Response to Marsha Bryant, Edward Brunner, Carter Revard, Robert Dale Parker, and Michael Thurston

Three of the four members of Cary Nelson’s Editorial Advisory Board (Edward Brunner, Robert Dale Parker, and Michael Thurston), together with a professor of Modern Poetry (Marsha Bryant) and a Native American poet/Middle English scholar (Carter Revard), have been enlisted by Nelson to respond to my admittedly severe review of the Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry. The five responses range from the polite and judicious (Bryant) to the nasty-vituperative (Revard), but the basic case made against my argument is more or less the same in all five responses. Let me therefore summarize it here.

(1) Reacting to my epigraph from Frank O’Hara’s “To Hell with It,” all five respondents assume that I am somehow “against” the poetry of “subject matter,” that I have no interest in the meaning of poems or in the “cultural work” poetry can and does perform. As Thurston puts the case: “Perloff objects to any poetry that too directly treats the poet’s experience or the historical occasion of the poem. . . . Poetry, for Perloff, must be ironic, must be largely about itself . . . must be indirect, impersonal, and preferably experimental.” My “narrow” aesthetic, it seems, has blinded me to the potential of the work of contemporary (born after World War II) poets included in the anthology.

As a corollary of (1), I am accused (by Brunner) of being a proponent only of the Pound aesthetic, the poetic of the “imagist fragment”; or again (by Revard) of being an advocate of those evidently negligible New York poets John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara. Along the way, a few digs at the “language poets” are also thrown in.

(2) I am accused of being blind to the richness of poems written by the minority poets featured in the anthology’s final section as well as some of the earlier poems by minority writers that I cite. Evidently, I have totally misread and misunderstood the poetry of Adrian Louis and Ray Young Bear—the latter two defended at great length by Revard. The central complaint in my review—namely, that the anthology omits most of the prominent and interesting younger poets writing today (white as well as poets of color) is treated to the jeering response (especially by Parker and Revard) that I am merely opposing my “taste” to Nelson’s: take your pick.

(3) And, finally, I am accused by Parker and Brunner of making factual mistakes, of “bad math” (Parker), indeed, of being “illiterate and innumerate” (Revard). Evidently I don’t know how to count and I misquote poems.

The most serious of these charges is, of course, the first. Bryant observes (quite rightly, I think) that “Nelson’s approach shifts the debate from poetry’s intrinsic qualities to its cultural work,” it being her hope that, after all, these antithetical perspectives—Nelson’s and mine—need not be mutually exclusive. But Bryant is the only respondent to be so generous: the four other respondents assume that I have no interest in what they call the poetry of personal experience or cultural construction. Oddly enough, they base this conclusion largely on my citations from Frank O’Hara. Can it really be that they don’t see how playful the cited passages from O’Hara are? That of course he doesn’t “hate subject matter,” but only what Keats called, vis-à-vis Wordsworth, the “egotistical sublime,” the poetry that has a “palpable design” on us. When Thurston declares that I have a predilection for poetry that is “indirect” and “impersonal,” poetry that is only “about itself,” how does he square this statement with my foregrounding of O’Hara? Has Thurston ever read the meditation on the Cold War called “Ode (to Joseph LeSueur) on the Arrow That Flieth by Day”? Can any poem be more “experiential” and less “impersonal” than “A Step Away from Them” or “The Day Lady Died”? Or again, are these or John Ashbery’s or Charles Bernstein’s poems the “imagist fragments” Brenner is convinced I value above all else? As for Revard, who refers scathingly to the “limp, formless...