Reply to Marjorie Perloff's "Janus-Faced Blockbuster"

Georgia Douglas Johnson’s poem hardly deserves dismissal as a “Hallmark card” written in “choo-choo iambic pentameter.” In anapestic tetrameter (4 beats to a line, not 5), Johnson writes with distinctive design.

The heart | of a wo-| man goes forth | with the dawn As a lone | bird, soft wing-| ing, so rest-| lessly on; ¹ Afar | o’er life’s tur-| rets and vales | does it roam In the wake | of those e-| choes the heart | calls home.

The heart | of a wo-| man falls back | with the night. And en-| ters some a-| lien cage | in its plight, And tries | to forget | it has dreamed | of the stars While it breaks, | breaks, breaks | on the shel-| tering bars.

Take Perloff’s charge of “slack diction.” With “Afar o’er life’s turrets and vales” (line 3), Johnson draws on the language of romantic overstatement to evoke not freedom but the unreality of a temporary freedom. That unreal vista of castles and valleys is a prelude to the reality-check of the second stanza whose final line repeats “breaks” three times in a self-conscious echo of Tennyson’s seaside elegy “Break, Break, Break.” When Johnson uses the iamb (almost always in opening feet, in lines 1, 3, 5, 6 and 7), she employs it as a rhythm that thrusts forward but immediately loses its momentum as it falls into lax and sagging anapests. The play between insistent iamb and sagging anapest imitates the resumption of the torpor of domestic life despite the speaker’s exertion of energy.

Why is Perloff so quick to dismiss this work? One general answer is that polemically she has been arguing throughout her career for the domination of the Pound aesthetic (just as Harold Bloom, an equivalent on the east coast, has spent his career arguing for Stevens). Pound’s enduring innovation is the imagist fragment: what seems, at first, only a scrap of nonsense becomes, through pointed juxtaposition, a “luminous detail.” Perloff’s background as a linguist prompts her to marvel at meaning that can emerge when concepts are linked even in the absence of conventional syntax. But if Perloff has been a trustworthy guide to the avant-garde from the Objectivists to the Language Poets, she has had little to say about those like Johnson who use rhythm and rhyme, whose poetry is orchestrated through a complex musicality rather than dramatic compare-and-contrast visuals.

But a less general answer gets closer to what the Oxford anthology is about. Johnson’s poem is one of many that have previously gone unheard by a critical tradition that foregrounds “the difficult” as a crucial criterion, and in the process believes that anything that can’t be quickly aligned with that tradition must be some kind of mistake, or the product of ignorance. At one point in The Pleasure of the Text Barthes reinforces that view when he maintains that high culture and mass culture are like “water and fire.” Yet that battle-to-the-death metaphor isn’t exactly applicable to much twentieth century American poetry in which opposites gleefully coexist and invite cohabitation. Johnson echoes Tennyson not in homage to his genius but to emphasize that in her poem, human sensibilities are being broken by domestic enclosures, not waves that tumble euphonically on the shore.

Why should this matter? Why might students be interested in poems about southern mill strikes and problems with abortion? One answer is that these poems aren’t about just their moments in a remote “historical” past; they vividly depict problems that remain with us still. If all had a living wage then yes, strike poems would be quaint topics indeed. When Perloff responds to a poem by Taggard about immigration quotas before World War II by chiming in with her own counter-narrative, she couldn’t be further from the spirit in which all poetry is written: poetry is never designed to narrow down to the merely personal, to evoke the anecdotal, to recall a singular memory, though it is perfectly capable of doing all that. Instead...