I have been reading Marjorie Perloff’s new book “Twentieth-First Century Modernism.” It confirms a position I myself have been developing gradually over the past few years. I see a fundamental continuity between modern and “postmodern” poetry. (In fact, I have less and less use for the concept of postmodernism.) When I read Clark Coolidge --

"What I thought was the / ass-end of a pigeon / was a flag of waterproof / linen /
flapped by the wind at the lip / of the roof . . . "

I think of William Carlos Williams. Barbara Guest is basically an Imagiste in the H.D. tradition. Gertrude Stein could have written “Tender Buttons” yesterday. Such work is absolutely contemporary for me, in that I don’t feel it to be the product of a different epoch from my own. On the back cover of Coolidge’s “Solution Passage,” from which I extracted the above quote, there is a blurb from Lydia Davis: “Coolidge’s ear is almost perfect, and he rarely writes anything less than a perfectly beautiful sentence—the beauty coming out of not only the elasticity of his syntax, the brightness of his rhetorical flourishes and lively verbs, but also from the abundance of concrete images in his work.” I agree. This is good poetry in a very conventional, modernist sense, as defined by Pound in “A Few Don'ts." The question is why this type of writing is now characteristic of a specialized, avant-garde taste?

I don’t mean to simplify Perloff’s argument, which I will address later in a more nuanced way. What I like is the sense of freedom I get from throwing out the idea of a postmodern break with stiff, rigid, modernist precepts.