Robert Archambeau on the defining feature of modern poetry:
Après les Surrealistes, le déluge: the decades between the First Surrealist Manifesto and the present brim over with poetic language and images that cultivate the indefinite, that seek by their strange beauty to refute Dante’s assertion that the poet ought to be able to write a clear prose summary of his meaning. From the New Critical heresy of paraphrase to the midcentury American “deep image,” from the drifting syntax of John Ashbery to the elliptical juxtapositions of Anne Carson or Graham Foust, to Michael Stipe’s ambiguous lyrics (styled after Patti Smith, herself a student in the school of Baudelaire and Rimbaud) our proximate heritage consists of a thousand versions of the poetics of evocation, rather than definiteness. It is a tradition inviting us to discovery rather than educating us in dogma, and in that sense the modern poetic image is not an illustration of an idea, but something altogether different: it is an invitation to the voyage.
In this way, a poem is the very antithesis of "saying something."
Comments