Piotr Gwiazda

Department of English
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
gwiazda@umbc.edu

 

Review of: Marjorie Perloff, 21st-Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics. Malden: Blackwell, 2002.

 

The title of Marjorie Perloff’s new book seems, at first, a little confusing. Does she mean 21st-century postmodernism? No. Then perhaps she means the idea of modernism in the twenty-first century–our continuing obsession with the series of artistic and literary revolutions that took place almost a hundred years ago mainly in Europe? But why is the book publicized as a manifesto (specifically, as a part of the Blackwell Manifestos series)? Manifestos usually look toward the future, not the past, so what does modernism have to do with today’s (or tomorrow’s) poetic theory and practice? Apparently a lot, judging by Perloff’s subtitle: The “New” Poetics. The book’s final chapter is entitled “Modernism” at the Millennium–the quotation marks again hinting at something both forward- and backward-looking in Perloff’s provocative reappraisal of modernism and its significance for contemporary writing.

 

Some of these questions are answered for us in the book’s preface. Here Perloff suggests that we jettison “the tired dichotomy that has governed our discussion of twentieth-century poetics for much too long: that between modernism and postmodernism” (1-2). What we normally think of as postmodern poetry–the Projectivists, Beats, San Francisco poets, confessional poets, New York School, and “deep image” school–now appears less revolutionary than it did in the late fifties and early sixties; these poetic schools and movements were “indeed a breath of fresh air” (2), but only so far as they redefined the terms of opposition to the high modernism of Yeats, Frost, Stevens, Moore, later Eliot, and the New Critical orthodoxy that dominated the American poetry scene in the years immediately after World War II. In Perloff’s view, it is the avant-garde modernism of the early twentieth-century that, following a “curious poetic lag” (10), now emerges as a vital precursor to what she considers the most ambitious and adventurous writing of today. “Indeed,” Perloff observes,

 

what strikes us when we reread the poetries of the early twentieth century is that the real fate of first-stage modernism was one of deferral, its radical and utopian aspirations being cut off by the catastrophe, first of the Great War, and then of the series of crises produced by the two great totalitarianisms that dominated the first half of the century and culminated in World War II and the subsequent Cold War. (3)

 

Perloff envisages her book as a sort of paradigm shift, a reconsideration of the standard narrative of modernism with four chapters devoted to the poetic praxis of the early T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Marcel Duchamp, and Velimir Khlebnikov, and the final chapter discussing the importance of these avant-garde modernists to the work of Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian, and Steve McCaffery. These, and presumably other poets and artists associated with the Language writing movement (broadly conceived), take up the challenge of experimental modernism; it is through their work, rather than the work of, say, Charles Olson or Allen Ginsberg, that the spirit of modernism lives again. As Perloff says in the concluding sentence of the book, “ours may well be the moment when the lessons of early modernism are finally being learned” (200).

 

Perloff begins her revision of twentieth-century poetics with a fresh look at the early work of T.S. Eliot. In a gesture of critical bravado, she links Eliot’s early poetry (not The Waste Land, it is worth noting, but “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and other poems from Prufrock and Other Observations) to the main emphasis of Language writing aesthetic: language as the object, rather than the tool, of representation. Perloff suggests a parallel between Eliot’s idea of “impersonality” (with its implied separation of writing and experience) and Charles Bernstein’s call for indirection, artifice, and impermeability featured in his own manifesto “Artifice of Absorption” (published in A Poetics). Both Eliot in the first decades of the twentieth century and Bernstein in the last ones reject the notion of sincerity and explore the idea of language as the site of meaning-making. Eliot’s theory of a poet as a “medium” that fuses together particular impressions and experiences can be said to anticipate, in some ways, the contemporary notion of poetry as a construction, rather than a reconstruction, of experience.

 

In her discussion of Eliot’s early poetry, Perloff is especially interested in demonstrating how the poet’s Flaubertian quest for le mot juste, or simply his technique, enhances the idea of materiality of language. In her close reading of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” she notes Eliot’s penchant for producing “aural excitement” (21); thus, at the start of the poem, the monosyllabic line “Let us go then, you and I” creates, she says, a note of torpor; in the line “half-deserted streets,” she continues, “the s’s and t’s coalesce in what seems to be a whispered proposition coming from a doorway: ssstt!” (20). The point Perloff is trying to make is this: for the early Eliot, sound pretty much equaled subject matter. Accordingly, his work from the period reveals an ongoing preoccupation with the constructedness of poetic language (Prufrock himself being a composite of various sensibilities). This preoccupation can be seen not only in his effective use of sound effects, but also in the abrupt tense and mood shifts, tenuously interconnected syntactical units, juxtapositions of formal and informal idiom, and borrowings from foreign languages. These strategies, Perloff continues, “relate ‘Prufrock’ to Constructivist notions of ‘laying bare the device,’ of using material form–in this case, language–as an active compositional agent, impelling the reader to participate in the process of construction” (26).

 

In her attempt to paint two pictures of T.S. Eliot–one before World War I and one afterward–Perloff doesn’t rely on textual demonstration only. Looking at the poet’s correspondence from the prewar period, she describes him as a youthful, carefree student living in Paris, at one point sharing quarters with his close friend Jean Verdenal, and writing some of the most imaginative and experimental verse of the day. The outbreak of the war put a stop to Eliot’s idyllic lifestyle; the correspondence from the war years reveals him as a perpetually worried man living in a “curious form of exile” in London (33), and longing to return to Paris in order to be able to write poetry again. It was in London that the news of Jean Verdenal’s death at the Dardanelles reached him in 1915 (his friend would become the dedicatee of Prufrock and Other Observations, published two years later). In the period following the war, Eliot seemed a changed person. He no longer yearned to return to Paris, and his poetry no longer featured the same propensity for Laforguean playfulness, inventive use of syntax, and explorations of the semantic possibilities of sound. At this point, perhaps in anticipation of potential criticism of her characterization, Perloff says: “I do not want to suggest anything as vulgar or simplistic as that Eliot’s own avant-garde writing died in Gallipoli with Jean Verdenal [. . . .] I am merely suggesting that between Eliot’s radical poetry of the avant guerre and its postwar reincarnation, a decisive change had taken place” (39). A change did indeed take place in Eliot’s poetry, and the chapter by and large succeeds in revealing how “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and, by implication, the other poems from the period pave the way for, rather than merely precede, the radical parataxis, multivocality, and fragmentariness of The Waste Land.

 

In the chapters that follow, Perloff offers an extended reading of Stein, Duchamp, and Khlebnikov (all of whom she has discussed in her previous books) as major precursors to late twentieth- and early twenty-first century avant-garde writing. Looking mainly at Tender Buttons, she notes Stein’s preoccupation with the verbal, visual, and aural properties of language, especially her pre-Cubist strategy of rearranging the syntactic parts of a sentence (nouns, pronouns, conjunctions, etc.) so that each equally contributes to the whole. Stein’s endless syntactic permutations emerge as the result of her attraction to Cezanne’s all-inclusive treatment of the canvas surface, but also to Flaubert’s economy of form and subordination of subject matter to style. Perloff continues with a well-informed discussion of some of Duchamp’s readymades (including With Hidden Noise and Fresh Widow), as well as some of his boîtes en valise and verbal objects she calls “texticles,” all of which underscore his conceptual perspective: the constant examination of the medium, the incessant interrogation of the function of art itself. Duchamp’s contribution to twenty-first century poetics lies also in his ability to transform our understanding of visual and verbal language–and of their purported incompatibility. The focus of Perloff’s next chapter is the Russian avant-garde poet Velimir Khlebnikov, specifically his exploration of the graphic and phonic aspects of language. Khlebnikov’s poems reveal his lifelong fascination with word origins and, in a larger sense, his utopian pursuit of what he called the “magic touchstone of all Slavic words”–the first step toward formulating a universal, etymology-based language of beyond-reason or zaum (in Russian “za” means beyond, “um” means reason or mind). Khlebnikov’s fascination with sound-effects, puns, neologisms, and etymologies accounts for his inventive merging of sonic, visual, and semantic characteristics of language. By violating established linguistic norms, Khlebnikov pushes the limits of verbal possibility in a programmatic refusal to treat words merely as names.

 

A similar position with regard to the transparency of language, and to the long-discredited assumption that language conveys meaning rather than constructs it, informs the poetics of twenty-first century Language writing. In her final chapter, Perloff applies the experimental methods of the four early modernists to four contemporary Language writers, seeing evidence of the early Eliot’s verbal density in Susan Howe’s Thorow, of Lyn Hejinian’s debt to Khlebnikov and Stein in Happily, and of Charles Bernstein’s and Steve McCaffery’s active engagement with Duchamp’s legacy in the former’s dysraphism and the latter’s inventive mixing of the verbal and the visual. These sections are rather brief, spanning only a few pages each, as though in a determination not to steal the spotlight from the real focus of the book–the experimental phase of modernism initiated in the early twentieth century and only now entering into a kind of “special relationship” with contemporary writing (164). Hence Perloff’s use of quotation marks in her subtitle: the “new” poetics is really the return of an older poetics, a millennial extension of the modernism of Eliot, Stein, Duchamp, and Khlebnikov.

 

Perloff has without question played a key role in shaping our attitudes toward the complex and often contradictory nature of modernism; more than any other critic she has helped to bring avant-garde poetics to the center of today’s academic discourse. In her previous books, starting with The Poetics of Indeterminacy in 1981, Perloff formulated a distinction between two strands of modernism: the post-Symbolist mode initiated by Baudelaire and sustained in the last century by Stevens, the later Eliot, Lowell, Bishop, etc., and the anti-Symbolist mode, originating with Rimbaud and continuing with Pound, Stein, Williams, and their post-World War II descendants (vii). The distinction quickly became a kind of critical dogma, so much so that her astute question “Pound/Stevens: whose era?” (the title of her essay in The Dance of the Intellect) still resonates as a compelling inquiry and elicits new commentaries. A recent issue of The Wallace Stevens Journal, for example, is entirely devoted to a reappraisal of Perloff’s essay, with new perspectives by Perloff herself, Charles Altieri, Alan Filreis, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and Leon Surette, among others. It is interesting to see how Perloff gives another turn of the screw, so to speak, to her ongoing revision of twentieth-century poetics by separating what she considers the genuine avant-garde impulse of the early modernism, now vigorously resuscitated by Language writers, from the legacy of the postmodern “breakthrough,” which merely questioned the assumptions of high modernism and New Criticism. The final result is an enlightening and extremely thought-provoking book. Paying equal attention to texts and their contexts, her study is historically well-informed and intellectually stimulating. On occasion Perloff makes comments that appear overly dismissive and polarizing, as when she writes about “the unfulfilled promise of the revolutionary poetic impulse in so much of what passes for poetry today–a poetry singularly unambitious in its attitude to the materiality of the text” (5-6). Such statements may be inevitable, considering the oppositional nature of the texts she examines as a critic (and this is, after all, Perloff’s “manifesto”), but eventually they do more harm than good to her book. Here is why.

 

The poetry that doesn’t seek to foreground the materiality of the signifier is not automatically less “ambitious” or of a lesser order than poetry that does. Much of today’s mainstream poetry can be dull and unexciting, but much of it also can be inventive and inspiring; Perloff’s way of describing the so-called establishment poetry as “tepid and unambitious” is no more useful or critically penetrating than a mainstream book-reviewer calling experimental poetry meaningless and badly written; both kinds of evaluation mean nothing and lead nowhere. Perloff overstates her case when she says that the dominant “epiphanic” mode of the last three decades, which is largely a continuation of the Romantic lyric tradition, “has evidently failed to kindle any real excitement on the part of the public” (4). Evidently? All evidence points to the contrary. Rita Dove, Robert Pinsky, Stanley Kunitz–the Poet Laureates she herself cites in her argument– have produced considerable followings among both specialized and general audiences, and they even sell books. Granted, poetry is still largely marginalized in the United States, but doesn’t the rising number of literary publications, poetry festivals and slams, even poetry workshops (no matter what Perloff thinks about them), testify to the existence of some real excitement among the public? And what about Nobel Prize laureates Czeslaw Milosz, Joseph Brodsky, Octavio Paz, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, and Wislawa Szymborska? Though one wouldn’t call them experimental poets, they certainly manage to attract large numbers of readers in the United States, as well as around the world, something that can’t be said of any of the contemporary poets Perloff discusses in her book. If public enthusiasm is to be the criterion of a movement’s poetic success, as Perloff seems at times to suggest, then it is hard to share her faith in modernist experimentalism as a continuing force in the new century. Referring to the poetic innovations of Eliot and Pound, Randall Jarrell once said that a great revolution is hardest of all on the great revolutionists. This is not always true, for revolutionists may also grow into reactionaries, as Eliot did. But Perloff’s catastrophic reading of the modernist avant-garde as a vibrant movement tragically stopped by the historical realities of the twentieth century makes one wonder, at times, whether its “unfulfilled promise” can ever be realized.

 

Works Cited

 

• MacLeod, Glen, ed. Wallace Stevens and Ezra Pound. A special issue of The Wallace Stevens Journal 26.2 (Fall 2002): 131-266.
• Perloff, Marjorie. The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981.