SOURCE: “A Triptych of Modernism: Reverdy, Huidobro, and Ball,” in Modernism: Challenges and Perspectives, Monique Chefdor, Ricardo Quinones, and Albert Wachtel, eds., University of Illinois Press, 1986, pp. 111-27.

In the following essay, Balakian explores the Modernist poetics of Ball, Vicente Huidobro, and Pierre Reverdy.

Three poets of the early decades of this century shed light on the major paradoxes of modernism. I am not trying to establish this triptych to exercise random intertextuality nor as a basis for a study of influences. Geography separated these poets; the age connected them. From Paris to Zurich, to Santiago and Buenos Aires, the clocks were synchronized. Their affiliation resulted from a common cultural source that nurtured them and that they recognized: the revolution that had occurred in poetics in the previous century and that was to bifurcate modernism in our time.

In the context of modernism these poets have made the...