SOURCE: A review of The Dance of the Intellect, in Journal of American Studies, Vol. 21, No. 2, August, 1987, pp. 277–78.

In the following review of The Dance of the Intellect, Witemeyer finds shortcomings in Perloff's assertions and documentation.

In The Dance of the Intellect Marjorie Perloff gathers ten essays first published between 1981 and 1984 on various aspects of modern and postmodern writing in English. As in The Poetics of Indeterminacy (1981) Perloff seeks to construct a modernist genealogy for the kind of contemporary American writing she favors: the collage- and performance-texts of John Cage; the deconstructive narrative of Ed Dorn's Slinger; some of the work of New York poets Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery; the talk-poems of David Antin; and the “LANGUAGE” poems of Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian, Tina Darragh, and Ron Silliman. In her new book Perloff modifies her definition of the heritage somewhat; it is no longer primarily a tradition...