SOURCE: “The Marjorie Perloff Show: The Critic and Her Others,” in Minnesota Review, Nos. 43–44, November, 1995, pp. 212–22.

In the following review of Radical Artifice, Jarraway criticizes Perloff's reductive view of modernism and her ideological commitment to postmodernism.

In the field of twentieth-century letters, Marjorie Perloff might be considered one of our premier critics of literary modernism. She's already written three critical monographs on modern poets (W. B. Yeats, Robert Lowell, and Frank O'Hara), two focused studies on general traits in modern poetry (“Futurism” and the modernist/postmodernist “Lyric”), and has produced two collections of essays (The Poetics of Indeterminacy and The Dance of the Intellect), in addition to editing a third (Postmodern Genres). Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media marks her ninth labor in the vineyard of contemporary poetry and poetics. An extended meditation on “The Institution of Literature,” therefore, might give us pause to reflect...