Chapter 4 - Iconoclasm and Enigmatical Commitment

Summary

David James’s understanding of metamodernism as ‘continuity and adaptation’ in relation to early twentieth-century texts complements Ahren Warner’s interlacing of references to modernist authors in his work. His uncompromising engagement with French literature in particular has irked many critics. These criticisms might indicate an ‘innovative’ poet aspiring to the enigmatical poetry that I discuss throughout this book. Yet these suppositions would be inaccurate: allusions to modernist writers, iconoclasm and implacacbility are not coterminous with the enigma. Whereas Warner’s ‘Nervometer’ sequence forms an exemplary creative translation of Antonin Artaud’s elusive LE PÈSE-NERFS (1925), other poems – such as ‘Mètro’ – form neo-modernist, rather than metamodernist, responses to early twentieth-century writing. In contrast, James Byrne’s tentative poetic explorations ‘never end in discovery, only in willingness to rest content with an unsure glimpse’, as Byrne phrases it in ‘Apprentice Work’. His collections are open to the formal capacities of the enigma, even in a ‘committed’ poem such as ‘Cox’s Bazar’, that engages with the traumatised survivors of the Myanmar massacres.