2130_American Lit Module 3 _Postmodern Manifestos

Postmodern Manifestos

The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company

• What is postmodernism?– the experimental aesthetic movements of the

post–World War II era– a multi-faceted engagement with modernist

aesthetics and philosophy• a rejection of modernism• a continuation of the “unfinished project” of

modernism• a self-critical reflection on modernism

From Modernism to Postmodernism


• A shift from the poem as artifact to the poem as open-ended process

• An increasing emphasis on the unconscious, accident, and chance

• A growing focus on the body, gender, and women’s experiences

• A greater sense of the poet’s personal life reflected in the poetry itself

Postmodern Poetry


• (1) the kinetics of the thing. A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it

• (2) the principle, the law which presides conspicuously over such composition

• (3) the process of the thing, how the principle can be made so to shape the energies that the form is accomplished

Charles Olson


“I went back to work and wrote a poem for [a person I was in love with]. While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born. It’s a very exciting movement . . . which puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person.”

Frank O’Hara


• “In general, I deplore the ‘confessional.’ ”

• “But now—ye gods—anything goes, and I am so sick of poems about the students’ mothers & father and sex lives and so on.”

• “I can’t bear to have anything you write tell—perhaps—what we’re really like in 1972—perhaps it’s as simple as that.”

Elizabeth Bishop


• “How does a poem resemble a walk?”– “each makes use of the whole body”– “every walk is unreproducible, as is every poem”– “each turns, one or more times, and eventually

returns”– “the motion occurs only in the body of the walker

or in the body of the words”

A. R. Ammons


• “Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.”

• “We can train ourselves to respect our feelings and to discipline (transpose) them into language that catches those feelings so that they can be shared.”

• “Poetry is not only dream or vision, it is the skeleton architecture of our lives.”

Audre Lorde


• Rejects 19th-century sociological realism and 20th-century psychological realism

• Considers history and fiction both as products of the imagination

• Questions whether literature can represent reality

• Focuses self-reflexively on language itself

Postmodern Fiction


• “Either the novel will change, or it will die.”

• “No one takes novels seriously until they become movies, which is to say that no one takes novels seriously.”

• “The novel must continually reinvent itself to remain in touch with the texture of our lives.”

Ronald Sukenick


William H. Gass


“There is a fundamental contradiction in our medium. We work with a marble of flaws. My mind is utterly unlike my body, and unless you’re an angel, so, I am certain, is yours. Poor Descartes really wrote on the problems of poets: word sense and word sound, math and mechanics, the mind and its body, can they touch? And how, pray God, can they resemble?”

William H. Gass


Hunter S. Thompson


“Hallucinations are bad enough. But after a while you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth. Most acid fanciers can handle this sort of thing.”

Hunter S. Thompson

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Postmodern Manifestos

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2130_American Lit Module 3 _Postmodern Manifestos

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