21st–Century Modernism: The "New" Poetics

What if, despite the current predominance of a tepid and unambitious Establishment poetry, there were a powerful avant–garde that takes up, once again, the experimentation of the early twentieth–century? Marjorie Perloff′s manifesto argues that it is only at the turn of our own century that the powerful lessons of the avant–garde– an avant–garde cruelly disrupted by the Great War and subsequent political upheavals – are being learned. In detailed readings of T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Marcel Duchamp, and Velimir Khlebnikov, Perloff studies the strains which were to become so important today: the Eliotic understanding that form is meaning, Stein′s revisionary treatment of syntax and everyday language, Duchamp′s conceptualism, with its transformation of the ontology of the "work of art" itself, and Khlebnikov′s poetics of etymology, sound play, and spatial design. These individual but related poetic concerns are then examined in the work of a number of poets writing today. "To imagine a language," said Wittgenstein, "is to imagine a form of life." This revisionist narrative studies such key poetic "imaginings" both at the beginning of the twentieth century and at the millennium, so as to discover how their respective "forms of life" both converge and cross.

List of Plates. Acknowledgments. Introduction. 1 Avant–Garde Eliot. 2 Gertrude Stein’s Differential Syntx. 3 The Conceptual Poetics of Marcel Duchamp. 4 Khlebnikov’s Soundscapes: Letter, Number, and the Poetics of Zaum. 5 “Modernism” at the Millennium. Notes. Bibliography. Index.

Marjorie Perloff is Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of Humanities Emerita at Stanford University. She is the author of numerous books, including Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (1991), Wittgenstein′s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (1996), and Poetry On and Off the Page (1998). She is considered to be one of the most distinguished critics now writing on twentieth–century poetry and poetics.

"Perloff′s newest work offers refreshingly frank, controversial, and even inspiring ideas ... Perloff′s readings refuse to reaffirm orthodoxies, presenting innovative perspectives on poets, early modernism and its relation to the current scene. Far from being a reactionary call to return to the past, Perloff′s work envisions a bold continuation of modernism′s earlier revolutionary impulses. 21st–Century Modernism is vital and necessary reading for anyone interested in the history of modern poetry and where it is going." PN Review "The book commands respect, [...], not only for its energy and the precision of its readings, but for its refusal to surrender powers of arbitration from the artist to the teacher or theorist." Times Literary Supplement "The heart of [Perloff′s] book is her enthusiasm – a well–researched and carefully argued enthusiasm" The Virginia Quarterly Review