If you've been watching Late Night with Stephen Colbert recently, you've been inundated by a good deal of experimental poetry. That's because Colbert, long considered a "metamodern" performer by the American literati, reads experimental metamodern poetry to his late-night audience most nights. That he doesn't call it that makes his popularization of avant-garde verse no less shocking a development.
The term "metamodernism" was coined by an American professor in 1975 to describe literature that seamlessly combines opposite qualities -- for instance, sincerity and irony, high art and low art, competence and incompetence, optimism and cynicism, or Life and Art -- and does so in a way that makes it impossible for readers to know how to take it.
While the term is frequently applied to David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest and the generation of "alt-lit" it inspired, in poetry metamodernism has both taken longer to manifest and been decidedly less mainstream when it has.
In the same way that forward-looking high school English teachers in the 1990s and 2000s often told their students that some rap music can credibly be considered poetry, in this decade teachers are realizing that certain social media texts -- carefully framed, reframed, or remixed -- carry all the hallmarks of experimental writing. For instance, the "bad kids' jokes" Stephen Colbert and Sarah Silverman recently read aloud on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (see video below) would be considered metamodern art by avant-gardists because it is unclear whether they are funny or not, and why; whether they were intended by Colbert to be funny or painfully bad; whether there is a genius in their incompetence that could not be captured by a "competent" comic; and whether appreciating the strange humor of children is a cynical act or one that honors the unique logic of a still-forming human brain.
A 2014 call by the Comedy Central program @midnight with Chris Hardwick for viewers to tweet hypothetical names for "sad toys" ended up in my own metamodern poetry collection Metamericana as a curated poem entitled "#sadtoys", and in fact this sort of exchange between pop culture and the avant-garde has become commonplace. Timeout London has now published its popular #wordonthestreet feature -- which collects the strangest things real people have been overheard saying in London, much like the historical avant-gardist Guillaume Apollinaire did in his famous 1914 poem "Lundi rue Christine"--as a book that can only be classified as contemporary metamodern poetry.
Juxtapositions of Life and Art, presented as Art, may be nothing new, but their ubiquity in not just popular culture but contemporary experimental writing is. Consider Selected Tweets, a book exclusively comprising hundreds of actual tweets by poets Tao Lin and Mira Gonzalez. Are these tweets cynical reproductions of contemporary social media practice, satirically compiled in a single volume? Or are they sincere reflections of two young Americans' lived experience, expressed via what is presently the most popular forum for such experience? Is a tweet "a slice of Life," or is it simply the building-block for our own (or someone else's) experimental art?
More recently, the poet Robin Coste Lewis explored a now-popular trend, "literary remixing", in her book Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems. The poetry collection, now nominated for the 2015 National Book Award, features a self-expressive epic poem comprised entirely of "titles, catalog entries, and exhibit descriptions" written by people other than Lewis. If snippets of "found text" are increasingly being reframed by comedians like Stephen Colbert (and, before him, Jay Leno, with his newspaper-clipping "Headlines" bit) as thought- and laugh-provoking comedy, literary artists are now using such blocks of Internet data to express not just themselves but their sense of themselves as multiply-souled.
The question now is not whether "literary remixes" and other self-expressive but concept-driven reframings of existing texts are commonplace, but whether the nation will have the same conversation about these cultural setpieces that it had about innovative rap lyrics in the 1990s and 2000s. Moreover, given that we can find the same sort of metamodern artistic gestures in play in non-literary settings -- for instance, in Jimmy Fallon's popular lip-synching contests, which straddle the line between an exhibition of real talent and intentional ridiculousness -- perhaps it's time to credit the metamodern ethos with bringing avant-garde artistic sensibilities to the largest audience they've ever enjoyed?
For more examples of metamodernism in contemporary culture, see the "Month in Metamodernism" and "Basic Principles of Metamodernism" articles at this link.
Seth Abramson is an Assistant Professor of English at University of New Hampshire and the Series Co-Editor of Best American Experimental Writing, whose next edition will be published by Wesleyan University Press in late 2015. His most recent book of metamodern verse is Metamericana (BlazeVOX, 2015).