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chapter eight
Postmodern poetry ,
avant-garde poetics
In this chapter we broaden some of the possibilities for writing poetry. In
the first half we look at strategies for writing a contemporary or post-
modern lyric. Traditionally the lyric was a short poem which expressed the
writer’s emotions, for example, about love or death. The lyric had musical
qualities—usually rhythm and rhyme—and it would also in general
address serious topics. As we will see the postmodern lyric may still be a
short poem which addresses some of these topics, but it inverts many of
the characteristics of the traditional lyric. The term postmodern lyric is
therefore somewhat tongue-in-cheek, since such a poem overturns many
of the assumptions on which the lyric was historically grounded.
In the second half we will pursue some of the possibilities for experi-
menting with different aspects of language, such as extending or resisting
metaphor; games and systems; discontinuity; lexical experimentation; the
poem as visual object; and prose poetry and ‘the new sentence’. We also
look briefly at the avant-garde poetics which accompany these strategies:
that is, ideas and theories about formal experimentation in poetry and the
political impact this generates.
These two parts of the chapter are in fact interconnected: the poems by
Denise Riley and Emma Lew are good examples of postmodern lyrics
which also employ some aspects of linguistic experimentation (particu-
larly discontinuity).