A Postmodern Exit, by Hunter Kettering

Poetry, chapbook, 36 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

A Postmodern Exit is a self-reflexive chapbook composed in both reflection and streams of consciousness, blurring the lines between memory and presence. The autobiographical collection reads as a testament to the tribulations of the coming of age experience today, a epoch defined by the necessity to leave the precedents of the postmodern world for a new collective state of redefinition: metamodernism. In this context of cultural change, there is a requirement to first know thyself in the particular, and thus the poems are explorations of identity.

Upon self-awareness, there is a need to connect the micro to the macro, or the personal to the collective. The poet relates the grand notion of history which contains anything that is human to his own particular experiences by abstracting how happenings in time and space relate to whatever is timeless and boundless. In this search, the poems of the shared environment, whether local or global for the wandering writer, are ongoing points of insight towards an evolving interpersonal world. This oscillation of perspectives can only be reconciled through the unitary perspective of natural law. This perspective allows for multiplicity, and thus all things sincerely felt or understood become real, something beyond true and false.

While the poems are written from a lens of self-discovery through the tool of awareness, the ultimate goal of writing them was therapy. The writing process was a sequential act of awareness, acceptance, and finally letting go. For the sake of healing in light of trauma recovery, creating distance between the poems and the poet despite the innate connection allows both to stand on their own more fully. The poems attest to the power of good art in the fullest, ideal sense, something which must be true like light and inherently moral, for such is beautiful. And the poet may thus be firmly authentic, as a part of nature, something which is free and conscious.

Hunter Kettering is an emerging poet and advocate for the healing arts across all mediums and modalities, presently living and working as a fine arts gallerist in Jackson, Wyoming. He studied history at Claremont McKenna College and continues to write, being inspired by the natural world and its beauty.