[In the following review of Radical Artifice, Francis discusses Perloff's critique of modern culture and the role of avant-garde poetry.]

As its title succinctly announces, Marjorie Perloff's collection of essays [Radical Artifice] attempts to assess the impact of our culture's predominant modes of communication on contemporary poetry: “to understand,” as she writes, “the interplay between lyric poetry, generally regarded as the most conservative, the most intransigent of the ‘high’ arts, and the electronic media.” These media include sound and video tape, faxes and modems, telephones and computers and four-color slick magazine reproductions—the whole panoply of technology by which the sending and receiving of messages has been sped up and expanded and through which instrumental discourses like advertising work their mass effects. Where does charged and cadenced language fit in this scheme, Perloff wonders, and what can words do to resist being merely “processed”?

Writing that foregrounds its materiality and its difficulty, its status outside the “natural” effusions of mediaspeak provides Perloff with an answer, the “radical artifice” of her book's title. Presided over by the late John Cage, who is credited with recognizing in the 1950s that poetry would have to “position itself, not vis-à-vis the landscape or the city or this or that political event, but in relation to the media that, like it or not, occupy an increasingly large part of our verbal, visual, and acoustic space”—Perloff's book is an anatomy of the various ways contemporary poets have handled this thematic. (She also praises three of Cage's own “poetic” multimedia works, describing and interpreting his Lecture on the Weather, written for the Bicentennial; Roaratoria: An Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake (1978); and the six Norton Lectures given at Harvard during the 1988/89 academic year.)

One possibility explored by contemporary poets is the articulation of “an alternative language system” whose insistent eschewal of transparency, referentiality, and conventional sense itself can make for a practice that is proof against capitalism's typical commodifications: thus “language poetry” may include in its opaque mishmash sentences from billboards (Joan Retallack's “Liquid Smoke, wine or beer pep up yellow cheese”), but billboards will never return the favor. Meanwhile the ideal of poetry as “common language,” periodically resurrected since Wordsworth and central to early Modernist aesthetics, is shown to be untenable in the age of talk show teleculture, where horrific confessions are conveyed in clichés and made banally available to all. To differentiate their utterance from this, poets like Leslie Scalapino, Clark Coolidge, and Susan Howe practice a non-rational, disjunctive poetics that may yet refer obliquely to the same profound problems “investigated” by Donahue and his ilk. And in responding to the “videation of our culture”—an evolution provocatively mapped by Perloff through comparisons of the proportions of text vs. imagery in advertising from the ’20s, ’40s and ’60s—poetry eschews the imagism of the Modernists or the “deep image” of 1960s poets like Robert Bly and James Wright for a surface defamiliarization: “‘making strange’” she writes, “now occurs at the level of phrasal and sentence structure rather than at the level of the image cluster so that poetic language cannot be absorbed into the discourse of the media …”

With experimental or avant-garde writing like this—and the implications of such labels are explored as well in Perloff's book—poetry becomes a practice “that defers reading” and such metaphors as “following” or “seeing through” it are repeatedly problematized. Whether it's a poetry that stresses language's materiality—as in the concrete works of Steve McCaffery and Johanna Drucker—or adheres to a strict preordained procedure for its effects, like the ingenious autobiographical projects of Lyn Hejinian—the work that interests Perloff is often just that which cries out for someone else to assist in its explication. Like many another gifted critic, Perloff is led by her erudition to champion poetry that lay readers might well find impenetrable—poetry, in effect, that requires her. And while her own efforts in this direction are commendable, her readings as lucid as the texts gnomic, one can't help wondering if a poetry which offers a radical accessibility might be more likely to instruct or delight over the media's ubiquitous din.