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

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¡Xpoem:

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¡KThe adequation of
thing and sign has lapsed with the realization of the arbitrary condition of language. (M 43)

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:

1. The central tenet of modernism, as propounded by Clement Greenberg, is that no text

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)

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¡Kthe recognition that a poem or painting or performance text is a made
thing¡Xcontrived, constructed, chosen¡Xand that its reading is also a construction on the
part of its audience. (M 45)

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

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¡Xand as

easily lifted from¡Xexistence. (C 17)

4. Procedural works are typified by the recurrence of elements and a centripetal force that

1. Prototype¡XWilliam Carlos Williams¡¦ Spring and All (1923)¡Xconsists of twenty-seven

argument that poetry be ¡§new form dealt with as a reality in itself.¡¨ ¡Kthe series

distinguishes itself from the neoromantic sequence principally because it forgoes the

linear, thematic development of that form¡K 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 its

They function as ¡§an arrangement of mobile, substitutive parts, whose combination

produces meaning, or more generally a new object.¡¨ The serial form is thus based on the

complex and multifarious means by which , as Rovert Creeley points out, one thing finds

its place with another. (C 21)

3. The serial form in poetry is one of ¡§those works,¡¨ as Barthes puts it, ¡§whose fabrication,

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.

1. The ability of procedural forms to sustain their own momentum derives from their relationship to the "paradigmatic consciousness." ¡K 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 ¡K 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)

1. Objectivism

1. The Objectivist poetics pays an acute attention to particulars and details¡Xthe 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.

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?