Salty Pleasures

When people complain about ‘postmodernism’ in poetry, they are usually, for all their talk of form and technique, strangely indifferent to its intense aestheticism. The disruptions of syntax, use of indeterminacy, tonal disjunctions, obtruse formalism, and intertextuality are types of decorativeness, instruments of ornamentation. For all that Language poets and others press their political case, pleasure is the guilty secret of postmodern poetry.