For Marjorie

Maggie O'Sullivan

November 8, 2012

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Marjorie Perloff

This Jacket2 feature is devoted to the life and work of Marjorie Perloff, whose critical inquiry over the course of more than three decades combines the pragmatism of lucid analysis with the sociohistorically informed commentary of distant reading to arrive at what Charles Bernstein calls “an inductive criticism grounded in a grappling with the poem at hand.” Jacket2 publisher Al Filreis brings together a number of different poets and critics for discussions of Perloff's critical legacy as well as reflections on the interpretive craft she has shaped for American poetics.

Preface

Al Filreis

J. Gordon Faylor

On the unoriginal genius of Marjorie Perloff Jerome McGann

Sound bytes and computer blips Dee Morris

On 'The Poetics of Indeterminacy' Joan Retallack

The contemporary of our grandchildren Richard Sieburth

For Marjorie Maggie O'Sullivan

Perloff and/in France Jan Baetens

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

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

Four wheels and a broken glass Caroline Bergvall

'Radical Artifice' Johanna Drucker

'The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage' Stephen Fredman

Becoming Marjorie Perloff Brian Reed

The unprepared future of an exophonic refugee Al Filreis

'The Futurist Moment' Jean-Michel Rabaté

Marjorie Perloff's twenty-first-century modernism Peter Nicholls

Close, very close Peter Middleton

Marjorie Perloff: A bibliographic essay J. Gordon Faylor

Futurism and schism Marjorie Perloff

By this author

'Writing is a body-intensive activity'

For Marjorie

(Un)Disciplining the ethnographer's body

The poetics of opacity in Renee Gladman's Ravicka series

Angelica Maria Barraza

Detail from ‘Couriers reporting to the emperor,’ via <a href=https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:COM_V1_D319_Couriers_reporting_to_the_emperor.png>Wikimedia Commons</a>. — Detail from ‘Couriers reporting to the emperor,’ via Wikimedia Commons.

The racialization — and weaponization — of “sociology,” “social,” and “social science” as descriptors for poetry by people of color is particularly crude; at its foundation it suggests that their/our poems are merely collections of empirical observations, that they are self-referential expressions of social particularity largely devoid of stylistic elements such as rhythm, metaphor, etc. Stripped of poetic markers the poems cease to be poems; they become a sort of personal testimony, autoethnographies, that elicit from critics further reductive descriptors such as “cultural” and “identitarian.”

Renee Gladman’s Ravicka series almost didn’t get published. Dalkey Archive Press planned to publish the first two installations, Event Factory and The Ravickians, but then didn’t. Danielle Dutton, a consultant for Dalkey, couldn’t understand why not.

January 7, 2021

'I make these collages and write'

Alice Notley's visual art

Nick Sturm

Alice Notley reading from ‘When I Was Alive’ at her MoMA PS1 show. Photo by/courtesy of Monica Claire Antonie.

Alice Notley’s one and only exhibition of her visual art in the United States was in 1980 at MoMA PS1. The press release, written by Notley, notes that her collages are made “of paper (potential trash) from the poet/artist’s life, pieces of illustrations from favorite cheap books, sidewalk discoveries, and things she could see on the floor, from her chair, and was too lazy to throw away.”

December 22, 2020