A page of John Cage’s ‘Roaratorio’ in Perloff’s Radical Artifice. Image courtesy of Marjorie Perloff.
During a season of two-word movie titles with hard consonantal punch — Home Alone, Total Recall, Die Hard, Naked Gun — I listened to Charles Bernstein and Marjorie Perloff pair other words to communicate the essence of her forthcoming book. Old terms — avant-garde, experimental, innovative — seemed worn out. So did the academically toned nuances of “studies,” “approaches,” or “investigations.” More tired were the residuals of the plague of postmodern “signs” of the “hetero-hegemonic” “(un)conscious” and other neo- and pseudologisms.
Form is resistant. In the words of the linguist Roman Jakobson, quoted by Marjorie Perloff in one of her more influential books, Radical Artifice: Poetry in the Age of Media (University of Chicago, 1994), “form exists only insofar as it is resistant.” This insistence on the materiality of textual form is one of Marjorie Perloff’s methodological and ideological constancies, one of her main critical vantage points. Form as cognate structure, context carrier, unfixed play, semantic regeneration.
Perloff lecturing on Duchamp at CUNY, 2012. Photo by Matthew Knip.
According to Wikipedia, a “Wittgenstein’s ladder” is a reductive explanation of complex material, a “lie-to-children” or “tender introduction,” such as falling apples are to Newton’s Second Law.[1] For her part, Marjorie Perloff’s Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (University of Chicago Press, 1999) supplied an introduction, neither tender nor reductive, to the place where poetry meets the everyday, a place both aesthetic and ethical.
Marjorie Perloff in her living room, 2008. Photo by Emma Bee Bernstein.
For well over three decades, Marjorie Perloff has been one of the most engaging and engaged poetry critics in America. Her commentaries on individual poets, modernist and contemporary, as well on key poetry movements and directions, have become the go-to source for interested readers, students, and scholars. And these essays are among the best introductions to the poets about whom she writes.
France is a country of translations, but it has taken more than four decades before a book by Marjorie Perloff will have been published in France (a translation of Wittgenstein’s Ladder [University of Chicago, 1996] is to be released in 2012). This situation is not exceptional per se. Other important Anglo-Saxon authors have been ignored in Paris, the most blatant example being the almost Surrealist delay with which the major texts of cultural studies were revealed to Francophone readers. Yet the case of Perloff is different.
