[In the following review, Materer gives a positive evaluation of The Futurist Moment.]

Marjorie Perloff's new book, The Futurist Moment, which follows The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (1981) and The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Pound Tradition (1985), confirms her position as one of the few critics who is essential to our understanding of contemporary poetry. In The Poetics of Indeterminacy, her distinction of two traditions in modern poetry made possible a wider and more sympathetic reading of both modern and contemporary works than other critics have given us, which is clear from the book's treatment of writers such as Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett, John Ashbery, David Antin, and John Cage. The Futurist Moment is not only a brilliant work of criticism but also a formidable piece of scholarship that clarifies the historical development of these traditions.

Two of Perloff's earlier books explore a major contemporary poet in each tradition. She explains in Poetics of Indeterminacy that when she was writing The Poetic Art of Robert Lowell (1973) she saw a profound difference between the Symbolist mode that Lowell inherited from Baudelaire and Eliot and an “‘anti-symbolist’ mode of indeterminacy or ‘undecidability,’ of literalness and free play, whose first real exemplar was the Rimbaud of the Illuminations” (p. vii). In her Frank O'Hara: Poet among Painters (1977), she treated a poet whose work was a natural antithesis to Lowell's art because he opposed the “neo-symbolist” tradition of Eliot. Perloff used terms such as “raw” and “cooked,” and “civilized” and “barbarian,” to analyze this opposition; but her terminology soon became more original and precise. In The Poetics of Indeterminacy, she analyzed the anti-Symbolist “other tradition” in terms of Rimbaud and Modernist painting as one in which “the free play of possible significations replaces iconic representation.” Significantly, one of her most illuminating citations from an artist in this tradition is from a painter, René Magritte: “‘People who look for symbolic meanings fail to grasp the inherent poetry and mystery of the image. … But if one does not reject the mystery, one has quite a different response. One asks other things’” (p. 44).

To analyze O'Hara, who was a curator of the New York Museum of Modern Art, it was necessary to analyze the Postmodernist art of New York in the fifties and sixties. Collage is already an important concept in Frank O'Hara, but it becomes a key one in many of the essays collected in Perloff's Dance of the Intellect (1985). To describe the way the “other tradition” works in Pound or Williams, she writes that the mode used “is that of collage, the setting side by side or juxtaposition of disparate materials without commitment to explicit syntactical relations between elements.” Meaning in this tradition is relatively free because the syntax evades unambiguous predication and clear subordinations. As John Gage writes of collage art, “‘The situation must be Yes-and-No not either-or’” (p. 83).

In The Futurist Moment, Perloff explores the relationship of the “other tradition” to the “Futurist” tradition. Perloff believes that the “moment” of Futurism before World War I was crucial to modern art and that its importance has been obscured. Her title comes from Renato Poggioli's The Theory of the Avant-Garde, which gives priority among the prewar isms to Italian Futurism: “‘The futurist moment belongs to all the avant-gardes and not only to the one named for it …’” (p. xvii). Perloff thinks that the seminal importance of Futurism has not been recognized because the Italian Futurists were later associated with Fascism, and so their innovations in collage, manifesto, sound poetry, typography, syntactic dislocation, and poetic form have been neglected by later critics who dislike the tone or politics of their declarations. A still more important reason for this neglect by literary critics is that prior to this book there has been no critic ambitious enough to synthesize material in English, French, Italian, and Russian, and in both verbal and visual genres, in order to assess Futurism's influence. The nationalist barriers of language and politics had to be overcome to assess a moment in history when a genuine international community of art was a reality. For example, Marinetti published his 1909 Futurist Manifesto not in Italy but in the Paris Figaro, and conversely Apollinaire's L’Antitradition futuriste (1913), with its posterlike arrangement of typography and its call for the suppression of “poetic grief … syntax, punctuation, lines and verses, houses, boredom,” was published, not in Paris, but in Milan in a bilingual edition.

Perloff finds in Futurism some of the most crucial innovations in Modernism, such as the breakdown of the prose/poetry distinction and the questioning of the “representability of the sign.” In an age of mechanical inventions that were transforming human experience, the automobile and airplane, typewriter and telegraph, both the space of the canvas and of the book page were reconceived; invention replaced representation even as ordinary and banal images were reintroduced as fragments. Perloff's first chapter captures the excitement of this moment in literary history through a fascinating close reading of La Prose du Transsibérien (1913) by the poet Blaise Cendrars and the painter Sonia Delaunay. This poem-painting demonstrates the Futurists' rupture of artistic norms, and the artists themselves—Cendrars a Swiss who arrived in Paris by way of New York, and Delaunay a Ukrainian Jew married to a Frenchman—exemplify the internationalism of their personnel.

The following chapter addresses the key concept of “The Invention of Collage” and relates visual collage to Marinetti's parole in libertà. This in turn leads to a chapter on the “Manifesto as an Art Form,” which sheds new light on a genre in which the categories of the literary and the theoretical break down in a mode characterized by improvisation, by theatricality, and by extreme self-consciousness. Sections on Ezra Pound's writings in the BLAST period, on the Russian Futurist book, and Roland Barthes's La Tour Eiffel all focus on the “rupture” of literary categories. (A major Futurist icon was the banal and sublime Eiffel Tower, and some reactionary art editor has commented on the “representality of the sign” by turning Jim Dine's horizontal version of the tower on page 199 the “right” way up.) By comparing Blaise Cendrars's prose poem “La Tour Eiffel” with its Postmodern version by Barthes, Perloff measures the distance between the Futurist sensibility and our own. Barthes is as moved by the tower as Cendrars, but also far more ambiguous about it: “‘A look, an object, a symbol, the Tower is all that man puts into it, and that all is infinite. … Through the Tower, men exercise the great function of the imaginary, which is their freedom, since no history, however dark, could ever deprive them of it’” (p. 213).

It is the “dark history” of our age that concerns the late Robert Smithson, the last artist treated in the book. Smithson is a conceptual artist who is known for “monuments,” mysterious but powerful images carved from the earth like the huge Spiral Jetty at the Great Salt Lake in Utah and the Broken Circle in Emmen, Holland. His “travel narrative,” a typically Futurist text consisting of photographic collage, essay, and prose poem, is entitled “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey.” This is a tour of works that are monuments simply because the artist sees them as such: a ramshackle bridge, a pumping derrick, and pipes crossing an industrial wasteland (The Great Pipes Monument). The irony is sardonic, but behind it is an attempt to see the present as it really is and to find within it whatever aesthetic satisfaction one can. As with the Futurists, the attempt is not to decipher the meaning of an object, but to see it in a new way and without detaching it from the flux of reality. In comparing Cendrars and Barthes (or Smithson), Perloff shows how the Futurist moment lives in our own: “Even as Barthes echoes Cendrars's themes, he ironizes and problematizes them. If … the ethos of avant guerre has its counterpart in the contemporary dissolution of the boundaries between art and science, between literature and theory, between the separate genres and media, ours is what we might call a disillusioned or cool Futurism” (p. 195).

Readers with diverse interests in national literatures and artistic genres will enjoy and profit from this book. It contains nearly seventy illustrations, many of them in color, like the beautiful ones from Delaunay's and Cendrars's Prose du Transsibérien. The critical terminology is sophisticated but clearly grounded in a wealth of specific and lively details: titles, names, and phrases in several languages enrich the style; and every page seems to bring up some new facet of a work or author or an unexpected comparison. Futurism lasted for only a moment of prewar experiment and enthusiasm, but The Futurist Moment expands that moment and shows how it permeates our own.