Marjorie Perloff

For Marjorie

The contemporary of our grandchildren

A view from the eighties

Marjorie Perloff at the University of Alabama's "What is a Poet?" symposium in 1984.

My friendship with Marjorie dates back to the early eighties — and, more specifically, to two Ezra Pound conferences, the first held at the University of Maine–Orono (where we sat together listening to Basil Bunting recite his “Briggflats”), and the second at Sheffield University (William Empson’s old redoubt and home that year of the World Snooker Championship). We immediately hit it off, especially upon discovering that we shared a mentor in common in the person of Craig La Driere.

Sound bytes and computer blips

Marjorie Perloff's electronic world

Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media pivots on a seven-word manifesto: “The poet’s arena,” Perloff declares, “is the electronic world.”[1] A key move in a long career, what backs this claim? What leads forward from it? How does it fare in the thoroughly mediated, digitized, networked, and programmable world we currently inhabit?

On the unoriginal genius of Marjorie Perloff

Marjorie Perloff in the Lotus Garden at Huanghzhou University, Wuhan, September 2011.

Keeping originality always in view — for he is false to himself who ventures to dispense with so obvious and so easily attainable a source of interest […] I […] design to render [“The Raven”] manifest that no one point in its composition is referable either to accident or intuition — that it proceeded step by step to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem. — E. A. Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition”

Arkadii Dragomoshchenko

Remembering a great writer and friend

Arkadii Dragomoshchenko

I had already started writing my first commentary for Jacket2. But then I had to begin again.

Earlier today I learnt of the passing of a great poet and a friend: Arkadii Dragomoshchenko.

I discovered on the weekend that Arkadii was seriously unwell. As a result, I dedicated the launch party for my book A Common Strangeness that we held in Dunedin, New Zealand, on Monday to him. As part of the launch, the New Zealand poet Cilla McQueen read the first part of his long poem “A Nasturtium as Reality” alongside her own poem “Photon.” It was just the latest in a long line of cross-cultural encounters generated by Arkadii’s work.

Gerald Bruns on Radical Coherency (Antin's essays) & Attack of the Difficult Poems

Alan Thomas, our University of Chicago editor
took this picture at the book launch, in Los Angeles,
for Antin's essay collection,
Marjoire Perloff's Unoriginal Genius
and my Attack of the Difficult Poems: Essays and Inventions.

just out:
Gerald Bruns reviews Radical Coherence and Attack of the Difficult Poems
 in Jacket2's review section.

Haroldo de Campos tribute at Guggenehim museum (1992 video)

with Bessa, Perloff, Cisneros, Dworkin, Bernstein, Helguera

Presentation on the work of Haroldo de Campos, in conjunction with the exhibit" Brazil: Body and Soul,"
Guggenheim Museum, New York, January 12, 2002


Marjorie Perloff: A short response to Alan Dershowitz

In his Huffington Post piece, "Suppressing Ugly Truth for Beautiful Art" (1 May 2012) Dershowitz writes:

State of error (PoemTalk #50)

Tom Raworth, 'Errory'

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

For our 50th episode, Charles Bernstein, Michael Hennessey, and Marjorie Perloff gathered at the Kelly Writers House to talk about Tom Raworth’s poem, “Errory.”  The poem was published in Clean & Well Lit in 1996, and has been reprinted in the Carcanet Press Collected Poems (2003). Our recording of “Errory” comes from audio material produced in 2004 by the Contemporary Poetics Research Center (CPRC) at Birkbeck College of the University of London, and we thank Colin Still for making these recordings available to PennSound.

Here is the CPRC/PennSound recording of Raworth performing “Errory,” at somewhat more than his usual breakneck speed. Listen to “Out of a Sudden,” for instance — from the same recording session — and you'll notice a more deliberate pace. <--break- />

Yubraj Aryal on Perloff, Drucker on Mallarme

from Journal of Philsophy

Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry, Fall 2011, Vol. 7, No. 16

Unoriginal Genius/Conceptual Writing: Recovering
Avant-Garde in the Contemporary Poetics
(on Perloff)
by Yubraj Aryal: PDF

Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés and the Poem and/as Book as Diagram
by Johanna Drucker: PDF

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