SOURCE: A review of Radical Artifice, in Chicago Review, Vol. 40, Nos. 2–3, Spring–Summer, 1994, pp. 175–77.

In the following review of Radical Artifice, Francis discusses Perloff's critique of modern culture and the role of avant-garde poetry.

As its title succinctly announces, Marjorie Perloff's collection of essays [Radical Artifice] attempts to assess the impact of our culture's predominant modes of communication on contemporary poetry: “to understand,” as she writes, “the interplay between lyric poetry, generally regarded as the most conservative, the most intransigent of the ‘high’ arts, and the electronic media.” These media include sound and video tape, faxes and modems, telephones and computers and four-color slick magazine reproductions—the whole panoply of technology by which the sending and receiving of messages has been sped up and expanded and through which instrumental discourses like advertising work their mass effects. Where does charged and cadenced language fit in this scheme, Perloff wonders...