the creation of four men: Darwin, Marx, Einstein and Freud. The revolution in thinking contained in their best-known books swelled a sea-change in Western culture, something that dissipated after World War I -- a cultural period sometimes called "postmodernism." (OK, that's one "post.")
This cultural period produced much searching and questioning but not too many results, sort of like examining a nose from a piece of shattered sculpture and trying to decide what the rest of the statue may have looked like.
The decades that followed the Great War erupted in a massive economic boom/bust -- and its corresponding cultural inhale/exhale -- that set up the chaotic storm/struggle of World War II. The welcome Allied victory had its downside: an even more destroyed social, economic and political aftermath -- culturally known as "post-post-modernism." (That's two.)
But the spread of nuclear weapons invented during the war plunged the world into a Cold War -- resulting in a cultural hold-your-breath-and-wait-for-the-end attitude -- that lasted until the Berlin Wall fell. Another interim period began -- let's call it "Fin de Siecle Redux" (at least if your grasp of foreign languages is as crude as mine is).
The events of 9-11-01 prompted a cultural gasp, ending that last interim period and beginning yet another global conflict -- with the cultural damage spreading like the wake of a blasted deep-sea oil derrick. So, now we have "post-post-post modernism?" (That's three.) Come on! How many "post"mortems do you need to see that a cultural mindset has collapsed and vanished under the very waves of time and space it claimed to redefine?
Most of Western High Culture set sail a long time ago: biologists figured out that Darwin was right about evolution but fell short on how it works, psychologists (and fellow psychiatrists?) decided Freud was right about the existence of a subconscious mind but wrong about how to treat many of its problems, and social scientists realized economic inequity may more often result from international monetary policy than from Marx and Engels's dialectic prophecies.
Some philosophers also have gotten on board with physicists to study being itself in a new light (or a new/old light -- more on that someday: for now, let's not get tied up in some "string theory").
Most of these revisions to "modernism" apparently have passed without notice among the art traditionally seen as humanity's bellwether -- poetry. Modern poets published nowadays seem stuck in what's sometimes called a "cultural malaise" -- their own little island? Are they lost?
I'm not necessarily including the laureates of the latter 20th Century here: Heaney, Paz, Montale, et cetera (some people are just really good swimmers!). I'm more addressing The Club (discussed in a post last year I called "First Base").
I also realize what I've posted here is very generalized. It's largely summed from what I've snatched (OK -- "apprehended" if you want to get fancy about it) from lectures I've heard and books or articles I've read in college and since, so -- again -- I'm not a qualified authority on anything. At best, I chart my course measuring by the rule of my crooked thumb.
But that thumb-rule tells me a wavy crossroad lies before us, which I suppose prompts the perennial question: "Where do we go from here?" I think clues may lie in those buoyant signposts extending from the shore we left so long ago on this light-and-dark dappled (sometimes even nauseatingly wobbly) time-space checkerboard.
I believe we're looking for a tower -- one with a light in it. That's why I call this blog The Instauration. Because we may need to find new land and build a tower ourselves. Those other guys did it (see My Top Ten) in their day, and we may need to do the same.
Pomp? Probably. Or maybe moxie. Deciding which, my friends, is where you come in. I think I see something way, way over there.
Land?
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