Introduction

Abstract

I have called this book The Poetry of Postmodernity. The situational term “postmodernity” signals a residual suspicion of the word “postmodernism” — and of its necessary relevance to poetry of the recent era. Nevertheless, I accept that the concept of the postmodern is now well established and the poetry I shall discuss has been largely chosen for the way it negotiates issues said to be characteristic of the postmodern situation and its aesthetic. Much of the point of the book (what some critics might call its “intervention”) is that little has been written about poetry itself in a postmodern context. Much has been written about a new cultural phenomenon (variously dated in the period since the Second World War).¹ Much has also now been published concerning post-modernist architecture, film, fiction, video, performance and even music.² There is a frequently cited text entitled A Poetics of Postmodernism³ which scarcely alludes to actual poetry, poems or poets at all. Indeed, most recent literary uses of the concept have applied it, almost exclusively, to novelistic output over the last few years. Yet if we really inhabit a “condition”⁴ of postmodernity, it must surely, somehow, have manifested itself in British and American poetry too. “Artists are the antennae of the race” Ezra Pound asserted, thinking primarily of poetry: my book attempts to test that aphorism as it applies to selected samples of poetry written in the era termed postmodern.