poetics as an industry of technical fantasy

Revolutionary Road comes to poetry.

Received the below book release from Northwestern UP a few months ago. Though the book is titled Contemporary Poetics its essays are pretty much all from the 80s and 90s, the heyday of postmodernism. I was struck again this morning by the grandiose subtitle: "Redefining the Boundaries of Contemporary Poetics, in Theory & Practice, for the Twenty-First Century," and I hope it isn't considered rude to point out the extent to which the exuberance of the book's title hugely fails to comport with the age, gender, interests, and ethnicity of the authors.

Given the book's TOC, pasted below, you have to wonder how the boundaries, whatever and wherever they are, of poetics are to be redefined on behalf of the the entire upcoming century by authors who are nearly all anglophone, with only two women, with people who are presumably almost all white, with essays that seem still to retain the key concerns of the mid-20th century (principally modernist worries [text and technical issues]), and with the book's two keynote essays by theorists born in the first half of the 20th Century, one of whom is 60, the other 79.

The book offers a fantasy. If "sudden change" is what can be hoped for, and not sodden change, why compile such a collection under a bumptious and totalizing title only to reach back into the late 1980s. The revolutionists stopped for orangeade indeed.

The essays here are useful, sure, but to compile them under this intention? Anne Lauterbach was right to suggest experiment "means you must put what you know at risk to what you do not yet know." Such an attitude has nothing to do with totalizing efforts to prefigure the not-yet-known as a mere recapitulation of the not-so-recent past's canonical struggles. Let's concretize the poetics fads of the 1980s/1990s as fate? Where's ethnopoetics? Ecopoetics? Translation theory?

It was Wittgenstein after all, w/out whom langpo just couldn't have been, who repudiated such radical and totalizing redefinition as a metaphysical delusion and a theoretical fantasy.

I wouldn't be surprised if all self-consciously revolutionary movements do not in some way succumb to self-parody when viewed from even a decade or two later. But everything from the masculinist trope of exploration to the canard of renewal and redefinition, when this seems more an attempt to anchor the outworn concerns of an old guard, makes this book more unfortunate joke than self-parody.

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"Contemporary Poetics: Redefining the Boundaries of Contemporary Poetics, in Theory & Practice, for the Twenty-First Century"

Edited by Louis Armand

ISBN 0-8101-2359-2 (paperback). 384pp.

Publisher: Northwestern University Press, Evanston.

http://nupress.northwestern.edu

Exploring the boundaries of one of the most contested fields of literary study--a field that in fact shares territory with philology, aesthetics, cultural theory, philosophy, and even cybernetics--this volume gathers a body of critical writings that, taken together, broadly delineate a possible poetics of the contemporary. In these essays, the most interesting and distinguished theorists in the field renegotiate the contours of what might constitute "contemporary poetics," ranging from the historical advent of concrete poetry to the current technopoetics of cyberspace. Concerned with a poetics that extends beyond our own time, as a mere marker of present-day literary activity, their work addresses the limits of a writing "practice"--beginning with Stephane Mallarme in the late nineteenth century--that engages concretely with what it means to be contemporary.

Charles Bernstein's Swiftian satire of generative poetics and the textual apparatus, together with Marjorie Perloff's critical-historical treatment of "writing after" Bernstein and other proponents of language poetry, provides an itinerary of contemporary poetics in terms of both theory and practice. The other essays consider "precursors," recognizable figures within the histories or prehistories of contemporary poetics, from Kafka and Joyce to Wallace Stevens and Kathy Acker; "conjunctions," in which more strictly theoretical and poetical texts enact a concerted engagement with rhetoric, prosody, and the vicissitudes of "intelligibility"; "cursors," which points to the open possibilities of invention, from Augusto de Campos's "concrete poetics" to the "codework" of Alan Sondheim; and "transpositions," defining the limits of poetic invention by way of technology.

"An epoch-defining collection of manifestos and essays: its list of contributors reads as a who's who of current important theorists in the field." --Michael Golston

"Puts a number of excellent essays back in print and makes several others easily available for the first time." --Craig Dworkin

CONTENTS

1. END GAME

Charles Bernstein: How Empty is my Bread Pudding?

Marjorie Perloff: After Language Poetry: Modernity & its Discontents

2. PRECURSORS

Kevin Nolan: Getting Past Odradek

Donald F Theall: The Avant-Garde & the Wake of Radical Modernism

Bob Perelman: Doctor Williams's Position, Updated

Simon Critchley: Wallace Stevens and the Infinite Evasion of As

DJ Huppatz: Corporeal Poetics: Kathy Acker's Writing

Michel Delville & Andrew Norris: Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and the Secret History of Maximalism

3. CONJUNCTIONS

Ricardo Nirenberg: Metaphor: The Colour of Being

Keston Sutherland: Vagueness

DJ Huppatz, Nicole Tomlinson & Julian Savage: AND &

Bruce Andrews: Readings Notes

Bruce Andrews: Lost and Found

4. CURSORS

Augusto de Campos: Concrete Poetry: A Manifesto

Augusto de Campos: Questionnaire of the Yale Symposium

Darren Tofts: Epigrams, Particle Theory and Hypertext

Gregory L Ulmer: Image Heuretics

J. Hillis Miller: The Poetics of Cyberspace: Two Ways to Get a Life

McKenzie Wark: From Hypertext to Codework

Alan Sondheim: Codeworld

5. TRANSPOSITIONS

Louis Armand: Techno-Poetics in the Vortext

Steve McCaffery: Parapoetics and the Architectural Leap

Allen Fisher: Traps or Tools and Damage

Steve McCaffery: Discontinued Meditations

Marjorie Perloff: Screening the Page / Paging the Screen: Digital Poetics and the Differential Text

Louis Armand is director of the Centre for Critical & Cultural Theory in the Philosophy Faculty of Charles University, Prague. His books include Solicitations: Essays on Criticism & Culture; Techne: James Joyce, Hypertext & Technology; and Incendiary Devices: Discourses of the Other. www.litterariapragensia.com