SOURCE: A review of Radical Artifice, in Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. 92, No. 3, July, 1993, pp. 412–14.

In the following review, Dasenbrock gives a positive evaluation of Radical Artifice, but disagrees with Perloff's view of the avant-garde.

Radical Artifice is an interesting, perceptive, rewarding, and important book, easily the best of Marjorie Perloff's many books and one of the most important books yet written on contemporary poetry. Its focus is the effect that the electronic media—particularly advertising and television—have had on contemporary poetry. This effect for Perloff has a negative and positive side. On the one hand, the commodified media of the postmodern age have stripped certain once-dominant poetic modes of their power and authenticity. On the other hand, this does not mean that we have entered a “post-poetic” age, since the contemporary poetry Perloff finds important is largely a response to the way the media...