Turning Back the Clock

Michael Lista, for the National Post, reviews Marjorie Perloff’s Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century, her new book on conceptual and concrete poetry. Lista, while sort of sympathetic to the project, argues against these tendencies and for what he calls an “arrière-garde”—which seems to be, simply, contemporary poetry as we know it, and as it’s already celebrated by the big presses and major prizes. How exciting! What vision!

The problem, which is not an uninteresting one, is that Perloff frames conceptual writing in terms of its modernist antecedents, and Lista points out that the newer works are not completely faithful to those projects:

The visual beauty of many of the pages of Pound’s Cantos led to the scopophilia of the concrete poetry movement; the structural bravura and meticulous parallelism of Joyce’s prose inspired the constraints of the Oulipo; the fetishizing of minutiae, and the verisimilitude of ontogeny and phylogeny in Pound and Joyce birthed the conceptual poetics. But the expressionistic lyric of Eliot, the harrowing mastery of Joyce’s prose, is in each case the husk of Modernism that is discarded without regret.

The problem is that these avant-gardes are fragments of the total Modernist vision, and therefore they can’t fully shore us against the contemporary predicament, interconnected, information-saturated, and simultaneously old and young as it is.

Ok, but wouldn’t this be akin to, say, in a different era, critiquing Pound for taking from Browning’s dramatic monologue while leaving behind the coherency of the individual speaker? Or critiquing Schoenberg for taking inspiration from the chromaticism of late romanticism while shucking its lyric expressionism? These critiques could be made, but they would have to be taken for what they are—arguments for neo-romanticism. In the same way, Lista argues not for a continuation of the modernist project of “making it new,” but for a sort of neo-modernism—this time fully legible and institutionalized. Of course new forms of writing don’t take wholly from older forms—nor do new works complete the vision of dead writers! If they did, they wouldn’t be new forms of writing, and also, um, they wouldn’t be any good.