Marjorie Perloff

Close, very close

Marjorie Perloff at the ACLA Forum, 2007.

Marjorie Perloff is one of our best readers of poetry, one of those critics whose interpretive craft is always compelling to follow. She has not only kept practical criticism relevant, she has shown that it can be renewed even in the close reading of the most refractory modernist poems. This commitment to close reading has required nerve. Even critics sympathetic to the modernist avant-garde can be opposed to such a critical strategy: close reading, they say, is mere pedagogy; it views the text through lenses tinted with undeclared ideological commitments; it finds in even a multitudinous text just a few devices and deconstructions; it is ahistorical; or it is too historical, too closely rooted in the historical moment of the reader. 

Despite such pressures to abandon close reading, Perloff has held fast. Close reading enables her to affirm the fundamental intelligibility of poems, and locate this intelligibility in the logical space of reasons, the embodied space of empathy, and in a long and many-sided poetic tradition.

Avant-garde poetry has repeatedly been dismissed as nonsense. Perloff adapted the techniques of practical criticism that she learned from an earlier generation of literary critics (and initially practiced on Robert Lowell’s poetry) to the task of arguing that such dismissals ignore the emergence of new forms of intelligibility. Her incisive reading of Gertrude Stein’s “Susie Asado” (1913) employs prosodic analysis, knowledge of other languages, analysis of syntax as well as semantics, plus biographical information, to demonstrate that such a seemingly abstract, unintelligible text can be rendered lucid. “Skeptical readers will object at this point, arguing that texts like Susie Asado are unnecessarily obscure, unreadable, and boring, that Stein fails to communicate a coherent meaning to the reader. The line between sense and non-sense is, of course, a narrow one. Remove all vestiges of reference and the text collapses into a series of empty sounds.”[1]

Marjorie Perloff's twenty-first-century modernism

Published in 2002 as part of Blackwell’s “Manifestos” series, Marjorie Perloff’s 21st-Century Modernism is a passionate restatement of her commitment to avant-garde writing and its role in an increasingly mediatized future. At a moment when the notion of the postmodern seems “to have largely lost its momentum,” we need to appreciate, says Perloff, the full potential of modernism’s continuing legacy.[1] 21st-Century Modernism accordingly revisits some old enthusiasms — Stein, Duchamp, Khlebnikov — and also returns to Eliot’s early work to discover there an avant-gardism Perloff now feels she undervalued in her previous books. This review of literary modernism neatly summarizes the qualities of avant-garde writing that Perloff will then rediscover in the “second wave of modernism” that she associates with the contemporary texts of Lyn Hejinian, Steve McCaffery, Charles Bernstein, and Susan Howe (5). The features emphasized are by now familiar ones: the collage-text, the “indeterminacy” of meaning that underwrites a determined anti-subjectivism, the repudiation of mainstream “authenticity” or what Bernstein has nicely called “the natural look,” and, above all, the recognition of the text as “verbal artifact.” This latter term consistently governs Perloff’s approach to the avant-garde, compelling her readers to realize that when Williams, for example, declares “No ideas but in things” or Pound calls for “Direct treatment of the ‘thing’”, they are speaking not of material objects but of the poem as “thing,” as conception and as verbal construction (a distinction missed by subsequent generations of critics, but not, of course, by the modernists’ immediate successors: the Objectivists).[2]

'The Futurist Moment'

The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (University of Chicago Press, 2003) has always been my favorite book by Marjorie Perloff. This book has inspired my own 1913 book, less by the choice of its historical focus than by its method. What the Futurist Moment manages to do so well is to be both historical, by bringing into the discussion a wealth of details and facts, and also current, keeping antennae for relevant contemporary issues. Perloff historicizes and problematizes at the same time, without encumbering herself with the trappings of heavy theory. That was to set a durable example for me in 1986. Most chapters begin with discussions of Cendrars, Marinetti, Pound, Delaunay, Malevitch, Tatlin, and end with Cage, Smithson, Antin, Derrida, or Barthes. Perloff bypasses antiquarian history to usher in a Poundian historiography, investigating the past with a view of the new(s) that stays new(s). It is a book written with a purpose, the form of a teleology geared to the Now. This has allowed it to retain its power of seduction and conviction, which is also why it has not aged a bit a quarter of a century later.

She avoids writing another book on Futurism — this has been done and will be done again, with more details and other archives — by giving us a book on the futurist moment, a word that should be understood in German:  “momentum” and “Kraftwirkung,” the calculation of dynamic applications of work — as in physics — to a reality seen as a network of forces. They shape history by making it work, and, at the same time, making it mean. 

Hence the decision to begin with Cendrars, a poet who never identified with futurism as a movement. It would have been different had Marjorie chosen Apollinaire, who, after all, had a “futurist moment.” Why Cendrars? Because of his superb “Prose du Trans-sibérien,” a poem magnificently illustrated by Sonia Delaunay. Its scrolls festoon all the pages of this book. Here is another way for me to relate to this book: it is an extended meditation on the Eiffel Tower. It is because of my great-uncles that I feel a personal connection with the iconic Parisian monument. One of them was in charge of supervising the exact formula for the repeated applications of paint without whose layers of anti-rust cover the edifice would have crumbled (this fact would call up for me the family business of underwater paints inherited by Italo Svevo in Trieste). Another uncle, a lovely man but a bad poet, had published a sonnet that I had memorized in my youth; it ended with an image of the winter sun setting in Paris, seen at the base of the tower by the viewer as it turned into a mass of molten iron beaten into shape by a monstrous anvil!

The unprepared future of an exophonic refugee

Gabriele Mintz and her father, Max; at right, Gabriele's passport photo. Courtesy of Marjorie Perloff.

The argument of Unoriginal Genius[1] is whole and sufficient. It hardly requires the assistance of — nor should its beloved author have to tolerate the prospect of reduction by — my quasi-psychoanalytic reading of the book’s stirring culmination in its chapter on exophonic writing. So attracted am I to the refugee’s story of discontinuity and yet nonalienation, and its possible effect on all subsequent forays into language, I can’t help myself. To be sure, the final section on Kenneth Goldsmith’s Traffic (chapter 7) is really theargument’sconclusion, but “Language in Migration” (chapter 6) is the capstone of its poetics, standing at the limit of its emotive (if I may) trajectory, Perloff’s strongest ever embrace, via Susan Howe and Caroline Bergvall, of a poetry she intensely admires for its exploration of “speaking patterns,” including “slips of the tongue or of the culture” (131; emphasis added).  In her many talks, lectures, interviews, and reviews — through her willingness generally to speak freely on almost any topic — Marjorie Perloff has had a great deal to say about “slips … of the culture.” But here, in Unoriginal Genius, that interest, which accumulated through the years of culture wars in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and developed further through the 1990s and 2000s, has found its proper place within a poetics positioned against the “culturally pluralistic, yet divided, and markedly monolingual society” — a society that “harass[es]” and “discriminat[es]” against such mis-spokenness rather than appreciating and indeed celebrating, as I believe Perloff does, art that arises from the special trauma induced by the linguistic politics of such monoculture (131, 132).

Becoming Marjorie Perloff

Marjorie Perloff at Dumbarton Oaks, 1957. Image courtesy of Marjorie Perloff.

When does a literary critic reach maturity? Looking back over Marjorie Perloff’s career, one could point to “Poetry Chronicle: 1970–71” (1972),[1] an omnibus review of more than thirty recently published books, as a possible candidate. Perhaps for the first time, instead of building on others’ insights, she actively sought to reshape literary opinion based on her own, independent observation and judgment.

“Poetry Chronicle” opens with a provocative quotation from Peter Schjeldahl — “Robert Lowell is the least distinguished poet alive” (97) — and goes on to declare the emergence of a new literary star, Frank O’Hara. Perloff marvels that a formerly “underground” writer’s “Collected Poems should now have appeared in an expensive glossy edition, brought out … by the venerable Alfred A. Knopf, and that [his] poetry, largely ignored by the Establishment during his lifetime, should win the National Book Award” (97–98). Moreover, while the “autobiographical elegiac mode inaugurated by Lowell’s Life Studies” (1959) might still have adherents — she mentions Denise Levertov’s To Stay Alive (1971) and John Berryman’s Love and Fame (1970) — “the real action now seems to be elsewhere,” namely, among O’Hara’s New York School imitators, whose works, like his, are typified by “improvisation, immediacy … catalogues of concrete images[,] … racy, purposely outrageous diction, and a very loose free verse line” (98).

'The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage'

Perloff (center) with others at the "What Is a Poet?" symposium at the University of Alabama conference, 1984.

Perloff’s writing in The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (Princeton University Press, 1981) is first and foremost addressed to resistant, uncomprehending, or skeptical readers. For a generation schooled in seeking and interpreting symbols in poetry, she proposes to delineate the pleasures of an Other Tradition that favors surfaces over depth and linguistic indeterminacy over symbolic coherence. One of the ways she wins over the reluctant reader is to show that the Other Tradition operates much more like a modern art than it does like a symbolist poetry.

'Radical Artifice'

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.

Marjorie Perloff: Die Dichtung und das Ding (poetry and the thing)

Perloff lecturing on Duchamp at CUNY, 2012. Photo by Matthew Knip.
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.

Ways of reading: Marjorie Perloff and the sublimity of pragmatic criticism

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.

Perloff and/in France

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.

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