Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media
"Private Notebooks: 1914–1916"
"Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century"
Marjorie Perloff[needs IPA] (born Gabriele Mintz; September 28, 1931 – March 24, 2024) was an Austrian-born American poetry scholar and critic, known for her study of avant-garde poetry.[1]
She wrote books about W. B. Yeats, Robert Lowell, and Frank O'Hara and promoted poetry that normally was not discussed in the United States, such as works by Louis Zukofsky, Kenneth Goldsmith, and Brazilian poetry. Perloff was widely considered the most influential critic of experimental poetry. She coined the term "unoriginal genius" to reflect the desire of some contemporary poets to create poetry by using other people's words and constraint-based practices rather than inspiration or other personal sources.[4][5]
Early life
Perloff was born Gabriele Schüller Mintz on September 28, 1931, into a secularized Jewish family in Vienna.[1] The annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany exacerbated Viennese antisemitism, and so the family emigrated in 1938, when she was six-and-a-half, going first to Zürich and then to the United States, settling in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, where she attended the Ethical Culture Fieldston School.[1] According to Adam Kirsch, "Perloff can be counted as perhaps the youngest of the great wave of European Jewish intellectual refugees who immeasurably enriched American culture."[6] She changed her name to Marjorie when she was a teenager, as she felt it sounded "more American".[1]
Her work has been especially concerned with explicating the writing of experimental and avant-garde poets and relating it to the major currents of modernist and, especially, postmodernist activity in the arts, including the visual arts and literary theory.[10]
The first three books published by Perloff each focused on different poets: Yeats, Robert Lowell, and Frank O'Hara respectively. In 1981, she changed directions with The Poetics of Indeterminacy, which began her work on avant-gardist poetry, paving the way for The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture in 1986 and many subsequent titles. Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy, published in 2004, won the Robert Penn Warren Prize in 2005 as well as Honorable Mention for the Robert Motherwell Prize of the Dedalus Foundation.[11]
Perloff did much to promote poetics that are not normally part of the discourse in the United States such as works of Louis Zukofsky, Kenneth Goldsmith, or Brazilian poetry. She was widely considered the most influential critic of experimental poetry. She was credited with coining the term — "unoriginal genius" — to reflect the interest of some contemporary poets in generating their work by citational and constraint-based practices rather than inspiration or other personal sources.[4][5] Her work on contemporary American poetry, and, in particular, poetry associated with Language poetry and the Objectivist poets, posits and critiques an "Official Verse Culture" that determines what is and is not worthy of publication, critique and emulation.[12] In 2001, she gave the British Academy's Sarah Tryphena Phillips Lecture in American Literature and History, on Gertrude Stein's Differential Syntax.[13]
Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century (University of Chicago Press, 2010) ISBN978-0-226-66061-5. Spanish version: El genio no original: Poesía por otros medios en el nuevo siglo (greylock, 2019) ISBN978-84-948280-4-1
Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy (University of Alabama Press, 2004) ISBN978-0-8173-1421-7
The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture, with a New Preface (University of Chicago Press, 2003) pbk. ISBN978-0-226-65738-7
Poetry On and Off the Page: Essays for Emergent Occasions (Northwestern University Press, 1998) ISBN978-0-8101-1560-6
Frank O'Hara: Poet Among Painters (University of Chicago Press, 1998) ISBN978-0-226-66059-2 (originally published by Braziller, 1977)
The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition (Northwestern University Press, 1996) pbk. ISBN978-0-8101-1380-0
Wittgenstein's Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (University of Chicago Press, 1996) pbk. ISBN978-0-226-66058-5
Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (University of Chicago Press, 1991) ISBN978-0-226-65733-2
Poetic License: Studies in the Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric (Northwestern University Press, 1990) ISBN978-0-8101-0843-1
Critical studies and reviews of Perloff's work
Radical artifice
Golding, Alan (Spring 1994). "Avant-gardes and American poetry". Contemporary Literature. 35 (1): 156–170. doi:10.2307/1208740. JSTOR1208740.