“A physicist friend of mine once said that in facing death, he drew some consolation from the reflection that he would never again have to look up the word “hermeneutics” in the dictionary.”
“In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it’s the exact opposite.”
Paul Dirac (1902-84)
You know, POMO prose might make more sense if we thought of it as poetry. But I’m not waiting for my deathbed to figure out what the stuff I’m reading actually means.
- Bricolage
- Derived from the French word “bricoleur” (a Jack-of-all-trades or handyman). POMOs use “bricolage” for any patchwork or non-expert creation.
- Dialogism
- Theory that every statement is “really” half a dialog with some imaginary listener–and therefore impersonal, objective statements don’t exist.
- Heteroglossia
- the challenge of nonstandard dialects to an official language–metaphorically, challenges to any dogma.
Sadly, the POMO bricolage of buzzwords works better as an author’s job-application than it does as a reader’s source of information. Yule Heibel has some very interesting remarks on the economic basis of POMO prose in her comments on my rant yesterday.