Poetry in the Age of Digital Reproduction: Marjorie Perloff's Unoriginal Genius, and Charles Bernstein's Attack of the Difficult Poems

For more than three decades, Marjorie Perloff and Charles Bernstein have been our foremost champions of poetic invention. This review looks at their new books: Unoriginal Genius and Attack of the Difficult Poems, asking the question, how can poetry be original in the twenty-first century?

Basing her investigation in the established modernisms of Eliot, Pound and Benjamin, Marjorie Perloff suggests answers through a series of close readings of texts by poets including Yoko Tawada, Caroline Bergvall, Susan Howe and Kenneth Goldsmith. These writers, claims Perloff, represent a contemporary shift from poetries of confession or creation to poetries of reinvention, citation and translation. While addressing the same shift, Charles Bernstein's collection of "essays and inventions," takes a less traditional critical approach. His speeches, reviews, satirical prose-poems and essays range in subject from Tin-Pan Alley and PennSound to the Yasusada hoax and Yiddish shtick. At times comic, at times earnest and always highly idiosyncratic, Bernstein's Attack of the Difficult Poems has something for everyone. Together, these two books blaze a trail into a new century of poetry, boldly going where, it seems, we have gone before.