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Richard Quinn
The University of Iowa
Richard-A-Quinn@uiowa.edu
Review of:
Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, eds. Poems for the
Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern and
Postmodern Poetry. Volume Two: From Postwar to Millennium.
Berkeley: U of California P, 1998.
2. Picking up where volume one left off, volume two continues the
project of constructing a millennial poetics outside traditional
canonical frameworks. Such a poetics, first and foremost,
includes both the oft ignored "experimental" wing of modernism
and the international postmodernisms of nations like Japan, Iran,
Russia, the United States, and Italy, to name a few. As the
editors put it, the anthology
11. The central section, "The Art of the Manifesto," includes "Black
Dada Nihilismus" and breaks yet one more convention through its
dismantling of the practice/theory antinomy. I have already
indicated how the post-structural ideas of authorial demise and
the mediational function of language interact within Poems for
the Millenium. In "The Art of the Manifesto," theories are stated
directly as poetry and poetry as theory. Included here is a
selection from Charles Bernstein's now famous poem-treatise
"Artifice of Absorption," discussing the interaction between
"absorptive" and "impermeable" poetic techniques, considering
their relationship to a disempowering and "absorptive" politics.
Similarly, an equally well-known portion of Rachel Blau
DuPlessis's Otherhow: Feminist Poetics, Modernism, the
Avant-Garde wonders about avant-garde writing, the very writing
comprising the anthology within which her own work appears: "Does
it secretly lovingly to itself hold the idea of poet as priest,
poem as icon, poet as unacknowledged legislator?" (433). If so,
the text argues, "turn yr. back on it. Or, not to tell you what
to do, My back" (433). The fact that such statements appear
between galleries (the simple fact of their appearance in a
"poetry" anthology makes the text unique) speaks to the value
such thinking places on interaction over hierarchy. The
poetry-theory included in "The Art of the Manifesto" responds to
and with the writing which surrounds it.
13. Such minor complaints aside, the two volume Poems for the
Millenium stands alone in the history of literary anthologies. It
addresses questions of completeness through a celebration of the
incomplete and runs roughshod over boundaries established to
protect and preserve established aesthetics. In doing so, it
participates in a process once described to me as "the
maximization of the principle of non-exclusion." As such, the
book not only includes the unrepresented of the poetic past, but
through its foregrounding of an "open" poetics, it includes the
very principle of inclusion we hope will reign in the next
millennium. Poems for the Millenium is nothing short of heroic.
Department of English
The University of Iowa
Richard-A-Quinn@uiowa.edu
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