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Poetic License: Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric

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Marjorie Perloff, Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University, one of the foremost modernist scholars (his study of Pound and of Avant Garde poetry are seminal works in the field) delivers a critical appraisal of those writers that have been marginalized by mainstream academics as modernists that don't quite fit the bill. These are specifically Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams, Emily Dickinson and John Ashberry, but the bulk of the work does center on Pound, but the more interesting pieces are devoted to poets that are scarcely treated in such comprehensive studies, such as Susan Howe, Paul Blackburn and W.S. Merwin. In a magistral articulation of cross-pollination Perloff scants on mathemetics and its allegorical imprint on poetic tradition. "From nature to culture, from art as the representation of natural phenomenaand processes to art as a self-consciously material production: this is the shift from Romanticism to Modernism, to which the mathematics of early twentieth century artists and poets provides an index." In fact Perloff wields the study of poetics as an internal dialogue of aesthetic merit that transcends artistic practice and becomes a theoretical inscription of which cultural theory is a predication.
Perloff insists that despite the recent vogue to "opening up the canon" our understanding of poetry and poetics is all too often rutted in conventional notions of thel lyric that shed little light on what poets are actually doing presently. This issue of canonicity is problematized in discussions on Ginsberg and Sylvia Plath and their respective place in the canon of letters. The intention of the whole is to display the possibilities that poetry has yet left unveiled due to presupppositions that hold sway. It is an indispensable work that becomes technical at times and overweening at others, often cross-disciplinary approaches are explored (see John Cage and Whitehead or Khlebnikov) which may be on a first perusal a deterrant, but the rewards gleaned from an engaged immersion into the critical resources and explicit paratextual expertise Perloff is mistress of are immediate and immense.