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Journal of Modern Literature 27.1 (2003) 207-210



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Modernism's Objects

University of Pennsylvania
The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics. Ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain. University of Alabama Press, 1999. 379 pp. $24.95 paper.

The Objectivist Nexus is an unusual and varied anthology of essays connected with Objectivist poets, poetics, and poetry, some of which appeared as early as 1979 (often in earlier versions), among others published for the first time in this collection. The publication of such an anthology marks a sea change in the academic fortunes of both the poets under principal consideration—Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, Charles Reznikoff, Basil Bunting, and Lorine Niedecker—and the critics and poets who have been instrumental in reviving interest in the Objectivists since the 1970s, inside and outside of the academy. This renewed attention shows no signs of flagging: since the 1999 publication of The Objectivist Nexus, Niedecker's collected poetry has been published for the first time by University of California Press, along with two new Oppen collections from New Directions. Even Zukofsky, by far the most studied and best known of the group, is undergoing a small renaissance, with Wesleyan University Press now publishing new centenary editions of Zukofsky's complete critical writings and a collection of his correspondence with William Carlos Williams. In short, a group of writers who once appeared to be an under-explored footnote to Poundian prewar modernism, notable only for their atypical Jewishness and left-wing political affiliations, have increasingly become central to the study of the history of American poetry and of modernism and the avant-garde in the twentieth century.

"Objectivist" is itself a contested label. Zukofsky coined it under apparent duress at Harriet Monroe's insistence after Pound arranged for Zukofsky to edit a special issue of Poetry devoted to "younger poets," which appeared in February 1931. Zukofsky, never entirely satisfied with his own invention, usually used "Objectivist" only in quotation marks and forsook "Objectivism" entirely. Most of the other authors included in the Poetry issue and Zukofsky's An 'Objectivists' Anthology [End Page 207]

(virtually self-published a year later by George and Mary Oppen's To Press) followed suit and disavowed the existence of any new, unified movement, or if it existed, that they belonged to it. Nobody, least of all Zukofsky, seemed entirely certain whether there was anything new in these Objectivist volumes, or of the younger poets' relationship to the previous generation's avant-garde. It is likely that Objectivism is the best-documented and most coherent avant-garde movement in English, yet it is nearly an empty class, stitched together only by historical accident.

The biographical difficulties and conceptual contradictions surrounding the "O"-word have led some critics to renounce it as a meaningful category, but DuPlessis and Quartermain make a convincing case that the disputes, misunderstandings, and accidents surrounding the genesis and circulation of the term are in fact crucial advantages in helping us to understand both the poets and the period. "The notion of a nexus," they argue, "tries precisely to address the fact that once the rubric 'Objectivist' was set into play by Zukofsky, it took on, magnetized, and got attributed to it a set of historical responsibilities that one may track and assess" (7). The subtitle "Essays in Cultural Poetics" and editors' introduction confirm that the book is a rare but welcome application of Stephen Greenblatt-style New Historicism to the study of modernist poetry. The intersection of politics, religion, history, and poetry in Objectivist practice lends itself especially well to an approach that combines literary analysis with historical and cultural scholarship. The editors take great pains to explain and clarify this project: their repeated explication of and praise for their own use of the term "nexus" to characterize this intersection is occasionally ponderous but well-taken.

As with any anthology, experts will find room to quibble with many of the essay choices. Some are conspicuous by their absence, especially Ron Silliman's "Third Phase," and Marjorie Perloff's "Barbed-Wire Entanglements: The 'New American Poetry,' 1930-1932...

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