SOURCE: A review of Poetry On and Off the Page, in World Literature Today, Vol. 74, No. 1, Winter, 2000, p. 168.

In the following review, Cornis-Pope analyzes Poetry On and Off the Page.

Written for specific conferences, symposia, or edited volumes, the fourteen essays collected in Poetry On & Off the Page reexamine from the perspective of the nineties “how much our assumptions about [modernist and postmodernist poeticity] have changed.” As the opening essay, “Postmodernism/Fin de Siecle” suggests, our understanding of postmodernism has shifted from a utopian definition in the early 1970s that “involved a romantic faith in the open-endedness of literary and artistic discourse,” to a more negative-prescriptive definition in the 1980s that hardened art “into a set of norms … that leave very little room for the free play.” Postmodernism's “fabled openness and decenteredness” has been preempted by a theoretical criticism that tells us what postmodernism means as “unequivocally as...