I think that this statement, said in the midst of a glowing review of Rae Armantrout's book "Versed", the most recent Pulitzer Prize for Poetry winner, is really emblematic of the state of poetry as a whole. When you read criticism of these heavy-hitters in the Language poet scene, guys like Ron Silliman, Bob Perelman, Barrett Watten; hiding in amongst the density and obscurity of the text are little postmod buzzwords: "deconstruction," "synchronic/diachronic," and of course the much loved and lamented "death of the author." You don't even have to delve into their own works on the topic of aesthetics and form to get this much. It's all there, all around.
The idea central to all of this, of course, is the destruction of the lyric/confessional model that grew out of Auden and Eliot into Plath, Lowell, Hughes, and Merrill. It's deeply rooted in poststructuralist/postmod philosophy, in the tradition of Barthes, De Man, and Derrida, and basically seeks to rupture our notions of subject/object and the relationship between the signifier and signified. It asks, well, what the fuck is a sentence exactly? and then proceeds to answer: "Whatever/the hell the hell the hell/reassembling/reconstituting/I/feel like it is." Of course, all these are important points, and poetry sometimes must be the first line of philosophy. Especially if speech is viewed as a restrictive, controlling tool; then, of course, you destroy the construct from the bottom-up with speech acts that in no way fit the pattern we unconsciously want to generate. There is something to be said for this, the so-called "desedimentation" and reassembling of poetic tools; since much art in bygone years, and much schlock art today, follows these closely prescribed grammars of unfolding; which is why my father always knows how a movie is going to end halfway through. With that said, however, I am mostly indebted to postmod-influenced art in two ways: a) it challenged the notion of what exactly "is" poetry, and left me free to do whatever strikes my expansive fancy, and b) it undertook this huge program of destruction of language and form thirty years ago precisely so that I wouldn't have to do it today.
Now, it's interesting, that one of their famous theses back in the heyday (to go along with I HATE SPEECH) was the "Death of the Author." It was called the great revelation of the 20th century, just as Neitzsche's "Death of God" was of the 19th. This spawned a whole plethora of collectivist ideology; where these guys write as if anyone could have written it. By this I mean they are the gradual change from Husserl and phenomenology (that the basic unit of everything is YOU and what YOU experience) through structuralism to the postmod world where we are all somewhat interchangeable parts molded and shaped by culture. It isn't you playing with that Barbie doll, it's everyone; it isn't you writing about elms and chokecherries, it's everyone. I guess you could draw a parallel to the cinema world trying to do away with the notion of the "auteur," the other, the director, and seeing film as a product of an ant colony of people from the gaffer to the producer. Well, I'm sorry, I didn't go see Shutter Island because of the sound check guy, or even because of Leonardo or Ben Kingsley, I went and saw it because I like Scorcese. And I humor myself that I can tell the stylistic flourishes that is in all Scorcese's work from Mean Streets on up; his imprint, as it were. What is obviously hilarious about all this dwells in the fact that, as Language poetry has become the entrenched school in academia, Rae Armantrout, who has become widely recognized as probably the best original Language poet (and not just in terms of her awards), is also the most lyrical, confessional, and author-ly. Her work is heavy on juxtaposition, of course, but we feel as readers that it's juxtaposition without the conceit of establishing nothing. It is the juxtaposition of what is going on in her senses and her internal world, and as we read, we constantly grope through the layers of incidence and symbol to find the grand structure and meaning (even if it be an ambiguous, questioning meaning) that we are sure is always there.
I want to reprint a poem from Versed for you here, the poem "Locality," to demonstrate my little rant, but it is of course copyrighted and I'm not going to infringe on the meager money one of my personal favorite living poets can scrape from her intellectual property. Oh, I'd also like to say that this is not finished, world of postmodernism; I have just reached a limit for manageable and easily-digested information. I will tilt my lance at your windmills again!
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