The modernization of poetry
Reading Brenda's blog entry about the plain, American language in William Carlos Williams's poems got me thinking about the effects of modernization on poetry.
Poets like WCW, Robert Frost, and their contemporaries have developed a style of poetry that uses a language much easier to understand at a glance than the language used by poets since Shakespeare. In the modern age, making things as fast as possible has started to become a cultural value, perhaps explaining the transition to language which lends itself to faster readings; and in a way, it is thanks to this shift that America has developed its own style of prose and poetry in the realm of literature.
I wonder, though, what will happen to our poetry in the future, especially considering that the "American identity" seems to be breaking down. American citizens now identify with their distant cultural heritage more readily than they do with their American heritage, in most cases. In the same way that WCW's sense of belonging to America inspired much of his poetry, there may be poets in the future whose detachment from an American national identity shows in their work.
Comments
Chris, you're describing one of the central premises of the post-coloinal approach, which sees that authors from different backgrounds who in the past might have felt it necessary to adopt to the mainstream culture (i.e. letting themselves be "colonized") in order to reach an audience have instead chosen to celebrate the multiple cultural influences on them, as well as their essential difference. James McBride, as the son of a black man and a Jewish woman, did much the same thing in The Color of Water. And you may remember Para Teresa, the bi-lingual poem from Rereading America.
Posted by: Dennis G. Jerz | February 16, 2006 12:11 PM