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

Varieties of silence, and near silence

(Jabès, Eluard, Celan, Kundera)

Raphael Rubinstein

Edmond Jabès. Photo by Bracha L. Ettinger via <a href=https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Edmond_Jabes.jpg>Wikimedia Commons</a>. — Edmond Jabès. Photo by Bracha L. Ettinger via Wikimedia Commons.

The aesthetic stridency of modernism was frequently accompanied by strong political stances, often with disastrous results. Among the innovative writers who managed to navigate the twentieth century without becoming entangled in its worst excesses was Francophone Egyptian poet Edmond Jabès (1912–1991). Did Jabès’s attitude toward language offer some degree of immunity from totalitarian attitudes? An inscription in a pamphlet Jabès published in Cairo in 1953 connects to a controversy that pitted Paul Celan and Milan Kundera against Paul Eluard; retracing this historic thread leads to an appreciation of writing that embraces the neutral and the ambient, a writing that courts silence.

July 22, 2020

Strolling around in language

translated by Daniel Owen

Afrizal Malna

Daniel Owen

I like sweeping. Ironing clothes. Tasks that mainly utilize repetitive motions, like digging or sawing with hand tools. Tasks that make my body present in their repetitions. Then, little by little, like drops of water, waterless and soundless, recollections appear one by one, to join in the celebration of the event of sweeping that I’m currently performing. The tools I use don’t represent (are not a representation of) my body or vice versa.

Translator’s note: Italicized words in “Strolling around in language” appear as italicized, English-language words in the original.

Jump to Indonesian text.

Strolling around in language

When I touch an object, narration begins to grow, to come to life in my body.

1 or One

July 14, 2020