Dear Chris,
I strikes me that the chronotope of the city is different from the
chronotope of the country? This is expressed in the speed of wok, of sports,
of leisure. Especially worth noting is the way the last interval of any
process gets dealt with. In the urban chrontope, which is the chronotope of
business, there is often this tendency to divive the last interval of the
operation into smaller slices, each with some sort of extenuation. In the
rural, the chronotope is divided into acts which are separated by ad hoc
meetings. Having said this, insofar as we are speaking of urban poetry
becoming postmetropolitan, I think one would have to ask whether the new
ratio of the senses re: the internet is having any impact on the chronotope
of the poetry? My feeling is not much. The reason for this being that poetry
(I mean Australian poetry) has never really adopted the urban chronotope to
start with, and has tended to retain the chronotope of the *walk in the
lakes district*. In this we are confronted with the semiautonomous nature of
poetry, suffused as it is, by genre?
It seems to me (often) that "postmodern" (if it has any meaning at all, and
is not merely employed [badly] in some attempt to differentiate the new from
the old, by means of some half-baked notion of style) has something to do
with:
1. Being comfortable with "progress" in a way T.S. Eliot was not.
2. Feeling comfortable with a certain self-referentiality in a way
T.S.Elioit was not (for the high modernists of English verse this
self-referentiality was emergent and still something of a crisis).
These "anxietities" of poetry have never impacted much on the chronotope of
the verse. Neither have the "concerns" or "themes" of poems had any
remarkable impact in that regard.
So my short answer would be, poetry cannot be post-urban because it has
never been particularly urban to begin with. I'm speaking here of poetry in
English.
:) Chris
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