Essays

Seeking a Transrational Contemporary Postmoderism
by Jared Smith

"Overpass"
Photo by George Kunze

Our culture is in a state of simultaneously undergoing radical expansion and reduction in human knowledge. The sum total of our knowledge is increasing, while the field of knowledge possessed by any one individual is decreasing due to specialization. This is reflected not only in institutional settings, where teams of workplace professionals combine their islands of specialized knowledge through networked electronic systems, but in literature and poetry as well. Yet poets must strive to transcend these individualized islands of information in order to achieve meaningful artistic wholeness.

Information development and exchange is so fast—and frequently imperfect in its first iterations—that it requires two kinds of rational thought processes to develop it and make it emotionally meaningful. These thought processes combine, rather than divide, nonlinear creative rationality with a more linear rationality that is required in order to adequately represent a known base from which the new creative work arises. Such a combining of thought processes, reflective of the greater changes in the world about us, is a natural outgrowth of Postmodernism. I might call it Transrational Contemporary Postmodernism. If a poet is to capture the complexity of human experience in today's world, that poet has to reflect both kinds of rational processes by which our nation is evolving.

To achieve this, I seek to illuminate the linear and historical perceptions of a body of poetry at the same level that postmodernists have previously achieved in regard to physically sensual sound and imagery. This allows an intricate interweaving of thought and impression that brings forth the organic internal rhythms that are inherent to our lives as artists and as readers. One is not restricted in this way to being "an invisible eyeball," as Emerson claimed to be, nor to reveling only in the barbaric yawp of Whitman, though it all becomes part of the eclectic mix. One incorporates the transcultural intellectualism of Eliot and Pound, enlivens it with Albert Goldbarth; involves the imagism of Stein and Monroe with the mysticism of Robert Bly and W.S. Merwin; gives increased depth to the confessional agony of the artist as seen in Denise Levertov or Charles Bukowski; rolls it together with the sexual ecstasy of the Beats, the restrained balance of Galway Kinnell, the interior landscapes of Mark Strand; and achieves a new and more powerful eclectic balance that invokes and perturbs the whole spectrum of transrational experience. Contemporary poetics are designed for this: the organic line-breaks, internal rhythms and rhymes, and alternating cadences to match alternating frames of mind.

In this way, the postmodernist view of artistic development, which has been described as a circle—where perceptions and the means to invoke them are endlessly rediscovered by each culture—becomes perhaps more like a tightly wound spiral where each generation lays out its own broad expanse of artistic endeavor so that the next generation can draw the threads tight and keep at least a fringe expanding into the unknowable.

Jared Smith has 9 volumes of poetry to date, and his Collected Works: 1972-2011, is forthcoming from NYQ Books. His web page, with links, freebies and so forth included, is at www.jaredsmith.info.