Saved Comments by Bernie
星期二 九月 15, 2009 9:48 pm
one trick to reading any poem is to make creative associations---especially more modern poems thought of as "post modern."
Ian Sansom in the Guardian on Muldoon…
"...postmodernism contents itself with allusion rather than conclusion,
Muldoon has an urge to encapsulate history. In an earlier long (very long) poem called ''Madoc: A Mystery'' he brought together the chronology of Western philosophy, the Lewis and Clark expedition, and the adventurous fantasies of Robert Southey (author of an unread epic entitled ''Madoc'') and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. ''Black Horse'' takes just such a flier at the universe, requiring readers not only to be light on their feet but to know about trebuckets and white-lipped peccaries. (A trebucket is a medieval catapult for hurling huge stones at an enemy. A peccary is a piglike animal with three toes on the hind feet, impure and ineligible to be eaten by Jews.) The dictionary will help, but for some of the allusions in this poem you'll need that university library...."
post-modernism assumes the reader has a vast and an eclectic reading and lifestyle---
books, poems, history, psychology, geography-travel, romance, medicine, culinary, political....
rigorous, huh?
your poems are post-romantic---love stories that not only end unhappily --- gothic and romantic---but love stories where the characters know they are doomed---the knowledge makes them post-romantic. that's why Dover Beach is the first post-modern poem---the speaker is so self-aware---