Is poetry relevant today?
Your first response might be no.
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Many of you are not in the habit of reading or writing poetry in your spare time. We would rather spend our time on social media than on pondering a poem.
Yet, we see snippets and elements of poetry in the world around us and rarely acknowledge it. For example, look at the caption on the image above. Frank O'Hara is a postmodern poet himself.
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And maybe the idea of "being a poet and you just don't know it" is true for most of us. How many times have you chosen a line from a poem or a quote from a poem as a caption on a photo? Or, maybe you have made up your own "poem," carefully choosing each word in a caption so it flows with rhythm, repetition or rhyme.
WELCOME
But what is "modern" and "postmodern" poetry?
Postmodern poetry is considered the experimental poetry that began to arise during the World War II era. Examples of postmodern poets include Charles Bukowski, Jack Kerouac, Frank O'Hara and Allen Ginsberg.
Since you asked, modernist poetry in general refers to poetry written between 1850-1950 in Europe and North America. According to the English poet Herbert Read, "The modern poet has no essential alliance with regular schemes of any sorts. He reserves the right to adapt his rhythm to his mood, to modulate his metre as he progresses." Examples of modernist poets include E.E. Cummings, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams.
As the video above shows, poetry transforms with us. Over the next couple of weeks, you will discover that poetry is neither outdated or irrelevant. Feel free to use our class hashtag to share any golden lines, questions or thoughts on poetry during this unit: #missupoetry