[In the following review, Cornis-Pope analyzes Poetry On and Off the Page.]

Written for specific conferences, symposia, or edited volumes, the fourteen essays collected in Poetry On & Off the Page reexamine from the perspective of the nineties “how much our assumptions about [modernist and postmodernist poeticity] have changed.” As the opening essay, “Postmodernism/Fin de Siecle” suggests, our understanding of postmodernism has shifted from a utopian definition in the early 1970s that “involved a romantic faith in the open-endedness of literary and artistic discourse,” to a more negative-prescriptive definition in the 1980s that hardened art “into a set of norms … that leave very little room for the free play.” Postmodernism's “fabled openness and decenteredness” has been preempted by a theoretical criticism that tells us what postmodernism means as “unequivocally as Brooks and Warren once told us what the word ‘design’ means in a Robert Frost poem by that name.”

While Marjorie Perloff's observation is valid, it ignores the positive role that more recent theoretical criticism has played in refining the definition of postmodernism, moving from often naive, formalistic-playful descriptions to a more considered sociocultural understanding that emphasizes the subversive-liberatory role played by postmodern practices. This theoretical rethinking actually fits Perloff's own desire to foreground postmodernism's differential potential in relation to modernism and the cultural contexts of the postwar decades. Perloff's essays divided between “Histories and Issues” and “Cases” illustrate a similar brand of revisionistic theoretical analysis that disturbs “holistic [literary] paradigms” by focusing on “differences/diversities” within them.

“Tolerance and Taboo: Modernist Primitivism and Postmodernist Pieties” argues—against the complaint of cultural critics that Michel Leiris's primitivism is racist and sexist—that “primitivisms, like the modernisms to which they are related, can only be plural,” a function of the history and geography they represent. “Barbed-Wire Entanglements” finds unexpected resemblances between the 1930s protest literature and Zukofsky's experimental “objectivism,” both questioning the “pieties of an earlier, more innocent modernism, by means of powerful wit, complex parody, contradiction of formal and emotional registers, and especially the dissolution of the coherent ‘lyric voice’ as controlling presence in the poetic text.”

After chiding poststructuralist theory and cultural studies for diluting and rigidifying innovative art, Perloff concedes in “What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Poetry” that practical criticism has had even more of a marginalizing effect on postmodernism. Poetry criticism, she argues, often works from theorems that “are put before us as if they were simply a matter of common sense, even though critical theory of the past half century has dismantled, step by step” these notions. Missing from the typical poetry review today is a “sense of history and a sense of theory,” especially of the poetic theory that has emphasized a “constructivist rather than expressivist” approach to poetry. The conclusion of this essay is not entirely pessimistic: while poetry reviewing in the popular literary press remains “largely impressionistic, uninformed and philistine,” new forms of discoursing about poetry developed on the Internet have caught up with this century's body of poetic thinking, demonstrating that “radical poetics” is not an aberration but a living discourse.

Perloff's own subtle understanding of historical-comparative poetics is demonstrated everywhere in her book. One of her major interests is in metrical formation, free verse, and verse/prose relationships. “Lucent and Inescapable Rhythms” focuses on the interactions between poetry and prose, rehistoricizing the question of metrical choice by reexamining Goethe's “natural” metrics, Rimbaud's prose poetry, Williams's version of “free verse,” and Beckett's experimental prose poems. Arguing that there is nothing inherently “free” about “free verse,” “After Free Verse” foregrounds the growing emphasis on the “materiality of the signifier, [and] the coincidence between enunciation and the enounced” in contemporary experimental poetry. Her examples are the “postlinear” and “multi-mentional” poetry of Clark Coolidge, Steve McCaffery, Karen MacCormack, Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe, and Bruce Andrews, mentioned repeatedly in the section of “Cases.” Dissociating herself from those who bemoan the influence of the electronic media on traditional discourses, Perloff emphasizes in her essays on McCaffery's concrete poetry (“Inner Tension/In Attention”) and John Cage's “mesostics” (“The Music of Verbal Space”) the new possibilities offered by media crossovers.

Two other essays in the section of “Cases” focus on related arts (photography and experimental video) to problematize further issues of expression, representation, and referentiality. “What Really Happened” uses Christian Boltanski's photographic installations to revise Barthes's philosophy of authentication, calling into question the association of the photographic referent with the real thing. The last essay in the book, “The Morphology of the Amorphous,” focuses on Bill Viola's videoscapes to argue that the digital technologies have offered new possibilities to artists interested in transcending conventional boundaries and capturing the “other, the visionary—the missing piece in the puzzle, the fourth dimension that ‘normal’ television can never convey.” This engagement with the poetic and cultural other raises the issue of the political significance of the new experimental art. Perloff tends to deemphasize this sociocultural function or to conceive it outside traditional concepts of engagement. Thus, in reviewing the controversy between Denise Levertov and Robert Duncan concerning the political commitment of the poet, “Poetry in Time of War” sides with Duncan, emphasizing the need to keep a tension between poetic and political discourse. Perloff's discomfort with explicit political agendas is obvious also in “How Russian Is It: Lyn Hejinian's Oxota” where she emphasizes subtle elements of poetic syntax and intertextual referencing but glosses over the more obvious political implications of the poem. This is one more example in a book rich in analytic demonstrations of Perloff's capacity to override traditional oppositions, presenting “an increasingly differentiated and complex space” for postmodern literary and critical practices.