Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries by Loss Pequeño Glazier, and: 21st-Century Modernism: The ‘New’ Poetics by Marjorie Perloff (review)

Abstract

MLRy 99.1, 2004 183 For others it may not. The New York school had forAmerican poetry a significance analogous to that of the Metaphysicals or the Romantics. Silly, sad, and solemn by turns, part of its pleasure lies in the facility with which it moves between the ridiculous and the sublime. It is also direct and honest; an uninitiated reader will find itimmediately engaging. Like any poetry itwill respond to theoretical analysis, but the tighter the theoretical framework, the more its spirit is threatened. Avant-garde poets eschew tradition; that is why they are avant-garde. Yet much ofthis poetry fails within American traditions descending from Poe and Whitman, and was written within the context of a background including Stevens and Williams, and even Eliot and Pound, whom Watkin mentions scarcely at all. Moreover, these poets are defined by their wit. Like the Metaphysicals it is through their wit that they most effectivelyengage the world that they inhabit. But Watkin's prose lacks the easy informality which gives rise to it. His fierce discursive rigour marches sternly towards an impenetrability that is hardly helpful in understanding poetry which is itself not easy. For example: 'The avant-garde must now be located not in a metanarrative nor archaeological superposition , but directly within the contemporary event of the textual encounter itself. The avant-garde is a textual event.' Or, as Frank O'Hara says, 'Happening is just like a little play. [. . .] "I'm going to do this delightful thing, I think, and I hope you'll come and thinkit's delightful"' (Standing Still and Walkingin New York, pp. 16-17). Initiated readers will not need reminding that the New York poets knew their Whitman and Williams, nor that they were quick-witted almost to a fault. For them Watkin's book usefully adds to the sum of knowledge. But it is a book that the publishers have allowed to betray its academic origins. To attract readers who are not examiners a little saving vulgarity is wanted. Watkin had to get his book out, and his publishers have virtuously helped him to do so. But they have failed in their responsibility to readers. Few but librarians and specialists will find the money for this well-argued and thoughtful book, which might easily have been, were times not, alas, as they are, much more widely useful. Clare College, Cambridge R. D. Gooder Digital Poetics: The Making ofE-Poetries. By Loss Pequeno Glazier. (Modern and Contemporary Poetics) Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press. 2002. xii + 2i3pp. $54.95 (pbk $24.95). ISBN 0-8173-1074-6 (pbk 0-8173I075 -4). 2ist-Century Modernism: The New' Poetics. By Marjorie Perloff. (Blackwell Manifestos) Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell. 2001. ix + 222pp. ?45 (pbk ?12.99). ISBN o-63i-2i969-2(pbko-63i-2i97o-6). These two books, while they do not engage with each other's material, nevertheless re? late, in that both deal with modern poetry,and in one case with the same poet, Charles Bernstein, whose writing reconstitutes words in what Bernstein calls 'dyraphism'?'a dysfunctional fusion of embryonic poets', a 'mis-seaming'. Marjorie Perloff expands this as 'the collaging of items that are not only disparate but have differentsyntactic orders, shifting voices, source and multiple allusions', combined with punning and word-play (Perloff, p. 172; see also Glazier, p. 36). And with that, we are offinto the territory that Glazier explores. He takes in such experiments as Concrete Poetry in the 1950s and explores the poetry that is written digitally. The model is poetry as the play of words, of language whose aleatory appearance cuts out the pretension of the humanist scholar. Glazier's book works at two levels. First, it is informative about the Web (which began in 1969, for military and research purposes in the USA) and its acceleration after 1991, and it reads partially as a series of fact-sheets, complete with 184 Reviews glossary, forthose who already know quite a bit about the Internet's ways and means. (The glossary is occasionally helpful, but it also assumes a fair degree of knowledge already.) In functioning as information, Glazier's book is useful for those who need what he...