When I was
a wee first semester M.A. student at Georgia Southern University I took a
course in Dante. It was rather ambitious,
I’ll admit, but at that time my intention to receive a graduate degree in
English was rather ambitious; up to that point the closest I had gotten to
utilizing that B.A. was my stellar work during nights and weekends at Barnes
and Noble. To my shock and surprise,
though, our entire first four-hour seminar class concerned NOT ONLY Dante
himself nor JUST the six phrases of Italian I had hurriedly memorized in the
week prior to the course when I learned I had misread the prerequisite language requirements. Instead, our
diminutive professor announced that we would use our study of Dante to speculate about and identify the Next Big
Thing – she explained that literature was merely a succession of historical
movements that echoed societal ones, and that “any idiot” could analyze trends
to describe the state of modern literature and its future. Well, I’m not just “any idiot.” I was stumped. I do not even remember my answer at the time,
but I think I used the words “existential,” “postmodern,” “ironical,” and
“paradigm” at a record-breaking clip.
Strangely
enough, though I cannot remember my answer to her question I remember very
clearly where it led me. Everyone else
in the class seemed to accept that an essay about the present and future of
modern literature was some kind of witty time-killing icebreaker; I, however,
was haunted by the question. So
haunted, in fact, that the existential
dilemma posed there pushed me towards the single most embarrassing
moment I
ever created as a graduate student – one week later I cornered our
professor (Ph.D. with
honors, Double Emphasis in Comparative Literature and Medieval Italian,
Michigan) with tears in my eyes to ask if literature even had a
future,
because, think about it, what role can metacognition play in a world
where
irony has become the principal method of discourse and the world had
developed
to a point where it no longer mattered if you noticed the ruminative
power of
nature because we were in a modern age where the machine THE MACHINE
rules NO WAIT
SORRY I forgot Ezra Pound already did that and Lord knows we can't
unwittingly engage the past so if we cannot trust our
society or ourselves and we have run the course on the Confessional
claptrap
and that Language crap doesn’t make sense to anyone but NOAM CRAPPING
CHOMSKY AND
IF WE USE ONLY IRONY TO TALK TO ONE ANOTHER WE NEVER SAY ANYTHING, ONLY
AN
APPROXIMATION OF THE THING (BUT WE’RE SUPPOSED TO FIND THAT ENGAGING?
HUH? REALLY?) ONLY GOD
HELP US IF WE DO NOT UNDERSTAND OUR FEEBLE ATTEMPTS AT COMMUNICATING YOU
MUST SEE PEOPLE CAN NO LONGER
UNDERSTAND ONE ANOTHER BECAUSE WE ARE TRAPPED IN TALKING MEAT COMPUTERS
LACKING TRUE DISCOURSE SUBSTITUTING WHAT WE THINK WE ARE EXPRESSING FOR
AN UNWANTED UNCHOSEN EXISTENTIAL POSTMODERN
IRONICAL PARADIGM . . . I’m sorry, what?
She interrupted me to ask if
someone in my family had recently died.
I write this in partial explanation
of my own hand wringing. Simply put, if
you ask me where contemporary American poetry (or letters) is going, I will answer
honestly. I do not know. I have absolutely no ability to predict the
Next Big Thing; I would never ever in a million years have believed that Robert
Grenier or Charles Olson would craft a poetic career.
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