The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics

Marjorie Perloff, Avant-Garde Poetics, and The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics The new fourth edition of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics should be commended on many fronts, not least for its addition of essays on numerous "Third-World" ethnic and national poetries, relegated in previous editions (especially the first two, improved somewhat in the third) to brief discussions within schematic entries devoted to whole continents. It's therefore strange and disconcerting that the entry titled "Avant-Garde Poetics," authored by the justly esteemed critic Marjorie Perloff, should echo the lamentable biases of past editions. The stunning omissions in Perloff's entry fly directly in face of the more capacious, internationalist gestures of the new Princeton. (1) Moreover, the entry's myopic purview is in dramatic contradiction with the internationalist outlook that the avant-garde itself (even on its minority right wing!) has long maintained at its ideational core. "Avant-Garde Poetics" is substantial--as long, in fact, as most of the entries given to national poetries, save the ones reserved for the United States and England, which are, Ut Imperium Poesis, multiply longer than any others. It names dozens of poets (and other artists) and a large number of tendencies and movements, from the era of Rimbaud up to the US "post-avant" present. And with exception of a passing reference to the Brazilian brothers Augusto and Haroldo de Campos and their Con cretista moment, not a single poet or group outside the Anglo-American/European experience is acknowledged. (2) The entire Iberian Peninsula, event goes missing! How could such a skewed summation have made its way into the new, more globally minded Princeton? I wonder if Perloff might explain her focus on what the state forms dub "Caucasian [non-Hispanic]" writers by saying that the strict concern of her entry is the "historical avant-garde," the European movements that Renato Poggioli and Peter Burger cover in their classic studies of same title, Theory of the Avant-Garde. (3) Yet, as noted above, this is clearly not the case: she brings in any number of Western-Caucasian figures and groups emerging after the initial epoch-making explosions--many of them less influential, historically speaking, than key actors she leaves out. Among the many indispensable authors of the radical tradition absent from Perloff's culturally crimped account, here are a baker's half-dozen whose works and thought, in intimate conversation with the avant-garde's very origins or later legacy, have altered the course of world poetry. I'm cognizant that much of the information will not be new to many readers of this journal. But given the somewhat confounding case at issue, some kind of anecdotal emphasis seems in order. Is the passing over by Perloff of a giant vanguard poet like Vicente Huidobro perchance an innocent cut-and-paste glitch? His announcement of Creacionisrno appears in Chile even before he arrives in Paris in 1916 to drink and argue with Apollinaire, Breton, Reverdy, Gris, Picasso, et al. He is writing and publishing calligrams as early as 1912-13, prior to Apollinaire. He was a central figure in the development of Nord-Sud, the key Paris journal of the time. He knew everyone in the Parisian avant-garde, and everyone knew him--he, Reverdy, and Tzara, in particular, become close collaborators. His Creacionista program is suigeneris--it precedes Dada, even, by a few years, and anticipates principles later elaborated by Surrealism and various other expressions of radical Modernism, not least in its calls for poetry's status as a fully organic reality, not mimetic of nature's outer appearances, but ontologically projective of its dynamical forces and operations: "Why sing of roses, oh poets?" he writes. "Make them flower in the poem." He goes on to enact his ideas by literally painting his poems. And then, beginning in 1919, he sets out to write Altazor, one of the greatest epics of all Modernism. …