ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors broaden some of the possibilities for writing poetry. In the first half they look at strategies for writing a contemporary or postmodern lyric. Traditionally the lyric was a short poem which expressed the writer’s emotions, for example, about love or death. The lyric had musical qualities—usually rhythm and rhyme—and it would also in general address serious topics. In the second half, they pursue some of the possibilities for experimenting with different aspects of language, such as extending or resisting metaphor; games and systems; discontinuity; lexical experimentation; the poem as visual object; and prose poetry and ‘the new sentence’. Writing a postmodern lyric does not mean giving up everything we know about the history of the lyric, but it does mean making it contemporary. Creating a contemporary lyric, therefore, almost inevitably means engaging with postmodern ideas of subjectivity.
