Poetry on and Off the Page: Essays for Emergent Occasions

Written over the past decade, the fourteen essays that make up this collection have as their common theme a reconsideration of the role historical and cultural change has played in the evolution of twentieth-century poetry and poetics.In an aesthetic climate increasingly Shaped by interdisciplinary concerns, modern and postmodern poetries more and more frequently intersect with such fields as photography, the artist's book, and video art. Perloff opens this collection with a look at broad theoretical concerns: the evolution and contradictions of the term "postmodernism"; the vexed relation of modernism to the primitivism ostensibly inherent in it; the large-scale transformation of free verse; and the reception of poetry and poetics in the contemporary press and its cyberspace future. From this theoretical framework Perloff then addresses individual cases: the difficult poetic language of Mina Loy; the relation of poetry to politics as exhibited by Denise Levertov and Robert Duncan; the mimetic nature of photography as understood by Roland Barthes and Christian Boltanski; the special accomplishments of John Cage's "mesostic" art.Committed to the notion that, in John Ashbery's words, "You can't say it that way anymore", Poetry On & Off the Page describes the formations and transformations of literary and artistic discourses, and traces these discourses as they have evolved in their dialogue with history, culture, and society. The volume is testimony to the important role that contemporary artistic practice will continue to play as we move into the twenty-first century.