Eyewear usually enjoys the work of Marjorie Perloff.
Her 21st-century Modernism is one of the key books in the Eyewear household.
Now to her recent review in the TLS of September 1, 2006, which arrived today in the post - her review of David Lehman's The Oxford Book Of American Poetry; printed beside three new poems by John Ashbery, the preminent American poet of the present age. Eyewear's own review can be read as an earlier post.
Perloff's review itself is critical, but perceptive, noting, particularly, Lehman's twin faults of favouring powerful contemporaries, and giving short shrift to major innovative figures like Stein and Pound (and in the process fetishizing the lyric form, and witty poems by "clever, well-educated" people - Silliman's School of Quietude by another name).
A few things. The TLS (and by the way Eyewear) exist primarily for clever, well-educated people; very few dull, uneducated people read literary theory and modern poetry - and, elitism be darned - Pound and Stein had no time for them - so why should Lehman be any different? Perloff throws the baby out with the bathwater here, too, in that her wry dismissal of the very fine (and innovative) poet Aaron Fogel misses Lehman's point, in rescuing marginal, eccentric and undervalued voices by presenting their poems beside more established figures - Fogel, if Perloff had bothered to read him carefully, is the kind of poet her writing usually champions - instead, here, she reads his brilliant "The Printer's Error" (which out-Muldoons Muldoon) as just another luxury of a middle-class mind.
Perloff is unduly harsh in her final judgement: "no, the Oxford Book is merely tedious in a corporate way". As an editor and poet, I find such statements deeply unfair. Whatever else Lehman may be (he certainly appears well-educated) he is surely no slouch. Years of serious attention must have gone in to the selection of this book, and, while it is a flawed canon, its unusual, eclectic, and often surprising choices are hardly tedious. Perhaps the tedium is based partly on Perloff's over-familiarity with the material (she is after all an expert on modern and postmodern American poetries) and should not be blamed on the chef serving the same expert salad one more time - if one dines at the Waldorf, there may be nuts.
No, what Eyewear finds most interesting is the final paragraph of the review, which must be quoted almost in full:
Her 21st-century Modernism is one of the key books in the Eyewear household.
Now to her recent review in the TLS of September 1, 2006, which arrived today in the post - her review of David Lehman's The Oxford Book Of American Poetry; printed beside three new poems by John Ashbery, the preminent American poet of the present age. Eyewear's own review can be read as an earlier post.
Perloff's review itself is critical, but perceptive, noting, particularly, Lehman's twin faults of favouring powerful contemporaries, and giving short shrift to major innovative figures like Stein and Pound (and in the process fetishizing the lyric form, and witty poems by "clever, well-educated" people - Silliman's School of Quietude by another name).
A few things. The TLS (and by the way Eyewear) exist primarily for clever, well-educated people; very few dull, uneducated people read literary theory and modern poetry - and, elitism be darned - Pound and Stein had no time for them - so why should Lehman be any different? Perloff throws the baby out with the bathwater here, too, in that her wry dismissal of the very fine (and innovative) poet Aaron Fogel misses Lehman's point, in rescuing marginal, eccentric and undervalued voices by presenting their poems beside more established figures - Fogel, if Perloff had bothered to read him carefully, is the kind of poet her writing usually champions - instead, here, she reads his brilliant "The Printer's Error" (which out-Muldoons Muldoon) as just another luxury of a middle-class mind.
Perloff is unduly harsh in her final judgement: "no, the Oxford Book is merely tedious in a corporate way". As an editor and poet, I find such statements deeply unfair. Whatever else Lehman may be (he certainly appears well-educated) he is surely no slouch. Years of serious attention must have gone in to the selection of this book, and, while it is a flawed canon, its unusual, eclectic, and often surprising choices are hardly tedious. Perhaps the tedium is based partly on Perloff's over-familiarity with the material (she is after all an expert on modern and postmodern American poetries) and should not be blamed on the chef serving the same expert salad one more time - if one dines at the Waldorf, there may be nuts.
No, what Eyewear finds most interesting is the final paragraph of the review, which must be quoted almost in full:
"... [M]aking my way through this heavy tome - too heavy to hold on one's lap or carry from room to room, much less on a train or plane - I wondered whether, in the digital age, it isn't perhaps time to put a moratorium (ten years?) on the production of blockbuster anthologies. To paraphrase O'Hara, the internet is good too - more fluid, flexible, and much more accomodating, both to tradition, and to our changing perception of the individual talent."
There are so many things wrong with this, I must put them in some sort of alphabetic order, in order to reply:
a) what is wrong with a heavy book? - are slim, lightweight ones better? - is Moby Dick, or Remembrance of Things Past, a light book or series of books?; how is this a meaningful evaluative statement?;
b) why would one want a poetry book that one can "carry from room to room" - or onto planes and trains - is this critic on the move? - why not sit still and read?; is the poetry book the new liquid bomb?;
c) more oddly, how does the internet answer the requirement to have a lighter, more transportable book - unless one is thinking of that clever device, the lap-top? - in which case the medium is being confused with the text;
d) so, in the digital age, moratoriums should be put on big, heavy books of poetry - in favour, one imagines, of unbearably light e-books;
e) in this uncomfortable moment of American fascism, why should anyone take seriously an American request to stamp down on any editing or publishing of poetry (that most radical of forms) - and why should canon-formation ever be arrested for ten years? - an eternity in a poetry school or movement - unless Perloff agrees with Lehman that the "last avant-garde" is among us;
f) turning to the internet, which Eyewear favours, yes, Perloff is correct - the internet is good too; but it is also only an instrument for editors and poets. The same nerve, skill, eye, ear, openness to the new, and fondness for the old, must be owned and operated by editors of digital anthologies, sites, blogs and so on;
g) more seriously, internet anthologies are not yet accepted by the critical apparatus that Perloff supports and endorses; the TLS has not reviewed, for example, nthposition's ground-breaking - and world-famous - internet anthology, 100 poets against the war, which spawned countless print copy-cat versions;
h) the mainstream poetic community has still to fully embrace the fluidity of the internet which Perloff rightly celebrates - partly because order, rigidity, and control form the basis for most poet-editor's social identity - and the internet threatens the order it promises to replace with a newer version.
I will be chairing a panel on the internet and literature on November 23rd at Norwich for a conference, more about that soon. In the meantime, for blockbuster anthologies on the net, look to September for a new one from Nthposition - Babylon Burning.
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