Poetry and Process:

Abstract

ONE OF THE MAJOR distinguishing traits of Modernist Poets--which has also been one of their legacies bestowed upon subsequent generations--is their interest in philosophical ideas that explore nature of an individual's relationship with external world. Even at beginning of twenty-first century, it is still difficult to avoid influence of Modernist Poets. The Modernists were first generation of poets to write in direct response to modern milieu that essentially separates us in experience from all previous eras. Their revolutions in form, subject, style, theme, and philosophy have transformed poetry from strictly metered forms and styles of previous centuries into highly solipsistic, and as Randy Malamud termed it in The Language of Modernism, difficult, confusing, obfuscatory (2) forms poetry often takes. Whether most current poets believe it or not, they still show presence of Modernists (for better and for worse) in their writing, despite pervasive application of term postmodernism. The preoccupation of some postmodernist poetry with what Paul Hoover defined in Introduction to Postmodern American Poetry as 'the death of God and author, and with oppositional strategies such as the empty sign (xxvii), is largely an intensification of modernism, in that writing still responds to modern urban culture, and that postmodernist writing still utilizes many of same techniques--juxtaposition, irony, and paradox--as modernists used. The prevailing assumption of much postmodern poetry, that poet's primary expression is one of solipsistic self-reflexivity with a tendency toward nihilism, has been a guiding literary concept for several decades. While on surface solitary nature of being a poet seems to validate many of philosophical suppositions of literary deconstructionism, I have always harbored doubts about creative possibilities of what seems to be a very narrow view of experience. It was from this impetus that I began to search for philosophical ideas that would better represent my own thinking and intuition about creative impulse and would offer a more fertile set of assumptions and ideals for creative activity. It is in work of Process Philosophers Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead in relation to concept of individual's experience of and interaction with temporality that my own hunches about nature of creativity are best represented. My proposal is a simple as this: that Bergson's and Whitehead's views of temporality are fundamental principles, and concept of essential interrelatedness of things provides basis for a much more fruitful artistic aesthetic that I am terming poetics of process, than does current deconstructive postmodern poetics. Nietzsche and Responses to External World by Modernism and Postmodernism The influence of philosophy on Modernist Poets, and particularly philosophers of late nineteenth century, is well known. As Sanford Schwartz detailed in The Matrix of Modernism, major features of modernism, abrupt juxtaposition, irony, paradox, and like (3), are not simply unmediated responses of artists to social and religious breakdown of turn of century. True, modernism is a clear response to miasma caused by shift in western society from a rural, Christian existence to an urban, secular one; rise of industrialization and its subsequent slums and robber barons, and Darwin's Theory of Evolution brought with them a wave of anxiety and skepticism would be aptly labeled alienation. Yet many of poets interpreted these phenomena as consequences of a society that had adopted nihilism discussed in work of some nineteenth and early twentieth century philosophers. Lawrence Gamache also noted in 'Toward a Definition of 'Modernism' that in shift to modernist period, there has been a progression from optimistic attempt to discover real world, studied confidently as proper object of philosophy and science and as artist's guide, to man reduced to skepticism and his own subjectivity (36). …