(Preface by Greg Dember)
Recently we experienced the unexpected passing of a good friend of ours here at What Is Metamodern? – my old college roommate, John Howard. This post is kind of a memorializing tribute to someone who was, in a sense, an unsung hero of metamodernism. It also offers a chance for us to showcase one of his poems that we think has a metamodern tone and feel.
John lived on and off in the Seattle area where my co-editor Linda and I are (mostly) based. As I describe in my recently published book, Say Hello to Metamodernism!, John was the person who first got me to ponder the question “What will come after postmodernism?” and John landed on an answer: the post-postmodern would probably feature a certain aesthetic sensibility that toggled between irony and earnestness. Prescient!
One place John saw this sensibility embodied was in the work of the singer-songwriter Jonathan Richman, who seems to have been well ahead of the curve, metamodernly speaking. We here at WiM are huge Jonathan fans; we regard him as an exemplar of the “proto-metamodern.” (Read more about this “AHA!” moment for us in the aforementioned book’s intro chapter! Also we put a few of his songs on a metamodernism playlist on Spotify.) Later, when more metamodern aesthetic products began to cross the horizon in the late nineties and early 2000s, John (Howard) was on more than one occasion the one to point them out. Most notably, he introduced us to the television shows Freaks and Geeks (1999-2000) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003). He also hosted watching parties of the TV show Community (2009-2015). All are quintessentially metamodern cultural products, in our estimation, and I feature each in my book.
Not only was John Howard a keen and enthusiastic observer of culture, but our departed friend was also a multi-talented creator. He studied oil painting in France; he created digital paintings early in the days of that medium, and he wrote his life-observations in the form of poetry. At a recent memorial gathering for John, I read his poem “Peanut Butter Story” – a selection from his chap book, Light Up and Love. I had picked it simply because I thought it was expressive of his spirit, but after Linda heard it read, she voiced something I’d also been secretly thinking: It’s got that metamodern j’ ne sais quoi! It’s not clear exactly what year John wrote the poem, but the chap book was published in 1996. So he most likely wrote it sometime in the early nineties, putting him at the front of the wave of the emerging metamodern sensibility. Our work on metamodernism over the last decade and a half being in no small measure the result of our friendship with John, I am happy we can pay tribute to him here at WiM, and hope you enjoy the poem:
Peanut Butter Story
I was only 9,
still they say I should have known better
than to put the
peanut butter jar
in the oven but I wanted to see
the peanut butter
get hot and bubble
like lava
and then I wanted
to pour it all over my ice cream.
When the jar exploded
I cut my hands on the hot glass
trying to clean up the mess
before Mama
found out
and I screamed
because it stung so.
At the hospital
I took 15 stitches in my palm.
I tell you this because
it makes me look dumb,
so you'll think I'm silly but truthful
and love me,
then we'll be friends
and walk together
hand in hand,
at least til the day
you notice that my hand
bears no scar.
But I do like peanut butter.
Don't you?
– John Howard, 1996
