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Marjorie PERLOFF. 21St-Century Modernism; the "New" Poetics

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Marjorie PERLOFF. 21St-Century Modernism; the Marjorie PERLOFF. 21st-Century Modernism; The "New" Poetics. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. 222 pages. $17.95. ISBN 0-631-21970-6. Joanny Moulin (Aix-Marseille 1) Hardly anyone else than Marjorie Perloff, Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of Humanities Emerita at Stanford University, could have afforded to author such an unacademic book of academic criticism. Her style is quite as anti-closural as that of the poetry she stands up for. She addresses here what she perceives in some recent contemporary poetry as the potential fulfilment of the truly innovative, avant-garde impulse of early modernism, one century ago. Her thesis is that Donald Allen's New American Poets, and then the Back Mountain, San Francisco, New York, Beat and Language poets all positioned themselves against the conservatism, formalism, and suspect politics of modernism, from Eliot to Auden and Jarrell and Lowell. She considers that they have paved the way to a 21st-century poetry that is characterised by Olson's "open field," process-oriented improvisation and vernacular colloquialism, thus seeming to have learned at last the genuine lessons of the modernist revolution. Perloff unsurprisingly continues her discourse against the lyrical, self-centered boredom of mainstream or laureate poetry, preferring to uphold the achievement of such representatives of what she calls a "second wave of modernism" as Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian or Steve McCaffery. She resolutely favours the "Williams camp" and objectivism, innovative, oppositional, experimental or alternative poetry, the Frankfurt School and French poststructuralist theory, including Michel Serres, thus bravely brandishing a time-honoured banner across the millenium. The greatest part of her book, however, bears on early 20th-century modernists, while seeming to consider rather implicitly that something must have gone sour, more or less mysteriously, in the modernist agenda, sometime between the two World Wars. However, she does not presume to investigate into the causes of this historical fact here, but merely witnesses that there had been a decisive change between the radical poetry of T.S. Eliot's avant guerre Parisian years and "its postwar reincarnation." Instead, Perloff's collagist method makes her shift to an examination of the poetic prose of Gertrude Stein who, like Eliot, is a "constructivist," for her differential syntax foregrounds the constructedness of the poetic text. For her, however, constructedness is a question neither of symbol nor of collage—it is not, for her, a Flaubertian matter of finding the right objective correlative to embody a particular emotion or situation, but rather a Joycean verbivocovisual complex that ultimately tends to eschew empirical representation. Perloff's next paratactical jump takes us to Marcel Duchamp an his readymades. Photographs of some of Duchamp's works will partly console the reader for the possibly unsettling rupture effect of this chapter, which retraces a link between Duchamp's plastic creations and objectivist poets like Louis Zukovsky or David Antin, via the philosophy of Walter Benjamin. But the Duchampian readymade, the "presence of the original" that it implies, is central indeed to an appreciation of modernist poetry. A stimulating touch is added by some impressionistic reflections on Duchamp's notion of "Inframince / Infrathin" which "is the most minute of differences or, as in the case of the subway passengers 'delays' to be perceived." Perloff is the reverse of didactically wordy, and every chapter crisply encapsulates the intellectual potential for a whole book, but her allusive style does provide food for thought. Parataxis : Russian Formalist poet and admired friend of Roman Jakobson, Velimir Khlebnikov invented a poetic "beyonsense" language beyond (za) mind or reason (um) called zaum. Khlebnikov, who had studied maths in Kazan with Lobachevsky, one of the inventors of non- Euclidian geometry, used algorithmical equations to develop a mimological theory of etymology and a poetry of "soundscapes," which stressed the materiality of the signifier. His undertaking is akin to Duchamp's objection to both "retinal painting" and what the Frankfurt School called the consciousness industries of mass-produced art and literature. And yet, in spite of such a plethora of avant-garde modernist innovations and revolutionary efforts, it remains obvious that the lyrical paradigm has been maintained throughout the 20th century and that a topical subjectivism always reasserts itself in the path of least resistance. But beyond a now superannuated modern/postmodern divide, some remarkable recent poetry clearly reasserts an essentially modernist attitude. This is, for instance, Susan Howe's calligrammes and the work she does on the very letter of her poems. There is also Charles Bernstein's "dysraphism" or collaging of items that are disparate not only in meaning but also in syntactic order, voices, sources, allusions. Ezra Pound had declared that after the Napoleonic wars "England fell back into the tenebrosities of the counterreformation, and has remained there ever since." Perloff, by all appearances, has picked up Pound's torch and she is blowing on patient embers..
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