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Modernism/Modernity 7.2 (2000) 344-345



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Book Review

The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics


The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics. Edited by Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999. Pp. x + 380. $49.95 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

On many college and university campuses across the country, fliers occasionally appear announcing meetings of the local Objectivist society. At these meetings, the poems of George Oppen, Lorine Niedecker, or Louis Zukofsky go undiscussed while attendees debate and approve the finer points of Ayn Rand's pseudophilosophical rants. This is what Objectivism means to most American college students, even English majors, even students interested in modern poetry. And that fact makes Rachel Blau DuPlessis's and Peter Quartermain's The Objectivist Nexus not only useful but downright necessary. This volume, which collects essays by Charles Altieri, Alan Golding, Peter Middleton, Charles Bernstein, Stephen Fredman, and others, establishes the canon of so-called Objectivist poets, situates them in their composition and reception contexts, reads them through the interpretive filters of politics, ethics, and religion, and argues for their significance in the history of twentieth-century American poetry. This major set of objectives is admirably met, and the book should help to redefine "Objectivist."

First gathered and labeled in the February 1931 issue of Poetry (which Louis Zukofsky edited) and soon solidified as an identifiable movement with Zukofsky's An "Objectivists" Anthology (1932), the poets Basil Bunting, Lorine Niedecker, George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, Charles Reznikoff, and Zukofsky shared both a specific poetic heritage (the modernism of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams) and a set of commitments to poetry as a mode of epistemology and an ethical or political praxis. After its initial publication, most Objectivist poetry went largely unread outside a very small and specialized audience. After several decades of neglect, however, their work has enjoyed something of a renaissance over the last twenty years, as critics have rediscovered and returned to this challenging, provocative, and rich poetry. The Objectivist Nexus follows the early recovery projects of L. S. Dembo and Burton Hatlen, the advocacy of David Antin and Marjorie Perloff, and the recent careful readings of individual works and careers by Michael Davidson, Peter Quartermain, and others, establishing a vigorous community of reception and sketching several vectors of influence.

The most important and compelling critical work in this book explores the ethical possibilities and responsibilities entailed by various Objectivist poetics. Charles Altieri's opening essay, "The Objectivist Tradition," establishes the key terms elaborated by later essays. Altieri defines the Objectivist tradition as "that body of work molded by freeing imagist techniques into methods of thought based on notions of field, measure, and 'open form' in the service of principles of sincerity and objectification" (32). Those principles--sincerity and objectification--come, of course, from Zukofsky's manifesto-like essay in the "Objectivist" issue of Poetry, "Sincerity and Objectification with Special Reference to the Work of Charles Reznikoff," and their meanings are effectively explored and elaborated not only in Altieri's essay (and his "Afterword") but also in essays by Ming-Qian Ma, Alan Golding, and Peter Nicholls.

Nicholls's essay, "Of Being Ethical: Reflections on George Oppen," is especially fine, a careful reading that contrasts Oppen's poetics with Pound's authoritative and authoritarian technique. Nicholls approaches Oppen's work through Jean Luc Nancy's theoretical account of writing, myth, and community to tease out Oppen's "evasion of the agonistic structure of the modernist avant-garde, with its tensed subject-object relation" (245). Oppen's poetry, Nicholls demonstrates, is in search of "a way of acknowledging the world and others without seeking to reduce them to objects of knowledge" (245). Reading Oppen's fairly late poem, "Occurrences," Nicholls finds him articulating such a relationship "through the hesitancy of the syntax, through [End Page 344] ambiguity and apposition, through the heavily stressed and repeated 'Of'--all elements that evoke relationship without reducing it to two terms, to a subject-object dualism" (250). This hesitancy, embodied in the poem's diction and resistance to closure, evinces an openness...

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