Perloff: Her Poundian agenda faltering, Yeats comes to the rescue!
The Boston Review’s recent symposium (December 6, 2012) re-visiting Marjorie Perloff’s “Poetry on the Brink” (May/June 2012) is wonderful. First one reads 18 invited poets (including Ange Mlinko, Cathy Park Hong, and Desales Harrison) briefly responding to Perloff’s essay in the BR’s stated context of “what is the most significant…set of opposing terms in discussions about poetics today…?” Then, in a great punchline to a long, tedious joke, we witness Perloff, the mother hen, in a rage, kicking all 18 of her chicks to the curb.
Perloff’s avant-garde creds are vast—so you know she has to be cunning (a word that describes Pound and his friends and heirs: not genius, but cunning)—but still it comes as something of a shock to witness the spleen:
1. Perloff mauls Mlinko: I’m a published Yeats scholar, dummy. I also know my Auden and Frost.
Mlinko made the mistake of characterizing Perloff’s judgment thusly:
Who are the heirs of the Modernists? This high bar
seems to include Stein, Zukofsky but not Auden, Frost
or Yeats (it seems Irish, English, and Scots are lost
in the discussion
2. Perloff hauls off on Hong: “I directed Yu’s Stanford dissertaton” a know precisely of which you quote, dummy, so please don’t imply I’m racist.
Hong foolishly dared to proffer:
. . . like all institutions, the avant-garde canon has been as racially homogenous as mainstream poetry. One can rationalize these exclusions. The critic Timothy Yu, in his excellent essay “Form and Identity in Language Poetry and Asian American Poetry,” delineates two poles of thought that emerged during the ’70s and ’80s: multicultural poetry and Language poetry. Both groups worked to disrupt the dominant paradigm, but they had radically different aims: “the Language poet’s critique of the personal, lyric voice vs. the minority poet’s desire to lay claim to voice.”
3. Perloff crushes Harrison: You wanna defend Dove’s silly Introduction? “Easy,” huh? “Verbivocovisual” is Joyce, “Cubo-futurist” comes from Maykovsky, Khlebnikor, and Kruschenyk. “Ironic neo-avant-garde” is Peter Burger. Dummy.
Harrison fatally erred by writing that it was “easy” for Perloff to go negative (against Dove’s anthology) while dropping names and avant-terms.
4. Perloff demolishes all 18 writers: “Why did none of the eighteen symposiasts dig in and take issue with my specific readings of Cage, Howe, Bernstein, Reddy, or Gizzi—readings that constitute approximately two thirds of the essay?” Dummies!
Perloff attempts to rout her enemies, finally, with, “Constatation of fact—Ezra Pound’s phrase—does, I’m afraid, matter, given that most of the poet-symposiasts are teaching college and university courses on poetry.” And she ends curtly with a bit of Yeats, from his poem, “A Coat”:
Song, let them take it,
For there’s more enterprise
In walking naked.
If we might speak for the Slaughtered Eighteen…
We would maintain it’s Perloff’s problem and not the eighteen that ”none took issue with her specific readings of Cage, Howe, Bernstein, Reddy, or Gizzi,” for there has to be, at the minimum, interest (in the sense used by Henry James) for discourse to occur. While it was admirable for Perloff to present actual examples, they were woeful: avant cut-and-paste goes to snooze town. There was simply no interest—and the vote was, well…18-0.
That leaves Perloff, naturally, with nothing to do but bristle and trot out scholarly creds and anecdotal knowledge: I’ve published papers on Yeats! “Verbivocovisual” is from Joyce! an easy way to defend herself against “the eighteen” and Harrison’s “easy” charge—oops!
True, the eighteen responses were all over the place; it wasn’t Perloff’s fault the symposium lacked focus.
Sandra Lim, using jargon, seemed to us to be faking it. Matthew Zapruder made trite observations on poetry v. song lyrics. Anthony Madrid was anxious to tell us one can have irony and feeling together. Samuel Amadon pointed out that no group cares for its label. Maureen McLane riffed on James Wright’s “I have wasted my life” in a poem of her own. Annie Finch said she enjoyed meter. Dorothea Lasky praised the “shape-shifter” aspect of the “metaphysical I.” Evie Shockley plied the transcendence of the racial: expression (black) v. conceptual (white). Rebecca Wolff was all “visionary over functionary” and needs a better photo. Lytton Smith was determined to free poetry from the page. Noah Eli Gordon said binaries were teachable, but not profitable for his poetry. Katie Degentish waded into counter-intuitive feminism. Robert Archambeau quoted David Kellog’s “The Self in the Poetic Field.” Dan Beachy-Quick went back to the Greek chorus to prove the intimacy of the lyric “I” is also social. Stephen Burt quoted Empson: “You must rely on the individual poem to tell you the way in which it is trying to be good.”
This is mostly Creative Writing Program Theory—used by Modernists (the academically astute New Critics helping out Pound and friends) to crash the Canon party back when the English Professor who teaches Keats was replaced by the Creative Writing professor (and Poet) who teaches himself, and if you are nice to him, You.
There’s nothing wrong with this impetus; we’d probably all do the same ourselves, but it seems to me, to keep everybody honest, as we cultivate the new writing, we need to keep our eyes on the Poetry Canon that’s being crashed.
This Canon is what makes us able to appreciate Yeats, after all, even if he belongs to it as much as it belongs to him.
There are canons within canons after all, but there they are. When we come upon Thomas Wyatt’s “They flee from me, that sometime did me seek,” we hear a quality, a canon within a canon. ”They flee from me, that sometime did me seek” shapes the Poetry Canon from all those 16th century writers until…now, obviously, if Canon has any meaning at all. We think it should have meaning. Raleigh, Spencer, Munday, Lyly, Greville, Sidney, Lodge, Peele, Tichbourne, Greene, Southwell, Daniel, Drayton, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Nashe, Campion, Aytoun, and Donne were born within 20 years of each other in the 16th century. This group is a sun that still shines. The Canon is a sun that doesn’t stop shining—unless we decide to put it out.
It isn’t just that the Canon is good; it helps the center to hold.
In this rather nasty exchange between 18 poets and Marjorie Perloff, it doesn’t seem like the center is holding.
