“I keep wondering if we can find a broader cultural explanation for the contemporary attraction to dissociation. Perhaps one reason is in our current, deeply ambivalent relation to knowledge itself.
We have yielded so much authority to so many agencies, in so many directions, that we are nauseous. When we go to a doctor we entrust ourselves to his or her care blindly. When we see bombs falling on television, we assume someone else is supervising. We allow “experts” and “leaders” to make decisions for us because we already possess more data than we can manage and, at the same time, we are aware that we don’t know enough to make smart choices. Forced by circumstances into this yielding of control, we are deeply anxious about our ignorance and vulnerability. It is no wonder that we have a passive-aggressive, somewhat resentful relation to meaning itself. In this light, the refusal to cooperate with conventions of sense-making seems like—and is—an authentic act of political, even metaphysical protest; the refusal to conform to a grammar of experience which is being debased by all-powerful public systems. This refusal was, we recall, one of the original premises of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry.
But when we push order away, when we celebrate its unattainability, when our only subject matter becomes instability itself, when we consider artful dyslexia and disarrangement as a self-gratifying end in itself, we give away one of poetry’s most fundamental reasons for existing: the individual power to locate and assert value.”
Tony Hoagland, “Fear of Narrative and the Skittery Poem of Our Moment” from Poetry magazine, March 2006
Poetry is always related to—and a reflection of—the changing world. I think of T.S. Eliot abandoning regular meter and rhyme to reflect the complete upheaval of Modernism to today’s “skittery” poetry reflecting the inability to know anything, or to feel progress and completion. I wonder how this “skittery” poetry will play out, and what will come next.
-R
