Monday, November 22, 2004

Postmodern Poets When I first started thinking about Postmodernism about 10 years ago (I'd encountered it some 10-15 years earlier, but didn't really think about it), I was not terribly impressed. It seemed like the final extension of radical humanism, a destruction of the authorial voice - read God - and the eradication of certainty. I was a determined follower of Francis Schaeffer (still one of the most influential writers I've read), signed on to the "Christian worldview" (still trumpeted as giving way to various madnesses of secularity), and have derisively said many times, "Man, you can't even drive in a postmoderrn fashion." And true enough, you can't - if you take postmodernism to mean a tossing of all the rules. But about the driving thing...you really can drive pretty much wherever you see fit. Brian McLaren says modernism creates postmoderns the way childhood eventually creates teenagers. It's a sort of hormonal process: swim long enough in the fluids of modernism, and suddenly, things have changed. Postmodernism is everywhere, and just possibly, (though I didn't want it to happen), my modernist childhood is over, and I'm finding myself in the awkward stage of the budding postmodernist. Here's a great essay by the wonderful poet Scott Cairns, articulating far better than I ever could the stirrings in me I'm struggling to respond to. He is welcoming "the return of the poetic", acknowledging postmodernism's role in bringing it about. Image Unto Likeness: The Body Breathing Again "The next step...is the making of new poems..." 12:50:51 PM    comment []

© Copyright 2004 Jeff Berryman .