[In the following excerpt, Golding offers a positive critique of Perloff's thesis and central arguments in Radical Artifice.]

Paul Mann, Peter Bürger, Andreas Huyssen, Russell Berman, Fredric Jameson—these are only a few of the most familiar names in that substantial chorus caroling the death of the avant-garde in recent years. Too many theorists of the avant-garde's demise, however, overlook or have no way to explain (beyond the usual arguments about co-option) the continued presence of what looks for all the world like avant-garde practice. Admittedly the paradoxes of “co-option” or “complicity” are almost infinitely regressive. What do we make of Robert Longo selling the image of himself sporting a mock (what else?) turtleneck in the service of Gap sportswear while he is also responsible for the cover of Bruce Andrew's I Don't Have Any Paper So Shut Up, a savagely satirical book brought out by an “alternative” or “small” press (Sun and Moon) that, in turn, also publishes a “classics” series? No wonder Jameson is puzzled as to how to tell the difference between critique and symptom in postmodern art. Still, as Marjorie Perloff puts it in Radical Artifice, despite the theoretical arguments for its disappearance, or its dilution into a Jamesonian “symptom,” “avant-garde art continues to be a reality. There is no reason to believe … that radical art practices will not continue to manifest themselves (often where and when least expected), even as their gradual assimilation into mainstream culture will not necessarily insure their commodification” (201). The four books under review [Perloff's Radical Artifice, Christopher Beach's ABC of Influence, Peter Quartermain's Disjunctive Poetics, and Linda Reinfeld's Language Poetry,] here attest to the ongoing life not so much of “the” avant-garde as of various intersecting avant-gardes in American poetry, apparently active in practice even if dead in theory. Together these books constitute a valuable history and analysis of those avant-gardes' history and current status.

Perloff's subtitle to Radical Artifice states her subject crisply: “writing poetry in the age of media.” That is, she sets out to examine “what really happens on the video screen, at the computer terminal, or in the advertising media, and then to see how poetic or art discourse positions itself vis-à-vis these powerful new environments” (15). John Cage acts as tutelary spirit; discussed in the first and last chapters as part of the vigorous defense of avant-garde art's continued vitality that frames the book, he is central to Perloff's postmodernism in his perception that “from now [the 1950s] on poetry would have to position itself … in relation to the media” (xiii). Yet unlike some theorists of the postmodern, Perloff does not argue for the collapse of the distinction between art and mass media, even while she admits that their boundaries are permeable. Her goal, rather, is to explore their relation.

Perloff organizes her discussion around the opposition between naturalness/transparency and artifice (James Wright versus Cage, Ezra Pound versus Clark Coolidge, to take two of her examples), and as readers familiar with her work since The Poetics of Indeterminacy (1981) would expect, this is a book written, as the title of one chapter has it, “against transparency.” Perloff borrows the term “radical artifice” from Richard A. Lanham, who uses it to describe verbal and graphic styles produced by the possibilities for manipulating text provided by the digital revolution.¹ Her purpose is to account for the forms in which that artifice has emerged in poetry, to consider why “the demand for a natural or transparent poetry (Pound's famous ‘direct treatment of the thing’), a demand that was the cornerstone of modernism, has given way … to the artifice one associates … with the nineteenth-century fin-de-siècle”—an artifice manifested today in “a significant body of poetry (or what claims to be poetry) … eccentric in its syntax, obscure in its language, and mathematical rather than musical in its form” (xi).

The writing that interests Perloff has reached this condition of artifice through “the transformation of the speech model” (54) that dominated much (not all, she admits) high modernist theory and practice (chapter 2); through a “deconstruction of image” (78) running counter to the modernist preoccupation with luminous detail, precision, and accuracy (chapters 3 and 4); and through a turn from the allegedly organic measures of free verse to number-based, overtly formulaic measures (chapter 5). On this latter point, Perloff convincingly uses the examples of the French Oulipo group, Cage's Roaratorio, Louis Zukofsky's 80 Flowers, and Lyn Hejinian's My Life to explicate a procedural poetics more generative than constraining, and as “free” in its own way as free verse. Then the subject of Perloff's chapter 6 becomes not what but how such writing means, as she responds to the familiar complaints of its nonreferentiality by reading two Ashbery and Bernstein lyrics against the background of “the formulaic and synthetic rhetoric” that saturates the airwaves and the public domain. In this context, “poetic discourse defines itself as that which can violate the system” (189)—one traditional role of avant-gardes. In a decade when Ronald Reagan could be hailed as the Great Communicator, the poet's job became to stop making sense.

Especially suspect for Perloff are terms like “speech,” “image,” “natural,” “transparent,” “authentic,” “organic,” “unmediated. These are the terms, along with “open,” “raw,” and “naked,” typically used by and about 1950s and 1960s avant-gardes, terms the datedness of which should remind us that the poetic avant-garde is a process, heterogeneous, historically contingent, self-revising. Especially today, such terms should be suspect. When Geraldo, Phil Donahue et al. are the measure of “talk,” “sincerity,” and “authenticity,” the speech-based lucidity of a Philip Levine, Perloff argues looks like another simulacrum. These days Coke, not poetry, is “the real thing,” and ex-heavyweight champ Evander Holyfield (a puffed up light-heavy) is marketed as “the real deal.” In the Age of Donahue (the next step, paradoxically, beyond the Age of Lowell in its media-tion of public confession), a more genuinely critical poetry “is coming to see its role as the production of what we might call an alternate language system,” a “discourse that defers reading” (49, 105).

My reservation here is that this argument for a “discourse that defers reading” seems to rest on the homology (open to debate) between formal and social disruption characteristic of the historical avant-garde. This position forces Perloff to exclude the various poetries occupying a middle ground between the transparent voice-centered lyric and radical artifice and thus somewhat limits her sense of the possibilities for cultural critique available in these other poetries.² I am more sympathetic to the instrumentalist poetics of, say, an Adrienne Rich or a June Jordan than I suspect Perloff is, even while I agree with her observation that this writing adopts the representational strategies of the culture it is allegedly attacking. This lacuna may be necessary, however, to Perloff's making her case forcefully. One can't cover everything, and these other poetries already have their vocal defenders. For her part, Perloff remains the most articulate and energetic apologist that the poetry of radical artifice could hope for.

Accompanying the deconstruction of speech by radical artifice is that of the image mentioned earlier. This procedure depends on the conviction that media images are now simultaneously so pervasive, powerful, sophisticated, and depthless that the very idea of “image” demands not duplication but a deconstruction enacted in three ways: by the use of image in full awareness of its deceptiveness (Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Michael Palmer, Leslie Scalapino, Ron Silliman); by a move toward syntax rather than image as poetic dominant (from Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofsky, and George Oppen to a number of Language poets); by focus on the word itself as graphic Image. This third mode, to which Perloff devotes a chapter in itself, has emphasized “experiments with the visualization of poetic text” (129)—Cage's mesostics are one example. The premise that “all writing—and certainly all poetic writing—is inevitably ‘seen’ as well as ‘seen through’ or heard” (120) launches Perloff into an insightful discussion of the relation between the verbal and visual text, of the verbal as visual. This chapter is characteristically compelling and thought-provoking in its moves back and forth among the art world, advertising, and poetry, among Robert Venturi, Marcel Broodthaers, concrete poetry, Steve McCaffery, Johanna Drucker, Barbara Kruger. I say “characteristically” because it exhibits virtues that run throughout Radical Artifice: incisive close readings that guide but do not march one through a text; an informed internationalist focus; the ability to discuss poetry in relation to other arts in a genuinely revealing way; a defense of experimental writing that takes the doubts of the uninitiated or unconvinced seriously; acquaintance with a remarkably wide range of “texts” (broadly defined). Compared with Perloff's earlier work, Radical Artifice also shows a stronger element of cultural criticism and a more pervasive use of the insights (not, blessedly, the jargon) of poststructuralist theory. It is probably her fullest defense to date of Language poetry; at the same time, Language poetry here is only part of the picture, not the whole.

Notes

1. The Lanham essay to which Perloff refers is “The Electronic Word: Literary Study and the Digital Revolution” (New Literary History 20 [1989]: 265–90). For an earlier, full discussion of the useful distinction between looking “through” and “at” a text that Lanham invokes in this essay, see chapter 5, “At and Through: The Opaque Style and Its Uses,” of Literacy and the Survival of Humanism (New Haven: Yale UP, 1983). Here Lanham distinguishes, as the two ends of a subtly graded spectrum, between “transparent styles” that “work unnoticed,” that we look through, and “opaque ones, which invite stylistic self-consciousness” (59) and that we look at.

2. On the question of critical allegiances, see Perloff's essay “From Tolerance to Irrelevance: Talking about Poetry in the Academy” (Sagetrieb 10.3 [1991]: 7–16), where she argues that “‘talk about poetry’” needs “not tolerance, which … goes hand in hand with irrelevance (i.e., if it's all more or less equally OK, who finally cares?) but passion” (16).