Marjorie Perloff and the Other Tradition

Marjorie Perloff explores the non-symbolist mode of poetry in The Poetics of Indeterminacy. She speaks of a tradition that is non-representational, which defamiliarizes our strategies for making things cohere. Like the poetry she treats, however, it seems Perloff does not have an aggressively explanatory metanarrative for this tradition. Instead, she proceeds down an explanatory path for a while, and then, after confronting disruptions and discontinuities from the poetic text, she reverts to the concept of ultimate undecidability. When performing this reversion, she doesn not complain about the text, but uses it as a chance to extol its virtues; defamiliarity is valuable in itself.

I focused especially on her chapter dealing with John Ashbery. In it, Perloff writes that "Dozens of provocative and possible stories suggest themselves" (258). This is true, of course, and Perloff spends some time with some of these stories. But it isn't very long before these stories, with which we've travelled with Perloff, are tossed up into the air and we're told to admire how they create a "precise tonality of feeling" (260). A series of perhapses is given up for a tonality. After pointing out these bland but true observation like "we never come to know the larger story," Perloff quickly transitions away, as if to say 'Let's talk about something else': "Here it is illuminating to compare Ashbery to Beckett" (273). Okay, but what about getting to some conclusion? No: "In this context of absent causality, even familiar things become unfamiliar" (274).

Of course, any great conclusions are forestalled by the poetry to which Perloff insists on responding. Ashbery isn't going to give any conclusions, so why should I fault Perloff for failing to deliver one? Because I'm sick of being told that non-representational texts like Ashbery's (or postmodern texts in general) are about disrupting or defamiliarizing the meaning making process or denying the reader an easy overarching metanarrative. I'd rather read a critic's own story through an Ashbery poem -- even if it isn't (and cannot be) the one and only accurate reading. As long as it's interesting and it makes some commitment.