[In the following review, Butterick commends the ambition of The Poetics of Indeterminacy, but criticizes what he sees as Perloff's unconvincing arguments and loose interdisciplinary approach.]

This [The Poetics of Indeterminacy] is a praiseworthy attempt to engage an important development in recent Anglo-American poetry and to find ways to measure it. Perloff believes that there have been buried in Modernism “two separate though often interwoven strands: the Symbolist mode that Lowell inherited from Eliot and Baudelaire and, beyond them, from the great Romantic poets, and the ‘anti-Symbolist’ mode of indeterminacy or ‘undecidability,’ of literalness and free play, whose first real exemplar was the Rimbaud of the Illuminations.” She calls this the “other tradition,” borrowing her term from the title of one of John Ashbery's poems. It is a tradition of writing that, as it has progressed, has grown increasingly away from our expectations of poetry, alienated in part by its own limitations and highly transitional experimental nature. Following an introductory chapter on the Rimbaud inheritance, there are essays on Gertrude Stein, Williams, Pound, Beckett, Ashbery, John Cage, and David Antin. The inclusion of Beckett and Cage as poets will, no doubt, surprise some readers and awaken others, though whether it strengthens the book and creates confidence in the author's perspective is matter for debate.

Perloff begins by contrasting Ashbery with Eliot and then Stevens to make her point that there is this “other tradition” that has survived the Symbolist mode. She makes her way to the kind of poetry she wishes to discuss through Jerome Rothenberg, who has surveyed the Modernist legacy in his Revolution of the Word, and then through Northrop Frye's various definitions of “poetry,” “verse,” “free verse,” and that most overlooked one, “free prose,” settling for poetry as “language art” or “word-system.” In this context, she discusses Stein, Beckett, and the others as “representative” (her italics) poets, though why Beckett, for example, and not Zukofsky or Jackson MacLow is never quite established. Perhaps if she had chosen poets more commonly renowned as central—such as Robert Duncan—we might have more confidence in her history. As it is, a poet such as Duncan, whose devout Romanticism and anti-Symbolist “free play” exist side by side, weakens her identification of the “other tradition.” (In another sense the “other tradition” is an unfortunate choice, suggesting as it does the occult.) There are abundant references throughout, invocations of authority and displays of comprehensiveness, though some of them seem indiscriminate. For example, in mentioning Allen Ginsberg and Keith Abbott among the “followers” of Rimbaud, it remains odd that she does not cite Charles Olson, specifically his “Variations” based on Rimbaud's “Délires,” or the fact that Olson considered Rimbaud among the writers who made what he called the “post-modern” possible.

Early failure to establish convincing terms results in a later uncomfortableness. I am not sure what is gained by the importation of such designations as Tzvetan Todorov's “undecidability” over the more straightforward “ambiguity,” unless it is the aleatory implications particularly favorable to Cage later in the volume. (Its use, along with extensive passages from other critics, notably in the visual arts, establishes a wider cultural context but also raises the question whether the author has a penchant for “authority,” that is, beyond her own powers of mind.) She eventually defines “undecidability” as a form of incoherence, typical of the poetry of Rimbaud and his heirs: “For what happens in Pound's Cantos, as in Stein's Tender Buttons or Williams' Spring and All or Beckett's How It Is or John Cage's Silence, is that the symbolic evocations generated by words on the page are no longer grounded in a coherent discourse, so that it becomes impossible to decide which of these associations are relevant and which are not.” At one point (p. 71) she writes how critics, in discussing Stein's Cubism, “repeatedly speak of ‘non-representational’ or ‘abstract’ art, of ‘flat surface,’ of ‘shifting perspective’ and ‘interacting planes.’ All these are slippery terms,” she contends, and goes on to note the extent. In that light, her own should be judged no less, for is she not guilty of the same “slipperiness” with “indeterminacy,” “undecidability,” “free play,” and the like? In discussing Ashbery's poem “The Other Tradition,” she ascribes to it “a precise tonality of feeling,” but she never says what the feeling is. Attenuated irony? Shifting consciousness? Discontinuity? Disengagement (which Kenneth Rexroth once called “the art of the Beat Generation”)? Parody? “The fact of addressing someone”? She is as evasive as the poem is—although much to her credit, it happens to be one of Ashbery's best.

By the time Perloff gets to Ashbery she feels she has earned her terms and perspective, although there is no attempt to directly correlate Ashbery with anti-Symbolism, the “other tradition” itself (even when discussing the poem entitled “The Other Tradition”). In other words, the argument is not so much developed as developmental. As a procedure, it moves by example and is only loosely deductive, taking little enough trouble to sustain itself or practice consistency and reiteration. It moves instead through a series of readings, some of which are masterful. Comparison remains her method and solution: an Ashbery creation is “rather like a Max Ernst frottage.” Her arguments are retinal “floaters”—always before our eyes but not locked into sight. She is sturdiest in her readings: no frivolity, no wobble. There are excellent comparisons of Stein and Sitwell, Ashbery and Auden. It is only when she tries to supersede the individual and collective readings, advance them into some larger drift of significance—a literary movement—that she trundles, scuffs her own keenness, and causes our enthusiasm to fall away. Moreover, throughout her examination she uses language of negative implication—words and phrases like “anomalies,” “strange,” “ambiguity,” “irreducible ambiguity,” “curiously enigmatic,” “enigma texts,” “we are no nearer to the meaning,” “unsolvable mystery”—to describe the work under view. These not only add up, subliminally, as characteristics of “indeterminacy,” but they suggest that, despite the author's professed acceptance of the phenomenon, there is a longing for coherence that undermines her unwarranted or, really, irrelevant confidence of tone.

The culmination of Perloff's “other tradition” is Cage and Antin, neither of whom is universally recognized as a poet. Her choice of writers is at the very heart of the issue, since hers is an argument by example. She never convinces that Antin's improvised “talk poems” are not mere talk and very little in the way of poetry, no matter how entertaining. His “remembering recording representing” quoted at length is hardly different from Ginsberg's Allen Verbatim or Olson's Muthologos, collections of talks and interviews. Again, comparing her examples to any of the transcribed addresses in the recent Talking Poetics from the Naropa Institute or the Hills magazine “Talks” issue (which include Antin's contemporaries), Antin is just “talk”—informed, enchanting, amusing. But talk is not poetry, even if the latter is defined as a higher form of speech. Perloff contends that form does not matter, but how are Antin's pieces different, if not formally, from typical oral discourse or even oral history as it is now widely practiced? Without punctuation or justified margins, and incorporating redundancies, Antin's “talk poems” are “unfinished” oral history. They are, perhaps, more self-conscious, in terms of language, than the ordinary subject speaking into the recorder for the historian; but the fact that these poems arise in the period of oral history and portable tape recorders and the regular taping of poetry readings further questions another value they might have had—originality.

Was there not always a Cracker-Barrel School of poetry? By insisting that form is not of the matter, Perloff's criteria and definitions remain vague: a “complex elaboration of metonymic threads” that create “a projective or generative stance,” or a “process of discovery enacted by … associative rhythm.” How different are those occasions from a Hairy Ape monologue or Ulysses? They sound, in fact, like a better classroom lecture or an evening with a professional monologuist, or anyone with the gift of the gab, a slice from a filibuster. She herself calls Antin's a “three-ring performance.” Moreover, it is not the mode but the quality of language that counts. Antin on the page, in the examples given, just doesn't dance before the eyes or within the porches of the ear. Perloff's explication of a passage concerning air-travel from his “is this the right place?” is thus ludicrous, like explicating the chatter of a relative just flown in for the holidays. It leads one to doubt, if not her judgment, at least her criteria.

It is not the “poetry” (which is generally intolerable to traditional expectations) but the concept that carries Cage or Antin about on its shoulders, brings them into view. Perloff says as much, referring to Cage's famous composition 4’33” in which the pianist simply sits at his instrument for four minutes and thirty-three seconds, hands in lap. She asks, “how many of us would have conceived of the idea in the first place?” She is right, of course, but how, it will be asked, is that different from the student who places the plaster bust of Socrates in his study face to the wall. How more profound? The all-white or all-black canvas, the blank Nothing Book, Warhol's Sleep, the pet rock—once; we will pay our attention once to such a concept or novelty, but hardly a second time. For most readers, the art of Cage and Antin remains a harmless solipsism and metalinguistic exercise.

The author might have been better advised editorially. The book's index is of names only, not such topics as collage, montage, oral poetry, performance, or the like, which would have been useful in this kind of a history of ideas to follow up strands of argument and better test any of the major premises. The volume also needs a summarizing chapter, in the spirit of its present final paragraph on the usefulness of such conceptual art forms. Otherwise the book appears to be several separate, self-contained essays, conveniently bound together. Indeed, the appearance twice of E. H. Gombrich's analysis of Cubism (pp. 56 and 128) with duplicated bibliographical information, or the author's quoting Ashbery's phrase, “hymn to possibility” (as if it had special efficacy) on repeated occasions (three times with redundant footnotes), encourages this impression. Perloff similarly invokes Frye's concept of “associative rhythm”—with which she begins (p. 40) and ends (p. 317) her discussion—without any indication that it has been used earlier. The impression is that the argument is not as rigorous and inevitable as it might otherwise have been.

In sum, Perloff is right to recognize the continuing role of Rimbaud in twentieth-century poetry—his tradition and the phenomenon of “indeterminacy”—but it is not more decisive or total a view than to speak of the Emersonian or nominalist or post-Romantic tradition in recent poetry. In fact, post-Romantic or even the plainer “experimental” makes better sense. Her study, however, does help us to see that what some of these artists are offering is not necessarily pleasure, but ways of creation and of expanding our awareness of language as creators and audience, and for this The Poetics of Indeterminacy can be readily praised. For those for whom a comprehensive view of contemporary Anglo-American poetry is not a chief concern, the book will be highly valuable. It has opened the doors wide to speculation. On the one hand, the most serious limitations remain the author's choice of terms and her method of argument, including her widespread appropriation of extraneous judgment, and, closely related, her specific examples of representative poets, together with a sense that the book is a not-quite-random series of essays, lacking a conclusive chapter. On the other hand, she champions new thinking about new areas of concern and is capable of exemplary readings, while the amount of her labor is notable—and discouraging to future superficial treatments. Any investigation coming after had better be at least as hard-working as this one.