Susan M. Schultz's A Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry, part of the series Modern Contemporary Poetics, is an original work, well conceived both structurally and thematically, filled with critical incidents, captivating stories, detailed descriptions, possible interpretations, and deep (self-)analyses that challenge the widely held view of "silence" in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry as "blockage." Schultz's work aims at showing how "silence," a forced or self-selected mode of expression used in various poetic, academic, and aesthetic contexts, should be seen, ultimately, as a productive feature rather than an impeding one to pave the way for vital new planes of development and existence for future poets against "enemy agents," such as competing values within the academy, gender, voice, professionalism, standard language, nationalism, audience expectations, catastrophes, etc.

Schultz, an experimental published poet herself, introduces her theoretical work on the "Poetics of Impasse" with a poem/essay, "a new poets' theory essay" or "a theorypo" or "a poessay," according to Marjorie Perloff, titled "Introducing Impasse." This hybrid text defines and addresses issues of "writer's block" as well as "reader's block." According to Schultz, "writer's block" is generally described as "condition" or as "obstacle" or "a state of (non)being from which one wants quick / Exit" (2); however, one needs to realize that "any talk of silence is itself an opening out of impasse" (3); therefore, "writer's block" "is an impasse in the act a writer generally / Assumes to be natural, spontaneous, or artificial and constructed" (3) because "[t]he natural or artificial result of the writer's coming to knowledge, / And that one comes into knowledge through silence rather than / Speech" (3). Furthermore, she addresses issues of expressing oneself in Pidgin vs. Standard English related to "silence" in local poetry as opposed to experimental American poetry; key words here are "local," "avant-garde," "authenticity," and "identity." A clear distinction between "the creator" and "the editor" or "internal censor" when one practices writing, according to Natalie Goldberg (Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within, 1998), is advocated by Schultz in the complex and complicated process of finding one's "way of entering the silence" (13).

The first two essays of the collection address some of the implications of formalist notions of poetry as a self-contained genre that answers only to itself and some of the effects formalism had on poets that are ahead of a past paradigm. In the first essay, "Hart Crane and the Impasse of Formalism" (26-46), Schultz interprets the missing of any mention of Hart Crane's poem "Praise for an Urn" (1922) from Cleanth Brooks' famous study, The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (1947) as an instance of the poet being silenced from the outside because Crane's poem, unlike those of Donne and Keats, did not represent the perfections of form so much as its ultimate inconsequence in the face of death. Because of an incompatibility between "real life" and "poetic form," Crane lost his power as a poet in the face of formalism even though he attempted to write "Praise for an Urn" as a proleptic elegy to New Critical formalism. The next case of poetic impasse, titled "Laura Riding's Essentialism and the Absent Muse" (47-78), concerns Laura (Riding) Jackson's self-silencing by renouncing her poetry in 1939 due to the distinct and conflicting "masculine" and "feminine" sides of her character, which assigned her the role of reaper rather than sower (see Riding, "Mortal") due to her belief in sexual essentialism. Her tragic case shows, according to Schultz, that social and cultural ideas of the exclusive capability of men and women have given way to notions that a woman's essential qualities distinguish her writing from that of men. In particular, ahistorical Riding was unable to recognize the historical force of Victorian essentialism that contributed to her self-silencing. So she became nothing and a muse to her long-time companion, Robert Graves, because a "woman is not a poet: she is either a Muse or she is nothing" (Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, 1948, rpt.1988: 446). Logically, Schultz advocates that Riding's work needs to be fully restored to its rightful place among that of pioneering modernists -- Eliot, Pound, Crane, Moore, and others -- and as one of the founders of a tradition.

A different kind of "silence" (80-81) is analyzed in the third essay titled "Gertrude Stein and Self-Advertisement" (79-101). The fact that Gertrude Stein had developed an audience by the early 1930s resulted in her paradoxical experience of a writer's block. Stein seemed to be confused of herself as a writer in the eyes of her readers who preferred The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas -- reading about her -- over Tender Buttons -- reading something by her. Stein, according to Schultz, solved her blockage by analyzing her thoughts and feelings of ambiguity that also involved questions of authority and power. She, ultimately though, made "a conservative [choice]" (99): leaning towards the taste of her audience. Yet another kind of "silence" is described in the essay titled "'Returning to Bloom': John Ashbery's Critique of Harold Bloom" (102-123). Schultz selected this case because of the dynamism characterized by a professional give-and-take in the symbiotic/parasitic/professional relationship between a poet and a critic: John Ashbery was ultimately able to move away from the heavy canonization of his work by an overbearing critic and his theory and claim part of a feminine tradition rather than Bloom's overtly masculine lineage. Essay five titled "'Grandmothers and Hunters': Ronald Johnson and Feminine Tradition" (124-140) provides an example of a gender impasse because very few of Johnson's readers are women. According to Schultz, Johnson "is a man's poet" (125) because he has a "special fascination with men who have sharpened their eyesight: explorers, anatomists, botanists, painters, antiquarians, poets, microscopists, mathematicians, physicists" (Guy Davenport in the introduction to Johnson's early book, Valley of the Many-Colored Grasses). Johnson's installs silence in his work where there were voices by leaving out part of his audience. Therefore, Schultz concludes that "there is work left on gender and poetry" (140). In Susan Howe's work, the opposite seems to take place: her silences suggest voices that have been erased, as Schultz points out in "The Stutter in the Text: Editing and Historical Authority in the Work of Susan Howe" (141-159). Since Howe looks at history as at once impasse and possibility, once she acknowledges that history silenced female voices -- the impasse -- she is ready to explore the possibilities of history without an editor who does not share a matching background. Her various forms of writing capture women's emotive ("wild") rather than their domesticated side; she blends history with imaginative writing in her innovative genres. In the penultimate essay of the collection, titled "Local Vocals: Hawai'i's Pidgin Literature, Performance, and Postcoloniality" (159-179), Schultz, as a non-Pidgin speaker, addresses the "silence" and "alienation" that was created in her during and after a poetry reading exclusively rendered in Pidgin: i.e., Hawaiian Creole English. Schultz rightfully concludes that only an editor and/or authority with a matching linguistic and artistic background will be able to guide the voices of the new writers in Pidgin by providing constructive criticism for improvement. Finally, Schultz's last essay. titled "Of Time and Charles Bernstein's Lines: Poetics of Fashion Statements" (180-208) examines "silence" and impasse when faced with the various choices for one's style of discourse in the academy. According to Schultz, Charles Bernstein represents a risk-taker as opposed to many "old-fashioned" examples.

In sum, in A Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry, Schultz effectively investigated "silence" -- either initiated from the outside or the inside -- as a widely spread feature in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry from Hart Crane to Susan Howe. From the University of Hawai'i at Manoa, Schultz successfully arranged a collection of stories in the form of case studies from the 20th and 21st centuries -- including "Writing after 9/11" as the Coda to her book -- that examined specific incidents of "silence" and the impasses it created/creates in the poetic, academic, and aesthetic landscapes. Therefore, for those of us actively struggling with our own demons, Schultz's candor and insightful writing is inspirational. The question, however, how "silence" and "impasse" are related to the notions of "exile" and "inner exile" remains unanswered.