Circles on the Water: Selected Poems, and: Stone, Paper, Knife (review)

172 the minnesota review not be surprised that alliances between the two were fitful at best and disastrous at their very worst: one thinks of the surrealists' short-lived liaison with the French communists and Stalin's liquidation of the soviet avant-garde. Yet these and other cases are each a special case whose idiosyncrasies resist the grand sweep of Burger's thesis. One wishes indeed that Bürger had devoted his final chapter to a detailed analysis of one historical instance of avant-garde, rather than to a recapitulation of Adorno's and Lukacs's views on artistic engagement. This might have given more authority to his otherwise quite enUghtening treatment of montage and the surrealist concept of chance. Yet, after aU, the institution ofart has proved to be more durable than the revolutionists expected. The Museum of Modern Art has recently expanded; Nadja is routinely assigned in courses on the French novel; dada has gone commercial. In the face of a trivialized "neo"-avant-garde, Bürger finally succumbs to Frankfurt School pessimism. He dubs the art of the 1950s and '60s a "false sublation" of art and society, and seems to conclude that the revolutionary hopes of the historical avant-garde are now extinguished. Having failed to overthrow the institution art, the avant-garde is itself institutionalized as a harmless formalism of revolt: "The Neo-avant-garde, which stages for a second time the avant-gardiste break with tradition, becomes a manifestation that is void of sense and that permits the positing of any meaning whatever" (p. 61). It is, incidentally, on this point that SchulteSasse most emphaticaUy disagrees with Burger's judgment. This same point might also cast doubt upon the depth of avant-garde's "break with tradition." Without disturbing Burger's central point, might not the avant-garde now be counted among the stylistic episodes of bourgeois cultural history, distinct from aestheticism and naturalism, yet re-assimilated into the institution by museums, publishers, critics, and the Uke? Despite such unanswered questions, Bürger provides us with an expansive and compelling explanation of an immensely compUcated phenomenon. His book supersedes older accounts such as Poggioli's Theory of the Avant-Garde and Matei Calinescu's Three Facesof Modernity, and offers American principals in the modernism debate a degree oftheoretical and historical reflection uncommon even in this age of theory. Theory ofthe Avant-Garde deserves a wide and thoughtful reading not merely among literary critics but by aU concerned with the fate of art in this century. PHILIP E. BISHOP Marge Piercy. Circles on the Water: Selected Poems. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982. 299 pp. $8.95 (paper); $17.50 (cloth). ________________ Stone, Paper, Knife. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983. 123 pp. $5.95 (paper); $12.95 (cloth). Ever since her first book of poetry, Breaking Camp, appeared in 1968, Marge Piercy has been an active and often controversial force in contemporary American poetry. Her first seven collections have estabUshed her as a sociaUy and politically-oriented poet who is not afraid to confront the issues central to the Sixties and Seventies: antiwar and antinuclear protest, the civil rights movement, feminism and women's Uberation, corporate and biggovernment corruption, and more recently, the environment. Now, in Circles on the Water: Selected Poems and Stone, Paper, Knife, her eighth and most recent new coUection, we have the opportunity to begin at the beginning, as it were, and review the progression ofher work up to the present. What we find is a consistently committed voice, a continuity of tone and approach that demonstrates that Piercy is pursuing the same goals with her poetry now as she was in her earlier books: to articulate the various aspects of personal and poUtical experience that concern her in ways useful and memorable for the ordinary reader. What I mean by useful is simply that readers will find poems that speak to and for them, wiU take those poems into their Uves and say them to each other and put them up on the bathroom wall and remember bits and pieces of them in stressful or quiet reviews 173 moments. That the poems may give voice to something in the...