The Period Style(s)

The writing's on the wall. But what does it say?

 We continue to describe, debate, etc., the period style.  Is the period style simply the “usual” poem of a time?  That doesn’t work, because then what we’ve thought of as the period styles of the past weren’t the period styles at all.  So is it the manner of the poems that get the most awards?  Also, no, as the awards of the past reveal. 

So what is it? 

Here’s Seth Abramson’s take:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/seth-abramson/july-2012-contemporary-po_b_1690087.html

“Scholars of the avant-garde warn darkly that we are suffused, in the twenty-tens, in a period style enamored with pretty rhetorical gestures, self-indulgent egotism, self-expressive melodrama, and bourgeois epiphanies. These scholars have been reading too little and too narrowly; the period style they describe was ubiquitous in the eighties and early nineties and, while now and then evident even today, has in the greater part been replaced by a dramatically divergent aesthetic sensibility.”

I kind of agree with him here.  This is the negative way to describe a large segment of the poetry that is often termed “Quietude.”  Right?  (There are more positive ways to describe it, but I’ll leave that for others to do.)  But it seems to me, from looking at the raw numbers, that this is still the most common type of poem being written today.  But again, the most common poem doesn’t mean “period style.”  Either way, we all can kind of guess who’s being talked about. 

Here’s where he gets really interesting:

“Dominant now are classically paratactic ‘implied’ lyric-narratives—employing the comma, that is, not the caesura; gesturing at story, not fetishizing it—marked by their disjunctive enjambment, eccentric juxtapositions, an absence of temporality, choked-off grammar and syntax, an indifference to the lyrical ‘I,’ and a penchant for mastering (in the neo-Modernist lineage) extremely well-said non-sense. This period style’s lyricism is all akimbo; its jagged edges and field-composition jump-cuts compose a despairing sort of postmodernist music which yesteryear’s neo-Romantics and New Formalists and post-confessionalists would hardly recognize.”

I want lists of names!  I'm kind of thinking he’s talking about John Ashbery?  Or Ashbery-like poets?  (Skipping the fact that Ashbery’s been publishing since the 1950s.)  Perhaps the poets once described as Elliptical poets?  Post-Avant? Third Way? This is something like the group that Tony Hoagland has said in the past represents the current period style.  If so, it’s a fair number of poets, and some have gotten awards and notice recently.  Here he continues:

“What's most striking about where we've come to in American poetry is just how universally this period style is well-executed, where present: of the many books not selected for review here, a clear majority exhibited a pleasing-enough competence which, while never jarringly or demonstrably idiosyncratic, nevertheless suggested to this critic that a veritable horde of our nation's younger poets, particularly those hailing from academic-institutional contexts in which a healthy one-upsmanship is now brewing, will shortly enough make us very proud indeed. A second group of younger/youngish authors has learned to dial back the period style just enough, and compound it with their own unique contributions just enough, for all those generative period-features and occasional eccentricities of concept and structure to be appreciated rather than merely noted.”

This fascinates me.  The way styles (I’m skipping the whole “period style” thing for now, because I don’t understand it.) work is that once we say things like “how universally this period style is well-executed,” and “a clear majority exhibited a pleasing-enough competence which, while never jarringly or demonstrably idiosyncratic,” about it, then it’s all over and headed for the library shelves.  And this: “A second group of younger/youngish authors has learned to dial back the period style just enough, and compound it with their own unique contributions just enough, for all those generative period-features and occasional eccentricities of concept and structure to be appreciated rather than merely noted” points our possible way to something new. 

So are we done with this style?  Is it all over?  It seems to me, in philosophy, the postmodern period and its attendant interest in relativism that has given these poets much of their energy is no longer generating much enthusiasm.  So what is?  Indeed. 

The new thing.  It’s on its way.