Refreshingly free of PC “niceness”.

Coincidentally, this essay deals with the same Apollonic/ Dionysian polarity I have written on recently.

And with your indulgence I would like to share my concluding remarks in that essay with you and your readers.

This was the conclusion of an essay which appears in the recently published THINK Journal (2.3):

The emphasis in these postmodern modes of poetry is on playfulness, transience and novelty, as the poet wallows in the pool of linguistic dissolution. In short, today we see the triumph of the Dionysian sparagmos, the rule of the Many, a swamp where ontology, language and meaning of the classical One are all joyously torn to shreds. In these postmodern poetries the celebration of newness becomes an end in itself. However, as Irving Babbitt put it many years ago, but in an expression which seems even more relevant today:

For the adult to maintain an exclusive Bergsonian interest in “the perpetual gushing forth of novelties” would seem to betray an inability to mature. The effect on a mature observer of an age so entirely turned from the One to the Many as that in which we are living must be that of a prodigious peripheral richness joined to a great central void.

The problem for postmodern poetries is that the majority of human beings do not enjoy living in a void of meaning and ontology. This accounts for the relative unpopularity of postmodernist poetry today (except in certain academic circles), in preference to the hip-hop or pop song, where the old ontologies still freely operate. So it would seem that the cultural stage is set for yet another swing of the polar pendulum in poetry, this time back towards a more classical mode. Or at least a mode of Romanticism (like the primal mode) that has a place for Apollo and his sense of order and meaning.

You’ve been graced with much more than a little sun and I believe that you do comprehend the common day …

Pat.