Free Radicals: American Poets Before Their First Books
edited by Jordon Davis and Sarah Manguso
Subpress, $16 (paper)

The editors of FreeRadicals: American Poets Before Their First Books propose that suchwriters are not yet bound in obedience to the “government ofpoetryland,” not yet constrained by the demands and expectationsthat a first collection will engender. Such freedom, they suggest,fuels work most “unpredictable” and “genuine.” Fair to say,but equally tenable is the view that new writers have not had time tobreak through the currently favored poetic strategies and stances, orbreak from the normalizing proscriptions of popular culture ingeneral, with anxiety of influence beside (but perhaps consortingwith) the point. Reading the sampling in this collection suggeststhat both views hold true, and in some cases both can be demonstratedwithin the work of a given poet—even within a given poem. But whileeditors pronounce provocatively, readers may simply take pleasurewhere they will, and there is much to be found here. Amid the smartlycurt ironies—“Forget that night & your wet socks. Low-flyingengines. She’ll never happen again” (Jeni Olin, “TomBrokaw”)—readers will find intimate feelings exposed and anunabashed interest in insight that, despite the exhaustion of ideas,compromised values, and banality of urban life, transcends its ownirony: “Paying for this, / each moment a new bird, / you touch yourpartner’s shoulder” (Savitz, “The Bird”); “Poetry is notentirely unhappy / with its debasement” (Alan Gilbert, “RelativeHeat Index”). Here, too, are many poets with the capacity torecognize “a blossom made from weariness” (Max Winter, “TheAscent”) as well as seekers too jaded for the utopic, who relishinstead “the ur-disaster, the one to which all others pale. The onethat sets you free” (B.J. Atwood-Fukuda, “Ballybunion”). Makinggood on the title’s optimism, no fewer than three of the 18 poetsincluded here (Olin, Jim Behrle, and Jennifer L. Knox) are slated topublish their first books this fall, with others sure tofollow.

—Rusty Morrison

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The Resistance to Poetry
James Longenbach
University of Chicago Press, $25 (cloth)

According to the provocative thesis of JamesLongenbach’s most recent study, “for centuries, poems haveresisted themselves more strenuously than they have been resisted bythe culture receiving them.” But perhaps the most striking thingabout The Resistance to Poetry is Longenbach’s own resistance tothe clichés of poststructuralist literary theory as it has unfoldedover the last 30 years. Longenbach acknowledges yet refuses to adhereto poststructuralist orthodoxy, paving the way for a new theoreticalapproach that integrates various aspects of deconstruction, dialogiccriticism, New Historicism, and reader-response theory while revivinga traditional, New Critical attentiveness to the nuances of poeticlanguage. At times Longenbach approaches a deconstructionist pointwithout taking the conclusion to its extreme, as in his chapter onhow the language of poetry offers us “a freedom to forgetourselves.” Here he claims that “to utter one word is inevitablyto be distracted by its relationship to other words—to enter thespace of untidy activity,” but he implicitly rejects the well-wornnotion of the text as an open play of linguistic difference with nodeterminate meaning. Elsewhere Longenbach assails the veryfoundations of familiar poststructuralist assertions, as when hequotes two contemporary New Historicist readings of Wordsworth’s“Tintern Abbey” only to subvert them in the next paragraph byarguing that both interpretations are the result of “using evidenceto fabricate a missing world of historical context and authorialmotivation.” Longenbach reveals his affinities with reader-responsecritics when, in his concluding chapter, he claims that “the wonderof language depends less on meaning than on the ways in which itmeans, the shape of the temporal process we negotiate in the act ofreading or writing a poem.” The author’s subtle precision as aclose reader bolsters his argument as he ranges from Callimachus toJorie Graham to substantiate his claims. By alternately embracing andeschewing critical trends, Longenbach has created a work that may begreeted with surprise in some literary circles, but which willenhance our understanding of poetry more than any book in recentyears.

—Robert Schnall

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Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy
Marjorie Perloff
University of Alabama Press, $29.95

Marjorie Perloff’s new book of essaysbegins with a call—or perhaps a plea—for greater differentiationin the study and teaching of poetry, and against pedagogicalpractices that too often shrug their shoulders and allow for vastlyinaccurate equivalencies between one poem or poet and another. Herbest argument is her own practice of what she calls “differentialreading”: the 14 essays range adroitly across the scope ofinnovative poetry from the canonical (Eliot and Pound) to theneocanonical (Ron Silliman, Rae Armantrout) to the simply new(Christian Bök, Caroline Bergvall). Nor is North American poetry hersole concern: the concrete poetry of Haroldo de Campos, TomRaworth’s Letters from Yaddo, and the writings of LudwigWittgenstein all merit essays of their own. Concepts and watchwordsof the great Modernist writers and thinkers proliferate into thefragments of a recognizably Perloffian creed: Marcel Duchamp’snotion of the “infrathin,” Stein’s assertion that compositionmeans “beginning again and again,” Hugh Kenner’s claim that“Art lifts the saying out of the zone of things said.” The museof indeterminacy presides over Differentials as over so much ofPerloff’s work, while her past tendency to set up criticalparadigms on invidious differences between poets is somewhat mutedhere. That is only appropriate given the new emphasis Perloff puts onthe old-fashioned practice of close reading, a practice she wants towrest from the dead hands of the New Critics and “Englit” inorder to restore the primacy of poetic language to literary studywithout subsiding into a dehistoricized formalism. The book’sconcluding essay, a personal meditation on Perloff’s dividedallegiances (the academy on one side, practicing poets and artists onthe other), begins a provocative exploration of “the aporias ofaffiliation” that I would like to see continued. Attention must bepaid to the poem on the page, and in this book Perloff shows onceagain that she is unequaled as a close reader of poetic canons oldand new. Even more welcome, however, is the hint of a new willingnessto examine her own position as American poetry’sprovocateur-in-chief.

—Joshua Corey

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Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil
C.D. Wright
Copper Canyon, $15 (paper)

Selected from over 20years of twangy, cantankerous, and ecstatic occasional writing, C.D.Wright’s first book of (mostly) nonfiction prose testifies to thepoet’s belief that “Poetry seems especially like nothing else somuch as itself. Poetry is not like, it is the very lining of theinner life.” Often using the vocabulary of faith to explore andilluminate the topic of poetry, Cooling Time possesses the moralintegrity of a lived vigil—best defined here as “a devotionalwatch”—whose object is “the elusory direction of freedom”that Wright considers essential to poetic practice. “The radical ofpoetry,” she writes, “lies not in the resolution of doubts but intheir proliferation, in an ongoing interrogation with what RobertoJuarroz called the poet’s one untranslatable song.” Wright urgeswriters to remain open to manifold trajectories and never to settle,for example, on either lyric or narrative alone. Accordingly, CoolingTime and its author resist identification with any one aestheticschool: “none of the poetries I admire stick to their labels,native or adopted ones. Rather they are vagrant in theiridentifications.” Wright maintains that “poets can still becounted on to stand nearly as one against the abjectification ofcontemporary experience,” and her dedication to the work of otherwriters and artists attests to her vision of community built onshared sensibility, from intimate companions Frank Stanford and Forrest Gander to figures as various as W.S. Merwin, Besmilr Brigham,Erin Mouré, and photographers Deborah Luster and Denny Moers. Butit’s with her remarkable first mentor, “The Unappeasable Mrs.Vittitow,” that the reader senses the strongest consonance withWright’s own character. “A radical, an upstart, and anautodidact,” a Catholic and early civil-rights advocate,Mrs.Vittitow is more than a literary guru—she is a worldview untoherself, one in which regional identity, spirituality, and oppositionto mainstream American politics and mores combine to propose a modelof what Bin Ramke in a recent poem calls “how to stand on theworld,” which is exactly what Cooling Time does for us.

—Brian Teare

Originally published in the summer 2005 issue of Boston Review