Modern Poetry After Modernism

Rating:
Summary: unimaginative criticism
Review: Longenbach's approach to "modern poetry after modernism" (I put it in quotes because of the disservice he does to his topic) represents one of the most conservative, unimaginative, and predictable accounts of modern poetry after modernism. He focuses on the usual suspects, ignores our more radical poets (though Ashbery is/was radical, he's become a tired topic for critics), and invites some of the poets he writes about to blurb his poetry book. If this smells like careerism, the book's lack of substance will corroborate the odor.

Rating:
Summary: Modernism into postmodernism without the reductive polemics
Review: This book presents a series of assessments of many our most high-profile contemporary poets which are linked by similar concerns and supported by similar assumptions, but between which there is no major, predetermined argument, no critical axe to grind. This results in a number of refreshingly non-partisan, poet-centered discussions that reveal Logenbach as one of our most persuasive and sensitive critics of contemporary poetics. If anything, Logenbach's central claim is against the very idea of there being any real and dominant centralizing assumption that can explain modern and postmodern poetics. He endorses a twist on a statement by Jarrell; the idea that "Postmodern poetry was, essentially, an extension of modernism; it was what modern poetry wished or found it necessary to become" (Jarell made the same argument for modern poetry's relation to the Romantics). Citing Habermas, he works to demonstrate how previous theories of postmodernity function by arguing against a straw man version of Modernism that "strategically oversimplifies" the movement. He champions Bishop as a poet whose work cannot be accounted for by conventional narratives of modernism, and he goes on to show how her position as a poet working between traditional and avant-garde distinctions helps us to understand the achievement of subsequent major poets including Jarrell, Wilbur, Ashbery, Clampitt, Richard Howard, Robert Pinsky, and Jorie Graham. Rather than "breaking through" to terrain beyond Modernism, these poets develop and extend aspects of Modernism overshadowed by its own monolithic reputation. Thus in Logenbach's view the rewards of modernity extend to "include multitudes" that more oppositional concepts of American poetics would shortsightedly assign merely to the present. If Logenbach's broad-minded beliefs about modern and postmodern poetics seem restricted by a still-too-narrow survey of poetic practices (his is the contemporary Ivy League canon, the avant-garde fringe of which halts at Ashbery) and leaves us wishing he would have taken on tougher cases, such as at least one poet associated with the Language movement, his reconciliation of long-respected superficial differences in contemporary poetics are startlingly convincing, and his account of the overall relationship between modernism and postmodernism is among the most cogent and democratic thus far offered.