Back to the Future
Moving Beyond the Modernist Interlude
About 110 years ago (in America we can conveniently date it from the 1913 Armory Show), the shock troops of aesthetic Modernism blew it all up. Disgusted with third-rate late Romantics, this self-proclaimed avant-garde decreed the destruction of meter in poetry, tonality in music, depiction in painting and sculpture, and in all the arts what they derided as the banality of beauty. Instead of seeking regeneration through artistic movements within the broad framework of what had been built up and bequeathed to them over thousands of years, they decided (for reasons I don’t fully understand) that we needed to destroy everything first in order to create anew.
At this point we can declare that we’ve run the experiment and it was not a success. Four or five generations on, the “artworld” is full of third-rate late Modernists, just it was once full of third-rate late Romantics. Although they continue to pat themselves on the back for sticking it to the bourgeoisie, today’s institutionalized, bureaucratized, subsidized shock troops no longer shock. Instead, they’ve reached the end of the line: they have become banal.
I think we deserve better than a culture of banal, third-rate ugliness, don’t you?
This doesn’t mean we have to return to the banal, third-rate prettiness which preceded the Modernist revolution. That’s neither possible nor desirable, in large measure because we should have learned some valuable lessons from the Modernist experiment. Because those lessons are specific to each art form, here I’ll limit myself to the two in which I’m active: music and poetry.
As to music, I wrote about it recently so I won’t go too deep here. Suffice it to say that when the emptiness of much late Romantic music became clear, atonality (especially in the form of serialism) was not the only path forward. If we revisit that fork in the road, we can see and hear that composers like Sibelius, Bartók, Scriabin, and Ravel were scouting out different kinds of tonality rather than discarding tonality entirely. In an American context, the tonalities and rhythms of jazz represent a priceless gift that even now is far from fully explored; composers like William Grant Still, Florence Price, Mary Lou Williams, Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn, and Thelonious Monk were exemplars of creativity and insight who all on their own should be able to inspire a few hundred years of music-making! For myself, I’m intensively studying, practicing, and composing along these lines and will have much more to share in the coming years.
As to poetry, I’ll simply say this: meter matters. The measure of a meter is called a foot for a reason: it’s what makes language dance. The arbitrarily truncated lines of Modernist poems limp and hobble like some klutz who just twisted his ankle on a tennis court without a net. Such poems might look intriguing on paper the first few times you see them, but they don’t sound or sing.
Not that we want to go back to the vapid skipping of 19th century sonneteers, mind you. At its best, Modernist criticism and practice demonstrated that the poet’s craft had become flabby with unnecessary adjectives, padded lines, hackneyed metaphors, forced rhymes, and plenty of other cruft.
But between hobbling and skipping there are some striking and spectacular forms of motion and emotion: dancing, spinning, whirling, sauntering, ambling, strolling, striding (à la Art Tatum and James P. Johnson), maybe even strutting with some barbecue (as Louis Armstrong would have it). For American poetry, here too the rhythms of jazz come into play, as in the poems of Langston Hughes and other writers of the Harlem Renaissance and beyond.
Beyond American shores, one of the beauties of poetic form is that it’s a worldwide and timedeep phenomenon: dozens of languages and cultures with celebrated poetry traditions have developed unique rhythms and measures, from dactylic hexameter to iambic pentameter, from pantoum to villanelle, from sestina to sonnet, from waka to haiku, from alexandrine to chant royal, from Sapphic to Anacreontic. These forms and many more provide numerous tonalities, as it were, for poetic composition.
And that’s not even to get into styles like high, middle, and low; genres like epic, dramatic, narrative, didactic, elegiac, and lyric; and movements like Metaphysical, Romantic, Symbolist, Imagist, and yes even Modernist.
With this endless bounty to work from, it’s a shame that English-language poetry of the last hundred years has mostly narrowed to short, free-verse, confessional, lyric poems. Boring! For myself, my primary poetry project these days is an epic poem in blank verse about Pyrrho and Alexander the Great. Take that, Modernists!
