Crossroads Poetics by Michel Delville (review)

Gaining a surer grip on the poetics of the twenty-first century means assuming the Janus-faced perspective proper to the turn of the century and the start of a new millennium. In Crossroads Poetics, Michel Delville adopts such an at once retrospective and forward-looking vision so as to both define twenty-first poetics and throw into question the meaning of “poetics” itself. Delville takes up the most salient views of the field as revealed by watershed 1990s works, in particular Charles Bernstein’s A Poetics and Marjorie Perloff’s Poetry On & Off the Page: Essays for Emergent Occasions,¹ turning them into lenses for examining current issues in poetry and poetics. The simultaneous analysis of textual with non- and para-textual art forms in Bernstein and Perloff, and the interdisciplinarity theorized by Julie Thompson Klein,² together inspire Delville’s “comparative, intermedial poetics” (6). Likewise the characteristically twenty-first-century poetics that results from this admixture, which Delville terms “transversal” (5), derives inspiration from Cultural Studies’ underlining of the mutual impact of “high” and “low.” Delville finds the potential for radical social and poetic transformation in the “popular-avant-garde,” which turns the productive exchange and mutual antagonism between popular culture and the vanguard into potent critique (7).³ At the same time, he is careful to leave room for the close [End Page e-5] reading of all forms and genres. In sum, Delville sheds light on the role and effect of society’s discursive practices on cultural production, as well as on our conception of aesthetics and aesthetic autonomy, while maintaining the rigor of traditional literary scholarship.

Delville’s vision is framed by interdisciplinarity, intermediality, and the incorporation of “popular” into “high” cultural production on one level, and a critical interpretation of cultural practices on another level. In her Introduction to Poetry On & Off the Page, Perloff explains that she has “sought to describe the formations and transformations of literary and artistic discourses, as these discourses have evolved in their dialogue with history, culture, and society.”⁴ Bernstein takes the idea of the back-and-forth between cultural and aesthetic discourses a step further; in A Poetics ideology always already shapes poetry’s language and references. Delville connects the dialogical interpretation that remains part and parcel of contemporary poetics, and the breakdown of disciplinary borders in today’s intellectual world, with the ideological and political labor of challenging the author’s supremacy and resituating authorial voice in the larger discursive network of a given culture. For poetics inevitably emanates from the conversations that occur within society at large, and these conversations are shaped by popular voices and popular cultural production; put differently, the popular and the elite cannot be separated into discrete and identifiable strands in the course of social dialogues. Delville indicates the considerable heuristic potential of situating poetics in the great web of social discourse, which consists in opening closed, “high” art forms to many kinds of cultural production and their nonelite sources, thereby exposing their popular origins and giving access to formerly excluded groups.

The ten chapters comprising Crossroads Poetics can be categorized into three major sections: the first part (Chapters 1–4) deals primarily with intermediality and generic crossing; the second (Chapters 5 and 6) focuses mainly on the detail and the “transversal poetics” that come from high–low exchange; and the third (Chapters 7–10 [the epilogue]) concentrates on the “popular avant-garde” and the consequences of radical interdisciplinarity, and cross-generic cultural and artistic production. Delville contends in Chapter 1 that the generic instability of the prose poem increases with its approximation toward silent film. According to him, by aspiring “to the literary equivalent of filmic movement”—the reiterative action of Charlie Chaplin’s early (silent) films—Gertrude Stein’s cinematic prose poems maximize the undermining of traditional narrative forms that happens naturally in this genre (13). Delville relates the locomotive repetitiveness that he identifies in Chaplin and Stein to the massification of hysteria and bodily trauma during World War I. Comparable to...