21st-Century Modernism: The "New" Poetics (review)

Filled with the surprising tour-de-force readings of poetry for which its author is famous, Marjorie Perloff's 21^st-Century Modernism: The "New" Poetics is nonetheless a fairly straightforward book. A highly partisan polemic, this manifesto sides with the Language poets, whom Perloff sees as constituting the most challenging and exciting contemporary poetic movement, reading many facets of their poetics back into earlier aspects of modernism. Her reading backward begins with a startling re-evaluation of the "indeterminacy" of T. S. Eliot's early poetry and then continues with treatments of Gertrude Stein's "differential syntax," Marcel Duchamp's "conceptual poetics," and the lettrism of Velimir Khlebnikov; it comes full circle by demonstrating these "modernist" poetic virtues in the poetry of Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian, and Steve McCaffery. By brilliantly re-contextualizing poetry at both ends of the century, Perloff reaffirms her vital role as the foremost interpreter of Language poetry and its English-speaking cousins. I have always admired Perloff's timely and persuasive interventions in the criticism of twentieth-century poetry, and this manifesto is another worthy example. In the present review, I would like to offer a corrective to what I see as an ahistorical notion that lurks in the background of the many excellent readings contained in the book.

One questionable effect of Perloff's bringing modernist experimentation into the neighborhood of more recent avant-garde poetry is to foster the impression of a timeless set of poetic methods for foregrounding language and artifice, methods whose presence or absence in the work of individual poets then can be ascertained by the avant-gardist critic. It's as if there were one kind of worthwhile poetry, based upon a set of articulable rules that could be applied, theoretically, to poetry written in any time or place. This notion creates a number of related problems. The most obvious, and perhaps least interesting, problem is that these rules seem to restrict too severely the field of valuable poetry. Although for many readers this would be a decisive objection, we can certainly grant a manifesto's author the prerogative to make extreme and exclusive statements of value: actually, we expect nothing less. A second and related problem, though, is less easily resolved. Is it really possible to extract from early avant-garde and later Language poetry practice a set of "modernist" methods that transcend the time and place of their employment? Isn't the desire to find such a set of methods itself a holdover from the failed modernist attempt to imitate science and seek universal methods and theories? This problem leads to a third one, which is also concerned with the occlusion of historical specificity, and that is the distortion of literary history that occurs when Perloff makes it seem as if the methods and values she prizes were discovered in the early twentieth century, lost thereafter, and only re-discovered in the seventies.

As far as I can tell, Perloff has arrived at the latter distortion by accepting a version of literary history promulgated by the Language poets themselves—one based not upon reality but upon their generational struggle with the preceding New American poets (so named for Donald Allen's 1960 anthology). In the seventies, when the Language poets began publishing, their teachers had been New Americans such as Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Larry Eigner, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Philip Whalen, and Jack Spicer. In her introduction, Perloff dismisses the New Americans as diluters of the primary experimental impulse of modern poetry, which she contends was cut off early in the century—often by war or politics. In making this statement, she participates in the Oedipal polemics that informed much of the criticism of their teachers by the Language poets during the seventies and eighties. Perloff's insistence that "the real fate of first-stage modernism was one of deferral" not only slights the actual experimental achievements of the mid-century poets, it also distorts literary history in regard to the...