Metamodern Poetry: An Introduction

Abduction, by Jesse Mockrin

 Here, at last, is the promised post on metamodern poetry--or, at least, what I think metamodern poetry is and ought to be, or at least, how I practice metamodern poetry. In other words, I'm going to present you with my theory of poetry writing. In any class on poetry writing--even in a blog of mini-lessons--one ought to know the teacher's theory of poetry. That way, you know where they are coming from, and you can make up your own mind about what you want to pay attention to and what you want to ignore in the development of your own poetry. 

There are several ideas on what "metamodernism" means, from cultural analyses to aesthetic ones. Obviously, we are more interested in the aesthetic aspects, but both are concerned with the synthesis of Modernism and Postmodernism, and with the affirmation of paradox. In aesthetics, the affirmation of paradox includes such things as bring both serious and ironic simultaneously, or in turn. 

Now, depending on what one means by "Modernism," a synthesis of Modernism with Postmodernism can mean several things. Aesthetic Modernism is typically considered to have developed in the late 19th through early 20th century. Literary Modernism can be considered to have started with any number of writers, though I would argue that its foundations are certainly in such writers as Walt Whitman (free verse), Flaubert, Dostoevsky, and Baudelaire. 

With the aesthetic Modernists, there is a self-conscious break with past forms and an infusion with the ideas of people like Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx. However, there is another kind of Modernism, which starts much earlier, with the work of Descartes, and which has its origins in the Renaissance (which itself created a break with the past, with Medieval culture). This era comes to an end with the ideas of Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, who are the fathers of Postmodern culture, which can be considered to have begun (in my mind) at the same time as Aesthetic Modernism. 

Meanwhile, what we consider to be Aesthetic Postmodernism began in the 1960s with the advent of pop art in the visual arts and in literature (with Don Barthelme, who is often considered the father of postmodern literature). Postmodern art tends to be fragmented, and gradually became academic art, dominated by university artists and writers. Postmodern art gave us and is the product of the creative writing class at our universities. 

Metamodernism in both cases is an attempted synthesis of Modernism and Postmodernism. However, an Aesthetic Metamodernism that only embraces and synthesizes (in an atonal fashion, without full synthesis of either) Aesthetic Modernism and Postmodernism is going to be different than one that embraces and synthesizes (again, agonally) Cultural Modernism and Postmodernism. After all, the literature of Cultural Modernism included Enlightenment literature, Romantism, Neo-Classicism, Realism, and Naturalism, while Cultural Postmodernism includes Aesthetic Modernism and Postmodernism. 

For my money, I think that Aesthetic Metamodernism ought to include influence from all of the movements within both Cultural Modernism and Cultural Postmodernism. A consequence of this is that I fully embrace all of the formalism used in the literatures of the Enlightenment, Romanticism, Neo-Classicism, Realism, and Naturalism as well as the aesthetic discoveries made by the Modernists and Postmodernists of the past 150 years or so. It makes little sense to me to only embrace Aesthetic Modernism and Postmodernism, as there is much more continuity between them than the Cultural versions. 

Indeed, I would argue that Aesthetic Postmodernism is the "normal art" of Aesthetic Modernism. Here, I'm using Thomas Kuhn's paradigm theory and applying it to the arts. Aesthetic Modernism was a paradigm shift, but Postmodernism wasn't. Postmodernism was merely a fine-tooth development of all that Modernism had discovered in the aesthetic realm. This had happened, too, with the Academic Art of the 19th Century, where the Academic Artists merely covered the same ground as the Renaissance, Baroque, and Rococo periods, and whatever they developed was well within that paradigm. Postmodern art, too, does the same thing--and it's even more properly called "Academic Art" due to its almost exclusive presence in our Universities and by those trained in our Universities. 

If Metamodernism is to be a new paradigm shift, it will have to do something revolutionary in relation to the Aesthetic Modernism/Postmodernism that runs through Cultural Postmodernism. 

What will that look like? I have a few suggestions. While such wonderful novelists as Dave Eggers, Michael Chabon, and Jonathan Franzen are now considered Metamodernists, from the standpoint of their being part of the New Sincerity, I have to wonder if they are truly revolutionary. Perhaps closer to what I'm talking about are writers like Zadie Smith, Haruki Murakami, and Frederick Turner, who synthesize the Modern with the Postmodern, and their own cultures with others. Further, Turner writes sci-fi epic poetry, which synthesizes a more ancient form with a more contemporary one. 

My own version of Metamodernism looks more like Frederick Turner's, as he describes his aesthetics in his nonfiction books, Natural Classicism*, Beauty*, and The Culture of Hope*. In other words, a synthesis of Postmodernism, Modernism, Medievalist literature, and ancient literature, as well as not just the West, but cultures across the world, from (ancient to contemporary) China and Japan to India and Iran, Mali and Nigeria, the Americas, and throughout the world. This would include a recognition that there's no such thing as an "African culture," for example (an idea which is the ultimate kind of kitsch), but rather that there are hundreds of different cultures across Africa, about which we should all learn something, and whose literatures we ought to be reading just as much as we ought to be reading the works of the ancient Greeks and Romans. In other words, in Turner's formulation, we ought to embrace a "natural classicism."

If you were to embrace natural classical metamodernism, what kinds of poetry do you think you would produce?