21st Century Modernism: The "New" Poetics (Blackwell Manifestos)

Rating:
Summary: A New Modernism?
Review: I find the basic thesis of this book--that early Modernism is still with us--wholly convincing, but
what's best here is the choice of four such different poets--Eliot, Stein, Duchamp, and Khlebnikov as
precursors of our own poetry. The chapter on Duchamp asks the question Duchamp himself asked,
Can one make works which are not works of art?" and shows what that means in terms of avant-
garde aesthetic. The last chapter is dismissive (but not excessively so) of some mainstream American
and then makes a strong case for the terrific innovations of four exemplary poets: Susan Howe, Charles
Bernstein, Steve McCaffery, and Lyn Hejinian. Even if you don't agree with Perloff's overall thesis,
you'll love the details and extremely lucid readings. best of all, it's ENJOYABLE.

Rating:
Summary: Rare close readings
Review: Perloff is one of the great boosters of the 'alternative modernists' -- the theme of this book -- and spends a good deal of time in the trenches, doing polemical readings of recent poets in the avant-garde. Lyn Heijnian versus, e.g., Seamus Heaney -- Perloff wants radical approaches, and she finds the best of those who'll never be reviewed in the New York Times because of their newness. Maybe fifty years from now, the Times will pretend that, of course, we all knew they were great from the start. Obscure to god-like, with no intervening step.

In contrast to some of the avant-garde LANGUAGE types, Perloff is fair and low BS when it comes to her criticism (constrast Charles Bernstein's insufferable Poetics.) Her close readings are in the style of someone like Helen Vendler (although Perloff and Vendler are near-contemporaries, so it's unlikely that one's derivative of the other.) There aren't many people who can write with such acuity -- the only thing worse today than most poetry is the criticism of it.

The chapter on Stein is brilliant, and it's moving to see Stein get the treatment that she would have wanted and that she deserves -- careful, intelligent and defiantly untrendy. She makes Tender Buttons -- something I had never appriciated -- come right off the page.