I'm just going to get a coffee to help me along with this. Before I go to get it I must say that I received a lovely email from Nonnie Augustine, poetry editor of The Linnet's Wings and they've accepted one of my poems for publication in late July this year. And I have to clean the kitchen now too.:s
Right I may have bitten off more than I can chew here. I think I am experiencing the hermeneutic circle that Heidegger wrote of in that I am having to read one thing to understand another and then having to read more again. I get a sense that being postmodern means questioning everything and taking nothing for granted. It is about skepticism and seeing the world in relation to individual experience rather than accepting any truth that claims to represent a group. It is about concrete experience. Postmodernism is highly suspicious of the modern world. I would liken it in a sense to a rebellious child?
A poem I found that is classified as postmodern (but then is it or is it just that I think it is) is thinking I think I think by Charles Bernstein:
"Postmodernism may be seen as a continuation of modernism's alienated mood and disorienting techniques and at the same time as an abandonment of its determined quest for artistic coherence in a fragmented world: in very crude terms, where a modernist artist or writer would try to wrest a meaning from the world through myth, symbol, or formal complexity, the postmodernist greets the absurd or meaningless confusion of contemporary existence with a certain numbed or flippant indifference, favouring self‐consciously ‘depthless’ works of fabulation, pastiche, bricolage, or aleatory disconnection. The term cannot usefully serve as an inclusive description of all literature since the 1950s or 1960s, but is applied selectively to those works that display most evidently the moods and formal disconnections described above. It seems to have little relevance to modern poetry, and limited application to drama outside the ‘absurdist’ tradition, but is used widely in reference to fiction, notably to the novels (or anti‐novels) and stories of Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Italo Calvino, Vladimir Nabokov, William S. Burroughs, Angela Carter, Salman Rushdie, Peter Ackroyd, Julian Barnes, Jeanette Winterson, and many of their followers."
from Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms
Lawrence Weiner
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