A post at New-Poetry sent me to Marjorie Perloff’s essay at the Boston Review website –no doubt not for the first time, for I vaguely remember reading it and not thinking much of it.   This time, I quite liked it.  Here’s the comment I left about it:  “I’ve always faulted Marjorie Perloff for the limited range of the poetry she writes about, but what other poetry critic read by more than a few hundred people would ever write about the poetry of John Cage, Susan Howe and Srikanth Reddy, much less write penetratingly about it as she has in this essay?

“Her choice of appropriation as a center or one of the centers of contemporary “advanced” poetry is interesting but a little off as far as I can see.  I, like Christopher M., at once thought of “The Waste Land” when Perloff began speaking of appropriation as something significantly new.  But appropriation wasn’t the key device of “The Waste Land”: textual collage was, appropriation being merely a preliminary operation required to make a collage.  The jump-cut poetry which resulted due to the influence of “The Waste Land,” which included Ashbery’s work has long been with us.

“What is notable about Susan Howe’s work is not appropriation, but her choice of kinds of material to appropriate, making her, for example, a partly visual poet at times, and it is the mixing of expressive modalities in contemporary poetry where the main action has been for many years, albeit ignored by all the certified critics but Perloff, but rarely more than mentioned in passing even by her.”

Most of the comments made by others to this post seemed to me rather stupid.  There were more at another location at the Boston Review website where the Boston Review (which I have not yet put on my list of Enemies of Poetry, but have been close to doing for quite a while) invited 18 poetry-people to:

A Symposium on the Poetic Limits of Binary Thinking

Marjorie Perloff’s essay “Poetry on the Brink” in the May/June 2012 issue rekindled conversation about innovation and canonization in contemporary poetry. To continue and extend the discussion, we cast a wide net and invited 18 poets to address the following question: what is the most significant, troubling, relevant, recalcitrant, misunderstood, or egregious set of opposing terms in discussions about poetics today, and, by extension, what are the limits of binary thinking about poetry? Their responses range from whimsy to diatribe, with meditation, appraisal, tangent, touchstone, anecdote, drollery, confection, wit, and argument in between.

My quick expectation was that the “wide net” would be from sub-mediocre to mediocre . . . but so far, after looking at just four of the contributions to the symposium, I’ve found an intelligent comment. It’s by Ange Mlinko (whom I believe to be a favorite of the Boston Review.) I did not find the comment by Vendler-certified Stephen Burt intelligent, though it prettily plays around the theme. More, I hope, soon.
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