English Studies Forum

A Sentence Acting as a Litmus Test Upon the Term "Post-Postmodernism"

Norman Weinstein

            Depending upon what the stakes are politically, within those politicized academic circles where such small stakes matter, Jack Spicer’s grumble about “English department of the spirit,” then you have to wonder what comes after the truly comedic “post-postmodernism,” how far is the jargon stretched like fresh salt-water taffy, too salty to be truly satisfying as sweet, and visa versa, but you might have stopped because you think this rant, debunking, but, no, really, a test interests me, perhaps you, surely involved Louis Zukofsky, who compiled A Test of Poetry, and that “test” seems right since Zukofsky taught engineers poetry while they were enrolled in an engineering program, surely different than teaching would-be post-postmodernist writers in a MFA program, anyway, Zukofsky treats every instance of poetry historically in his anthology as something that could be tested as an engineer would test the tensile strength of a metal in a lab, now conventional English department leaders and followers, usually when they test, believe in the testing liberal arts literary people do, that is, how does my fashionable taste stack up against the fashionable taste of the reigning raining critics of this moment, some of whom ensure tenure, so there is an approval or disapproval game involved which, this being academia, faculty pretend rests upon nobler ideals, but here we are with “post-postmodernism,” which frankly doesn’t translate since I didn’t receive a phone call when “modernism” passed into “postmodernism,” and someone should have phoned since I wrote a book on Gertrude Stein, who could be as “post-postmodern” as you’d like, particularly if you read between the lines of “Stanzas in Meditation,” so someone should have called me, I’m in the book, and said, we’ve marched, one abreast, into “postmodernism,” but no one rang, so here’s my confusion, since I don’t see any of the “Language Poets” going past Stein yet, or even Zukofsky, meaning if there were a virtual atlas of contemporary literature, “modernism” might be a city on a coast where residents of this said city claim there is another city just like it in a parallel universe, but to see it you have to complete a certain graduate program in English and read Derrida in French, so to really know there’s a “post-postmodernism” you have to belong to that sect, and that sect doesn’t return my calls, perhaps because the English department of the spirit’s jargon seems thin, and not subject to rigorous testing, but suppose a test could be formulated, who would stand to gain by knowing X poem really belongs to a new emergent school of  “post-postmodernism,” has a category invention made more dimensional reading and writing, and if not, why are literary categories treated as if periodic charts of elements, suppose in formulating a test as to whether a text belongs to this or that category the text is simply an X, not X as a placeholder for a misbegotten name, as was the case of Malcolm X, just an X as an exquisite assertion of immense unknowingness, now what might comprise any why implicit in Y, and can an equals sign suggest a soul’s flickering equilibrium rising off of a page written in streaming light, every wave and particle dissonant, in tune ?