I went again to try to see the Lichtenstein exhibit, but I once I got there I saw that it begins on June 29. Which is the Tuesday. Before I leave. And the museum is closed on Tuesday. So why do they announce that the exhibit begins on June 29. Where is the question mark on this keyboard. I´ll have to conclude that the period is the new question mark.

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So Marjorie Perloff cannot recognize iambic pentameter. (Mike Snider) Neither can Charles Berstein. This disqualifies Language Poetry. Yet I was the one who first put these examples up on my blog (at least the Berstein one, I don´t remember if I put the Perloff example up, although I had noticed it myself). And I love language poetry. So obviously things are not so simple. I´m sure Marjorie does ¨know¨ that the example she gives is not in iambic pentameter. It´s called a ¨mistake.¨ Yes, a very embarrassing mistake, but does that mean we have to throw out her entire critical opus. No more than we should disqualify Timothy Steele for writing some incompetent poems. Maybe Steele is a competent critic, a lousy poet. Although from what I´ve seen he´s neither.

Bernstein´s mistake is more serious, because his argument (in that particular section of his essay) depends on it. What is more remarkable is that his essay was given orally to several audiences, and appeared in print more than once, without anyone noticing. So the editors of Harvard University Press don´t know their iambic pentameter either. When someone is making a critical argument, noone really focusses on the examples. It is as though that shift of attention from the critical argument to the text being examined were too difficult to make. That´s not to excuse Bernstein (or Perloff) but just to say that such mistakes can be hard to catch once they are made.