Customer Reviews

21st-Century Modernism: The "New" Poetics (Blackwell Manifestos)

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Perloff is one of the great boosters of the 'alternative modernists' -- the theme of this book -- and spends a good deal of time in the trenches, doing polemical readings of recent poets in the avant-garde. Lyn Heijnian versus, e.g., Seamus Heaney -- Perloff wants radical approaches, and she finds the best of those who'll never be reviewed in the New York Times because of their newness. Maybe fifty years from now, the Times will pretend that, of course, we all knew they were great from the start. Obscure to god-like, with no intervening step.

In contrast to some of the avant-garde LANGUAGE types, Perloff is fair and low BS when it comes to her criticism (constrast Charles Bernstein's insufferable Poetics.) Her close readings are in the style of someone like Helen Vendler (although Perloff and Vendler are near-contemporaries, so it's unlikely that one's derivative of the other.) There aren't many people who can write with such acuity -- the only thing worse today than most poetry is the criticism of it.

The chapter on Stein is brilliant, and it's moving to see Stein get the treatment that she would have wanted and that she deserves -- careful, intelligent and defiantly untrendy. She makes Tender Buttons -- something I had never appriciated -- come right off the page.

I find the basic thesis of this book--that early Modernism is still with us--wholly convincing, but
what's best here is the choice of four such different poets--Eliot, Stein, Duchamp, and Khlebnikov as
precursors of our own poetry. The chapter on Duchamp asks the question Duchamp himself asked,
Can one make works which are not works of art?" and shows what that means in terms of avant-
garde aesthetic. The last chapter is dismissive (but not excessively so) of some mainstream American
and then makes a strong case for the terrific innovations of four exemplary poets: Susan Howe, Charles
Bernstein, Steve McCaffery, and Lyn Hejinian. Even if you don't agree with Perloff's overall thesis,
you'll love the details and extremely lucid readings. best of all, it's ENJOYABLE.

Perloff's study examines the question: Despite the predominance of a `tepid and unambitious' Establishment poetry, what if there were a powerful avant-garde to take up once again the experimentation of the early twentieth century? She explores this question across five chapters: Avant-Garde Eliot; Gertrude Stein's Differential Syntax; The Conceptual Poetics of Marcel Duchamp; Khlebnikov's Soundscapes: Letter, Number, and the Poetics of Zaum; and "Modernism" at the Millennium. As we move into the 21st century, she writes, the modern/postmodern divide has emerged as more apparent than real, and the modernist challenge remains open.

on duchamp, she is amateurish and derivative (as me is sure she knows), repeatin fings art istorians ave bin writin about fa decades. on stein, she is predictable. on "mainstream" vs "avant-garde" she is predictable, narrow-minded, and amateurish. basically, perloff is repeatin mainstream critical points about ow da maja innovations of avant-garde poetics is polysemy and a plastic attitude toward da medium (which da modernists figured out first -- for real! wot a shock!) -- dat, and da usual railin against generic prerogavites, etc. it's not so much dat wot she says is objectionable, it's dat anyone wiv alf a ead fa art who knows anythin about these artists could ave said wot she says in da house. dis is ok fa people who is checkin fa a prima fa maja artists related to lingo-based avant-gardes (wif a predictably partisan and shallow bias fa dat wicked cliche of 20f-century experimental poetics: "language poetry"). don't get me wrong. "some of my wickedest boys is 'language poets'" (sorta), but i wonda if da first generation lang po checks is embarrassed dat they've by now become da academic equivalent of igh modernists dig eliot and squid. it would be wicked to read more critics who didn't need an academic scool (which dey always dismiss while still bein constricted by da rubric) to tell them who is relevant.

wake me up is this 1975? more predictalbe veiled (new criticism) from the gran dame of poetic bootlicking-avant eliot? ha-typifies the problem with literary scholarship-stiff, predictable,revisionary. how many books can one write about privledged (safe) poetic experimentation-if you can even call it that. and dont get me started about Perloff's readings of recent works-(goldsmith's-the weather)
Marjorie, I think it's time to retire, or have you already?