The Writing Experiment by Hazel Smith

running off with the money

and faking our own deaths.

Will technology make me remote?

I don’t know where I am,

I never know what’s going to happen.

Everything is quiet,

stunned yet animated,

evolving yet wilting.

If I want to read a newspaper,

I reach out for it with my hand.

Funny how you’ve taken my theory

and decided to call it your own.

They will be making snow tonight;

it will be beautiful and we can afford it.

Come quickly,

by yourself,

bring the negatives.

‘Holes and Stars’ (Lew 1997, p. 5)

The disorientation is most potent in the lines, ‘I don’t know where I am,
I never know what’s going to happen’. But a set of disorientated scenarios
and unanswered questions stalk the poem: is this someone recovering
from an attack of amnesia; how does this relate to the faked deaths; who is
making snow?
However, the postmodern lyric may also move sharply between differ-
ent voices and registers. In ‘The Klupzy Girl’, by American poet Charles
Bernstein, a number of alternative voices are adopted which convey differ-
ent positions in the power hierarchy, as in the following extract:

Example 8.6

If we are

not to be phrasemongers, we must

sit down and take the steps that will

give these policies life. I fumbled clumsily

with the others—the evocations, explanations,

glossings of “reality” seemed like stretching

it to cover ground rather than make

or name or push something through.

‘‘But the most beautiful

of all doubts is when the downtrodden

Postmodern poetry, avant-garde poetics 163