As with daffodils and nightingales, postmodernity is only a good subject for lyric poems if a person feels in terms of it. Joshua Clover does. His new book, The Totality for Kids, will give plenty of people who despise po-mo modishness a target for their hatreds, and plenty of theory-kids a fetish object. But it is simply not the book either camp would like it to be, to its great credit.

Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, Theodor Adorno, Elliot Smith, Teen People, Beckett, Joy Division, The Passion of Joan of Arc: the world of this book will be familiar to anybody who spent time in graduate school in the eighties or nineties and went home at the end of the day to an apartment, an improvised meal, a drink (perhaps several drinks), a stereo, and a TV. Every member of that tribe carried with him a homemade culture canon he could discuss in Frankfurt School terms; social life was a contest made up of nodding and citing, citing and nodding. "It is our tribe's custom to beguile," writes Frank O'Hara in a line from "Naphtha," which Clover echoes here. True; also true, though, that when the theory-tribe scatters, its members must make their way in the actual world.

These are poems of loneliness in that actual world: little elegies for the theory-self before the dawn of aging, before the grisly new century, before—and here I may be over-reading—the question of "kids"(whether to have one, whether to allow oneself to be one forever) took over. (The book's title, mocking its own pretensions, is from a Raoul Vaneigem manifesto.) Clover's style takes its cue from Benjamin's montages. "Ceriserie" assumes the form of an open set of subjects ("Paris 1968," "The Louvre," "Music," "Misreading," and others) matched to predicates, some that engage subjective memory, others that provide cultural framework or definition:

Music: As the sleep of the just. We pass into it and out
again without seeming to move. The false motion of
the wave, "frei aber einsam."

Steve Evans: I saw your skull! It was between your
thought and your face.

Melisse: How I saw her naked in Brooklyn but was not in
Brooklyn at the time.

These are search headings and search results, suggesting the change in the structure of inwardness felt by any poet who writes in one window and Googles his subjects, or himself, in another window, nearly simultaneously. The self in this poem is a field made up of quick acts of retrieval, some of them deliberate, some generated by the choices of others—the choices, even, of total strangers.

O'Hara, subtly reprocessed here as a voluptuary among commodities, is the key to this book, as Clover slyly acknowledges. "At The Atelier Teleology" is Clover's talking-sun poem a la O'Hara and Mayakovsky:

By the way Joshua why are you so obsessed with the
modern
And its endnotes, what about going to bed in the sensuous
Now and Here, you know, the sublime sublime?

I don't like every gesture in Clover. There's too much mugging and vogueing: the irony stops too often at the door of these poems, sparing them their own devastating critique. Clover can't bear even to leave his poor author photo alone: he imitates a famous shot of Benjamin. Fine; I get it; the self is an intertext, a quotation. Enough already! Some poet with a gift big and weird and unclassifiable enough needs to come along and draw a circle around Clover's kind of thing, step outside the circle, and sing. Until that happens, count Clover among the companionable talkers.

— Dan Chiasson