Unending Design: The Forms of Postmodern Poetry

A new collection of essays from a distinguished critic of contemporary poetry. Marjorie Perloff is one of the foremost critics of contemporary American poetry writing today. Her works are credited by many with creating and sustaining new critical interest not only in the work of major modernist poets such as Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and Williams but also in the postwar tradition of American poetic innovation that ranges from the Black Mountain poets, through the New York School and concrete poetry, to the Language Poets of the 1980s and '90s. In Differentials, Perloff explores and defends her belief in the power of close reading, a strategy often maligned as reactionary in today's critical climate but which, when construed deferentially, is vital, she believes, to any true understanding of a literary or poetic work, irrespective of how traditional or experimental it is. Perloff also examines key issues in modernism, from Eliot's conservative poetics and Pound's nominalism to translation theory (Wittgenstein, Eugene Jolas, Haroldo de Campos), and the contemporary avant garde, as represented by writers like Susan Howe, Tom Raworth, Rae Armantrout, Ron Silliman, Ronald Johnson, Caroline Bergvall, and Kenneth Goldsmith. Ultimately, Perloff's most important offerings in Differentials are her remarkably original reflections on the aesthetic process: on how poetry works, and what it means, in and for our time.

Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy

Environmental Ethics and Energy Extraction: Textual Analysis of Iconic Cautionary Hollywood Tales: Chinatown (1974), There Will be Blood (2007), and Promised Land (2012)

Politics, Power and the Media

We recorded forty-five-minute dialogues for thirty straight days around New York City. Half these talks took place at a Union Square health-food store that we call “W.F.” Other locations included MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Opera House, Central Park, Prospect Park, and a Tribeca parking garage. What follows is our twentieth conversation. Here sickness, emptiness, a train delay, and an argument seem to prefigure disaster and the project’s sudden end. But this disaster—much like the two-character Japanese word for “crisis”: the first one meaning “danger,” the second, “opportunity”—offers clarities perhaps best expressed by a Japanese proverb: Luck turns Wait

A Squeeze of the Hand

F late-modernist painters opposed (in critic Clement Greenberg’s terms) to “using art to conceal art,” perspective-based realism proved the apex of vulgarity (“Modernist” 68). Similarly, for prominent advocates of postwar poetic experiment, the adoption of a first-person “I” limits a poem’s scope to one of narcissistic confession and/or self-inflating insight. Yet this reductive preference for the abstract over the representational gets problematized with the advent of Pop—both in Pop painting, and in Pop poetics.1 For just as the serial repetition of Warhol’s readymade icons produces as dramatic a dispersal of single-point perspective as any “flattening” of the pictureplane ever could, so Pop lyricism provides as provocative a critique of Confessionalist norms as does any overtly “opaque” text (Greenberg, Collected 29).2 Of course, Pop lyricism’s fusion of prepackaged data and perspectival multiplicity remains less renowned than does Pop painting’s.3 But by reconsidering the narrative complexities of Warhol’s and Roy Lichtenstein’s Pop output, I aim to recast artist/poet Joe Brainard’s undervalued I Remember text (1970–75) as an astute consolidation of Pop poetics—of a polyvalent form with (potentially) broad appeal: as endearing, anecdote-based assemblage; as shrewd art/literary hybrid; and as pointed commentary upon prevailing poetic paradigms. Crucial to Pop-art’s departure from static, single-point perspective—to its construction of a dynamic, multiplicitous perspectivism—is its reintroduction of narrative trope within the avowedly anti-narrative discourses of postwar painting and, later, poetry. Crucial to the estab-

Serial Realism: Poetic Narrative in Perspectives

ive written things before this in the natural vacuum that is the artificial hermetic closet that literature has been in for some time and the problem for me is in the closet confronting a typewriter and no person so that for me literature defined as literature has no urgency it has no need of address David Antin, tuning Close Listening This paper combines two modes of writing--the expository and the dialogical--in an attempt to excavate criticism from "the artificial hermetic closet" where it, too, has been stuck "for some time" (1) The essay's latter half thus consists of an excerpted conversation "about" David Antin. (2) Our hope is that this talk embodies much of what we value in Antin's work: its defiance of genre, its immediacy of address, its adoption and extension of the vernacular, its humour. But before presenting our own dialogue, we wish to briefly examine the current discourse concerning Antin's talk-poems (a discourse enhanced, in recent years, by the expanded distribution of Antin recordings via the internet). After offering more general remarks, we will focus on a particular printed text ("i never knew what time it was"), while also paying close attention to the PennSound audio record. Audio records of Antin's talk-poems, we will argue, provide an especially revealing sense of the poet at work. For even though, as critic Henry Sayre writes, "[T] he lack of punctuation and capitalization in the [typed] talk-poems require such a heightened attention level of the reader that something like a sense of presence is reestablished in the text," Antin's published pieces have been thoroughly revised, in some cases significantly expanded (Sayre 446). A comprehensive engagement with Antin's output thus requires (in Charles Bernstein's phrase) "close listening"--in addition to traditional close reading. Active Thinking When Antin steps out of his closet and enters a lecture hall, what does he want to tell the audience? Or, more properly speaking, what does he hope to create with them? In a 1974 letter to boundary z editor William Spanos, Antin writes: "i am a poet--a man talking in a way that makes things happen that i like to call thinking into and among important things" ("A Correspondence" 625). Around this time, Antin offers a related description of his work, suggesting that it is "no longer so clearly a poem a criticism an investigation but somehow lying between them or on their borders" (talking 55). These passages provide crucial insight into the talk-poems: we learn that talk-poems constitute events, that these events involve active thinking, we note that thinking defies conventional genres, occurring "on their borders." In his own words, Antin thinks "by any means" available to him (A Conversation q,2). The talk-poems blend genres--or, rather, demonstrate a distaste for genre, as well as for traditional demonstrations of poetic "technique." Being a poet does not amount to mastering meter and constructing precious objects. To be a poet--and this is a recurrent theme for Antin--is to go on a way of language. Similar to Heidegger, who thinks of mindful writing in terms of way-making, Antin conceives of talking as taking a walk: "I can imagine my impulse to speak, to move through language to some formulation, to some new place as being like a kind of walk" ("A Correspondence" 628). "Heavy" lyricism and dense versification are among the first items abandoned on this decisive return to nomadic talking. Antin's agile pursuit of the present of thinking overcomes any anxiety that his work should fit pre-existent categories. Vernacular Address Improvisation grants Antin access to the present: the moment in which thinking occurs. Near the beginning of a talk-poem performed at 1999's Los Angeles Bookfair ("how long is the present'), for example, the poet wonders if he should just read from talking at the boundaries. …

Andy Fitch

Papers

A Squeeze of the Hand

Serial Realism: Poetic Narrative in Perspectives

Re-Tuning: David Antin and the Audio Text