I sent this to New Poetry today. Sorry for duplication for some of you. -
Henry
>The Yunte Huang review (in the same issue of Boston Review -
>http://bostonreview.mit.edu) of Marjorie Perloff's new book 21st Century
>Modernism is pretty thorough & interesting.
>
>It looks like, according to Perloff, the early Modernists were radical,
>utopian, anti-elitist about art, materialist about language, and
>"anti-psychological". Her New Modernists (Bernstein, Howe, Hejinian,
>McCaffery) heroically take up where the old Modernists & Russian Futurists
>left off, after the wars & reactionary movements of the 20th century. The
>familiar dichotomy is set up between experimental dislocation & alienation
>versus bland, conventional mainstream poetics.
>
>Early Modernism will always radiate an aura of springtime, utopian
>excitement. The "found objects" of sudden constructivism. From the
>street to the microcosmos. But from the review anyway (and I will want to
>take a look at her book) it seems like Perloff must base her argument on
>extreme selectivity, both with regard to the poets involved and their
>thematic ambitions. Alienation only go so far, once you're off the
>street & into the sphere of rhetoric (Perloff's book is part of a series
>called "Blackwell Manifestos", from an established academic press). The
>ambition of epic, for example, takes up the problem of speaking to vast
>nations about how to sustain life & dwell in the earth for the long
>term. From this perspective the rootless enthusiasm of "radical utopian
>art" can appear trivial. The "bourgeois" tendencies of Joyce or Crane,
>for example, motivated them to reshape, rather than scorn & reject,
>traditional genres & modes of discourse. Perloff's argument, it seems, is
>reductive in this sense: it effaces the presence of past poetries on the
>poetics of the present, in order to foreground and exaggerate a dichotomy
>between "mainstream convention" and heroic avant-garde. "New Formalism"
>tried a similar tendentious gambit, a few years ago, from a different
>direction.
>
>Henry
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