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| Fair Use Principles whatismetamodern.com I recommend you check out this site... |
"Metamodernism, a term first coined in 1975 by Mas’ud Zavarzadeh (as an alternative to the term Post Postmodernism), has been in the news a lot lately. It’s a word academics periodically used throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, but it’s only lately become the sort of thing regularly discussed on popular websites like 4chan, Reddit, and Twitter... So what is metamodernism?
Well, first and most importantly, you should understand that it’s a 'cultural philosophy'. This means that it’s a system for understanding the world. Sometimes the sort of understanding metamodernism offers us is a logical understanding of how and why things happen during this particular period in human history."
Shia LaBeouf's Art Performance, 'I am not famous anymore' is considered to be a cutting-edge example of Metamodernism.
"In this sense, we can see metamodernism as a “system of logic” that helps us better navigate the digital age. At other times, metamodernism helps us understand our emotional reactions to things that are happening now—both our reaction as individuals, and the reactions of whole communities and even nations—at which point we can see metamodernism as a 'structure of feeling'."
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| Fair Use Principles The Hampton Institute An enlightening article: 'Black Metamodernism' |
"Metamodernism is likely to take something you’re certain is bad and show you that it’s an opportunity to do something you never imagined before... It’s likely to say crazy things like the fact that we live in a 'post-truth' culture gives us an opportunity to instrumentalize that very culture in the service of—you guessed it—Truth."
'This Is America' by Childish Gambino is a great example of Metamodernism in music.
"Digital culture is really important to the spread of metamodernism.... The internet lets us quickly overlap and combine things to create new things in a way we never could before..."
In a sense, I believe we poets of the blogosphere have been forerunners and mainstream proponents of metamodernism, perpetuating it in our collective efforts to reach a wider audience and creating our own cultural philosophy about poetry as an art form. Thus, anything we write is already part of the movement. Seth Abramson mentions the following:
"Key terms in metamodernism are dialogue, reconstruction, collaboration, interdisciplinary and transmedia work (collaborations across academic disciplines or creative genres/modes), inter- and hyper-textuality (the creation of new texts through the interaction of existing texts), generative paradox, generative ambiguity, simultaneity, engagement rather than exhibitionism, and, more broadly, the collapsing of artificial distances between concepts and people."
In the decade in which we, as a collective of 'toads' have been writing and inspiring one another to write, have we not fulfilled all the criteria? So the prompt for today is to write a poem. That is it. Write a poem. And while writing it, be cognizant of the fact that you are the voice of a new culture of literature/art/communication and that your voice, your point of view and your philosophy of human relations, here and now, is part of something much bigger than yourself which, paradoxically, cannot exist without you.
