The Still Performance

"The Still Performance" examines the poetry of five postmodern American poets: Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery, Adrienne Rich, W.S.Merwin and Charles Wright. McCorkle devotes a chapter to each one of these five poets and provides an overview of their poetics. He discusses how the tenuous condition of transcendence now negotiated in the realm of the ordinary is central to Bishop's work; how the self and the text, always intertwined, mirror each other's formation and erosion in Ashbery's poetry; and shows that Rich's poetry self-critically examines language and demands revision, whereas Merwin's poetry considers language as a mnemonic space that is steadily diminishing. His closing chapter on Wright's poetry considers the poem as ideogram, signature or autobiographical trace. Although these poets' thematic concerns are addressed in each chapter, the book argues as a whole for the poet's involvement with the materiality of writing, the provisionality of the self as mirrored in the ongoing process of writing, and the tenuous and easily eroded interconnections proposed by the act of writing.
The author concludes that postmodern poetry, and these poets in particular, are engaged in various but overlapping reappraisals of modernism. More importantly, he asserts the necessity of critical inquiry bound to the persistent act of self-examination.