A post mortem on postmodernism. (Letters).(Letter to the Editor)

SIR: My thoughts are loosely related to the debate between Patrick McCauley and Alison Croggon (Letters, November 2002).

Postmodernism is dead; free verse was once a battleground of philosophy for forward thinking and developmental ideas, but we have soured mother's milk with clotted cream. What is poetry other than a communal language? It must be understood before it can be reciprocated and let go.

The mosaic genre is empty without the spirituality of a practical base purpose, and in order to defer issues of neglect or incompetence, it deliberately defies the needs of local communities: masking critical social voices with the ethereal trappings of the bourgeois intelligentsia. It's a bit like the emperor's new clothes: postmodernism lacks the weight of social realism, the heart of romanticism, and the subversive aesthetic of surrealism; we have got so close up to ourselves we have become disoriented and lost.

Postmodernism gets into everything; because it has no form it paints nicely, but you find in the end that distinction is the premise for all talks of inclusion. But is postmodernism to blame for the politicisation of poetry? You don't put academic theory in the place of any real weight of first-hand experience. You don't confuse inspiration with a foreign credibility. Postmodern poetry draws on academic characterisations of modern art to paint an anti-formalist parody of contemporary genres.

There have long been two ways in which poets acquired credibility in Melbourne and Sydney. Asceticism is the traditional way of the proletariat: impoverished, often ...