SOURCE: A review of Radical Artifice, in American Literature, Vol. 65, No. 2, June, 1993, pp. 388–89.

Below, Spiegelman gives a positive review of Radical Artifice.

This book [Radical Artifice] eloquently compresses many of its author's longtime interests while also striking out into new territory. Perloff's subject is not just poetry but its connections to many kinds of contemporary mediation. The media turn out to be the stars of the book, since poetry (at least the poetry of the avant-garde and the Language schools which Perloff favors), far from existing at a “pure,” obscure, or high level, has come down to grapple with, and even to imitate, other models of communication in the postmodern age.

Perloff treats such obvious poets as John Ashbery, Charles Bernstein, Clark Coolidge, and George Oppen, but the late John Cage emerges as her cultural hero, since Cage worked tirelessly (his opponents would say tiresomely) on behalf of...