William Carlos Williams and James Laughlin: Selected Letters, and: The Still Performance: Writing, Self, and Interconnection in Five Postmodern American Poets (review)

Reviews 113 greater and more various than can even be encompassed by Nelson's broad scope, this cultural Left was largely destroyed by the ideological and material onslaught of decades of virulent anticommunism —among the ugliest moments in U.S. culture—in which elements of liberalism and even radical anti-Stalinism were significantly complicit. The results have been so devastating that even the efforts of many of the post-1960s generation of scholars to reform the canon have largely ignored the Left tradition that anticipated so many contemporary concerns. From this point of view, Nelson's agenda for future research might say far more about the need for cultural workers to debate and discuss in rather precise terms the relations beteween cultural memory and organized movements for social change. After all, a key lesson of Nelson's book is that partisans of cultural, economic and political egalitarianism cannot count on the internal dynamics and networks of extant institutions to preserve even the most rudimentary material artefacts of oppositional culture. Therefore, Left cultural workers in such institutions fatally err in limiting their associations to "colleagues." Rather, they need to find new ways to forge activist relations with oppositional social forces, many of which have the objective need to produce counter-institutions of cultural memory of their own. ALAN WALD William Carlos Williams and James Laughlin: Selected Letters edited by Hugh Witemeyer. New York: Norton, 1989. xxiii + 293 pp. $27.50 (cloth). The Still Performance: Writing, Self, and Interconnection in Five Postmodern American Poets by James McCorkle. Charlottesville: University Presses of Virginia, 1989. 233 pp. $30.00 (cloth). American poetry in this century has been, by and large, a vast fabric of alternatives and differences . Drawing on the lessons of a European avant-garde, as well as on the more home-grown subversions and revisions of epic and lyric traditions, our poets have created an immense body of work that is anything but a single, monolithic structure we can conveniently call modernism or postmodernism, a wildly various field of alternative poetic formulations and disparate—even antagonistic—poetries. Were a true account of this field to be written, it would of necessity include not only those figures who have come to be considered—prematurely, to my mind—"canonical," but a host of others, ranging from political writers like Kenneth Fearing to Objectivists like George Oppen and Louis Zukofsky, to a whole raft of African-American and Hispanic writers, to experimentalists like Myna Loy and the writers associated with avant-garde journals like transition or—in more recent years—L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. Unfortunately, such a comprehensive history remains unwritten; what stands in its place is a long series of partial accounts, most of them relying not only on a relatively narrow conception of what constitutes the central line of American poetry, but on an ultimately orthodox vision of canonicity that insistently overlooks the very vitality and range of our poetry in favor of an easily defined and self-contained package. Symptomatically—as if to illustrate the point—the poet Jerome Rothenberg's always quirky and often brilliant anthologies of alternative poetries have for the most part fallen out of print, while Helen Vendler's Harvard Book of Contemporary American Poetry, which carries not only the authoritative imprimatur of Harvard, but also the canon-making weight of Vendler's own name, flourishes. * * * The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams and James Laughlin, the publisher of New Directions, makes a fascinating case study in the tensions between the canon-building impulse and a poetics of inclusion. In this regard alone—aside from any consideration of his politics or his poetry itself—Williams is an enormously complicated figure. The beneficiary not only of Hugth Witemeyer's fine editing of this volume, but also of a recent exemplary two-volume Collected Poems, as well as endless studies and classroom attention, Williams seems finally to have gained a secure place in the modernist canon. And yet, such an outcome was not only far from certain during his lifetime, it is still a matter of some contention: Helen Vendler, for 114 the minnesota review instance, excludes Williams, though she includes his friend Wallace Stevens in...