I'm going to speak about postmodernism today in the Poetics Seminar. Not my idea: I don't believe in postmodernism.

"A division was created when Art was given the vulgar guise of Postmodernism. This has nothing to do with Modernism, of course. An invented term betrays the ethos of the society that accepts it. And perhaps there are practitioners who might be called Postmodern in their vandalism. But in order to accept this term we have to believe that Modernism, itself, is finished. Like throwing a bathing cap into the divine flux.

The conservative artist would like nothing better than to believe in the demise of modernism. . . "

--Barbara Guest, "Radical Poetics and Conservative Poetry."