Poetry versus reportage
The study questions once more – starting from the mutations in the postmodern world and culture – Malllarmé’s distinction between poetry and character. The fragmentation of the “collective” soul of the clan, tribe, city into a multitude of “individuals” decides, on the one hand, the creation of the difference between “I am interested” (in a superficial inertial manner, as an extension of the collective psychism) and “I care” (in an individual, absolute, interior manner). It is the difference between reportage and poetry. On the other hand, the very configuration of the interior space is mutated, due to the emergence of new communications media – radio, television, mobile phone, internet. What took shape in the dawn of modernity, and then became dominant in the XIXth and XXth century, that is the Human episteme, as Foucault calls it (in Words and things), is transforming now into something else, something vague and virtual. A new challenge, because now, at the beginning of XXIst century, the boundary between poetry and reportage is constantly moving. (It appears, for example, the reportage of the “individual”, e.g. the blogs.) The only criterion – always available – to distinguish today between poetry and reportage remains the opposition between “I care” and “I am interested”.
Keywords: contemporary poetry, modernism, postmodernism, the Human episteme, reportage, medium, message
