Poststructuralist poetry defines itself with each poem that is written. The movement slayed the formulaic and rendered itself unfettered. As for the days when poetry could be placed within an almost algebraic equation demanded by academies and universities, they are long over.
Poststructuralist poetry exists within itself like a reader enclosed within a reading nook. The words are the reader's alone to interpret. The Poststructuralist poet composes with the start-and-stop stream of realtime twenty-first century language and thought. Words and passages are referenced to the thing that is created within the poem and to the world that is crafted at the moment of composition, not to formulas constructed outside the personal experience.
Some detractors choose to call Poststructuralist words and passages arbitrary because readers, without expectations, work to grasp the world they entered upon beginning the poem. The reading process defines the context of the composition. The teacher, the mediator, the explainer, cannot. The poem itself guides with allusions and insinuation. Words may rhyme in the middle of the poem and not at the end of the poetic line. Words may rhyme, or they may not. The poem’s reader is invited to interpret the experience that is presented to them with their own feelings and interaction. The words are frequently arranged without punctuation, capitalization, or paragraph indentions. Some spacing may act as a break in the narration.
I invite you to memorize a poststructuralist poetry passage, then repeat it aloud. I find a celebration of self-sufficiency, of self rule within each one. The poet's work is exquisite in its newness, in its asymmetrical sounds, images, and lines. When you repeat Poststructuralist poems to an audience, or the mirror, you will realize that you hear similar word passages in your everyday life. They may be the sounds you hear when you walk by someone talking, hear televisions prattle while changing channels, or when you drive with the radio on and talk to several people in a car. These broken-speech passages are everyday occurrences and nothing unusual. The brain sorts through oral language and pieces the sound bites together into a whole, into a poem of life. Thus, we have the poetic poststructuralist rendering.*
--e. smith sleigh
*Hopefully, the latest edit on this blog will publish. I apologize for the mixup when this blog was originally uploaded. The final edit was not published.
Books:
. THESE THINGS ARE A ONE THING
. OUR NATURE: EXTERNAL LANDSCAPES
. THIS NATURE: INTERNAL LANDSCAPES
http://bit.ly/iionKS