A few words about my aesthetic…
I’ve often been accused of having a “junk” aesthetic, or an “everything-AND-the-kitchen-sink” style. This style can be off-putting to even the most hardy of new media practitioners; it often seemed that, during the early stages of New Media Poetry, poets were using the dynamic technologies available to recreate traditional figurative poetry in this non-linear space.
Of course, I don’t believe that my work is devoid of discriminatory criteria. These art objects come out of living in a Postmodern era–a huge, raucous pastiche of an age, in which no single ideology is dominant, thus allowing the poet to slip in and out of modes of expression like salmon struggling upstream. The postmodern poet often suffers from a compulsion to irony, and who can blame her: she lives in a world of kaeidoscopic shifts, where reference breaks down in the rush of styles, dictions, and ideologies.
Now, anyone TRULY familiar with my work can also see that through it all runs a pungent strain of the Romantic. This can seem at odds with much Postmodern art; after all, doesn’t that intrinsic irony imply a certain detachment? Can love really exist among all these shattered billboards?
I believe that this is the question I’m trying to answer.
Tags: New Media Poetics, Uncategorized
May 27th, 2008 at 11:58 am
I agree with you and appreciate your direction. Too often postmodernity is seen as a fundamentallyn chaotic style with modernist, i.e. reductive, bones; I think this is connected with the strain of anti-humanism that runs through a number of thinkers, and has been taken up as if anti-humanism meant anti-human. I think a lot of us have the same tendencies towards romanticism, even if we keep it out of our work - it’s there in everyday life. For me, it’s about the onlly thing that keeps me going at this point.
I appreciate your text -
- Alan