SOURCE: “Caution: Deconstruction Ahead,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, May 27, 1990, p. 4.

In the following review, Disch gives a negative assessment of Poetic License and avant-garde postmodern writing.

Marjorie Perloff has a relationship toward the “postmodern” poetry she champions as a critic much like the relationship of Donna Elvira to Don Giovanni in Mozart's opera. She has a passionate enthusiasm for its potential that the repeated experience of its unworthiness never dampens. Perloff is a capable critic who sometimes marvels unduly at rudimentary prosodic skills but who has a basically serviceable sense of what is wheat and what is chaff. She is, however, a professional critic, and these days in academia that often entails a fealty to French models of discourse and valuation—that are antithetical to literary common sense.

“Postmodern” is an epithet that can encompass almost anything written since 1950 that might strike admirers of Eliot or...