Lyric Poetry in the Age of Teleculture: Issues in Contemporary American Poetics

Year 1996, Issue: 4, 89 - 99, 01.10.1996

Peter Grieco

Abstract

"The predicament of [20th century] culture," in the words of ethnologist James Clifford, is a predicament in which "reality is no longer a given, a natural, familiar environment." It is one in which "the self, cut loose from its attachments, must discover meaning where it may" 119 . Throughout much of this century, American poets have sought to "answer" this predicament, this dislocation of cultural meaning, by attempting to hear and see, and make us, readers, hear and see, our world acutely, believing that through what may be called creative acts of perception we might indeed "discover meaning" where we may. As we now approach the end of the 20th century, it is time to ask if this project has changed for poets and readers, and if so, how? Surely, the modern predicament--of rootlessness, isolation and uncertainty--has remained enmeshed in the fabric of our "post-modern" lives. Yet, American culture in the last quarter of the century has also responded in new ways; ways whose medium is the omnipresent electronic media. It is the reaction of American poets to what they generally view as the inadequacy of this telecultural response that has come to drive many of the issues in contemporary American poetics.

References

• alt.yours. Cyberchat, Word June 1995.
• Bernstein, Charles. Ms Otis Regrets. New American Writing Fall/ Winter 1995.
• -----. A Poetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.
• -----. Contents Dream: Essays 1975-1984. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon, 1986.
• Bialostosky, Don H. Wordsworth. Dialogics, and the Practice of Criticism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
• Browning, Robert. My Last Duchess and Other Poems. Toronto: Dover Publication, 1993.
• Brownstead, David. The Death of Everything They Know. Buffalo, NY: Paper Cut Press, 1992.
• Ellmann, Richard, and Robert OClair. The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. Second Edition. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1988.
• Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture: 20th century Ethnography, Literature and Art. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988.
• Federman, Raymond. The Supreme Indecision of the Writer: The 1994 Lectures in Turkey. Ankara: Department of American Culture and Literature of Hacettepe University and The Poetry/ Rare Books Collection at SUNY Buffalo, 1995.
• Holden, Jonathan. The Fate of American Poetry. Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1991.
• Janowitz, Anne. Class and Literature: The Case of Romantic Chartism. Rethinking Class: Literary Studies and Social Formations. Eds. Wai Chee Dimock and Michael T. Gilmore. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
• Meyers, John W. Myths of Socialization and of Personality. Reconstructing Individuality: Autonomy, Individuality and the Self in Western Thought. Eds. Thomas Heller et al. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986.
• Messerli, Douglas. From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Poetry 1960-1990. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1994.
• Oresick, Peter and Nicholas Coles. Working Classics: Poems on Industrial Life. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990.
• Perloff, Marjorie. Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
• Reinfeld, Linda. Language Poetry: Writing as Rescue. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1992.
• Talaricco, Ross. Spreading the Word: Poetry and the Survival of Community in America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995.
• Volosinov, V. N. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Trans. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986.