Customer Reviews

Poetry On and Off the Page: Essays for Emergent Occasions (Avant-Garde & Modernism Studies)

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Marjorie Perloff ought to be more interesting. Usually people who are fanatical proponents of very specific schools/movements (in this case avant garde/post-modern/post-post-modern/ L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E/post-L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry/whatever)while being opponents of all others are interesting. Any kind of extravagant engagement with a subject--even when it's wrongheaded--is fascinating.

But reading this book, you may get a nagging sense that Perloff decided with her head, not her heart, long ago, what would carve out her niche in the academic world; that she has hung up a checklist on her wall to remind her of what she likes in poetry, and makes all her judgments and poem-expositions based on that criteria--which is getting awfully old lately. You never have the sense that Perloff has had an emotional response to a poem--probably not something she'd deny. Thus, there is no room for extravagance in her judgments; indeed, she reserves her greatest vehemence for knocking the kinds of poetry she doesn't like--demonstrating why they're lousy by citing lousy poems by poets who never made it anyway.

On the plus-side, Perloff explains very difficult, ultra-resistant poems/texts so that you'll finally be able to make out what these poems are after. As an introduction to what's now rapidly becoming poetry history, it's useful: you get lots of names, snippets of poems and texts--some of which are interesting, even startling--and a sense of how this stuff is talked about by the people to whom it matters.

Of course, finding out may turn out to be a big disappointment. "Is that all there is?" you may say. "Well, big whoop!"