IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 19, No.4 (2018) 110
Seth Perlow, The Poem Electric. Technology
and the American Lyric
Jan Baetens
Progressive contemporary writing has a problem with lyricism, to put it mildly. Most authors, groups, and tendencies that shaped modernity have tried to do so by categorically rejecting lyricism as a trace of outdated and sentimentalizing subjectivism. All forms of lyricism, according to the Modernist credo, turn poetry away from its critical and political potential, which is not to be found in the poet’s effort to use language to express deep personal feelings in an aesthetically sophisticated language, but in the reworking of verbal and discursive materiality, both highly antisubjective and critical towards social and ideological norms and values as inscribed within and reinforced by language as a means of interpersonal communication. Modern, that is, antilyrical poetry, can thus turn away from the quest for information, intersubjective exchange and positive, rational knowledge and become the linguistic and cultural epitome of the critique of language which equals the critique of society and all that makes society unbearable and unacceptable to modern-feeling eyes. In the house of Modernity, there is no room for lyricism.
The major claim of Seth Perlow’s fascinating book on modern lyric poetry, The Poem Electric. Technology and the American Lyric, is that the antagonism between progressive literature and lyric poetry is based on a misunderstanding. Rather than being mutually incompatible, lyric poetry and the critical understanding of writing set similar goals, using even, to a certain extent, similar techniques and devices. To be more precise, Perlow does not substantiate this claim by reading or rereading authors and works that illustrate the
Seth Perlow
The Poem Electric. Technology and the American Lyric
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018, 288 p. ISBN: 978-1-5179-0366-4 (paperback)
IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 19, No.4 (2018) 111 traditional take on poetry, such as the New Formalists or the fifth generation epigones of Robert Frost, but by foregrounding the fundamentally lyric dimension of experimental literature, both from the point of view of writers and from that of readers (although in many cases this distinction becomes very blurred). Indeed, if lyric poetry defines itself in opposition with the tenets of rational language as the best possible way of exchanging objective knowledge and enabling clear and univocal communication, then lyricism and experimental writing have more than one thing in common. What they actually share is the belief that their exemption of rationality will eventually produce new forms of knowledge, no longer grounded in rational thinking but no less vital than those produced by conventional ways of thinking.
As a second key feature of Perlow’s book, his approach to experimental writingis strongly determined by its link with medium technology, more precisely electronic technology: various forms of visual reproduction of handwriting and portraits in print and online (for instance, modern readers of Emily Dickinson, affectively reacting to the image of her handwriting and the mysteries revealed by a special treatment of her known daguerreotype and other more uncertain representations), the use of mathematically constructed chance operations (Gertrude Stein and Jackson Mac Low), telephone as a technical and social channel of lyricism (Frank O’Hara) and eventually the practice of technologically enhanced improvisation and spontaneity (Amiri Baraka and Allen Ginsberg). All these forms and devices sustain what Perlow, who does not reopen the already well-covered debate on the formal or semantic features of lyric poetry, calls the exemption of lyricism: “The writers discussed in this book use a variety of electronics, familiar and esoteric, to celebrate lyric poetry’s exemption from rational thought, its power to disrupt the orderly protocols of critique. Neither valorizing nor disparaging such claims of lyric exemption, The Poem Electric argues that the electrification of American verse cultures has energized the rhetoric that distinguishes poetic thought from rational knowledge.” (p. 3).
The structure of the book, consisting offour central chapters, is as straightforward as it is convincing. The Poem Electric opens with a theoretical chapter in which Perlow discusses the apparent paradox of his lyrical interpretation of allegedly antilyrical works and authors and the perspectives opened by an approach of lyricism in terms of “exemption of rationality” rather than in terms of personal expression or figural language. It then continues with four case studies, covering in a well-balanced way the major periods of experimental writing as well as the major shifts and steps in the electrification of writing technologies. The book ends with an audacious comparison between experimental lyricism and Michael Fried’s interpretation of “objecthood” in art, while no less audaciously applying this idea of objecthood, that is, the reflection on the ambivalent position of all great works of art hovering between meaning and materiality and their capacity of generating an eternal sense or presentness in the viewer, to a small set of recent digital-born works (by Young-hae Chang heavy Industries, William Poundstone and Tan Lin). Here as well, Perlow’s polemical tactic remains intact, for the examples of digital literature that he examines are in their technical “simplicity” light-years away from what many scholars and practitioners in the field consider typical of and necessary to electronic writing.
The four central chapters of the book, all of them extremely rich and innovative, obey a similar structure and line of thinking. First Perlow identifies the specific type of electrification that is at the heart of the writing and reading of the authors under scrutiny and discusses the specific type of exemption that is disclosed and experienced through their works, for instance, the notion of “affect” strongly triggered by the visual contact with Dickinson’s handwriting and portraits. He then relies upon the framing of lyricism in terms of
IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 19, No.4 (2018) 112 exemption to challenge the idea that these forms of experimental reading and writing are opposed to the idea of knowledge-production, demonstrating instead that the way in which authors use electric techniques or devices is inextricably and dialectically linked with rational thinking, even if the authors themselves or their readers do not necessarily consider it that way. A good example of such method is Perlow’s rereading of the conventionally accepted analogy between O’Hara’s colloquial poems and phone calls. The Poem Electric does not only insist on the author’s irony toward this similarity, it also discloses various aspects of O’Hara’s work that show instead an author who far from being the perfect socialite and the modern poet eager to embrace modern communication tools, appears as an example of solitude and lack of communication. Third, Perlow offers a precious combination of close reading and cultural and historical contextualization that equally tends to foreground the idea of technology-enhanced or engendered lyricism as exemption of rationality and thus of the creation of new forms of rationality. The way in which Mac Low used chance operations established with very different, in this case military, aims explains some of the singularities of his constrained writing texts, full of fears and anxieties that one does not find in outwardly comparable textual productions such as those by John Cale. Very illuminating as well is the comparison between improvisational techniques and the use of tape recorders in the performances by Amari Baraka and John Cage. This comparison made with the help of a careful reading of the historical references of improvisation, powerfully stressed by Baraka who insists on the vital importance of improvisation in slave culture and somewhat neglected by Ginsberg who tended to highlight issues of personal freedom and the rejection of media and literary censorship.
It should be clear that The Poem Electric is an important book. It radically displaces the discussion on lyricism, without for that reason suggesting that more formal or art-historical readings of lyric poetry are less valuable. From that point of view, Perloff is an amazingly pacifying scholar. Provocative he may be when examining the long-standing beliefs of experimentalists, which he deconstructs as being no less lyrical than the age-old lyric poets they debunk, Perlow has managed to bridge the gap between very different strands of lyrical and antilyrical thinking. His book is a major contribution to a new way of thinking modernism and experimentalism, deprived of any easy antagonism between progressive antisubjectivism and a more traditional sense of the reading and writing lyric subject.
Jan Baetens is editor in chief of Image (&) Narrative.
Email: jan.baetens@kuleuven.be
