Articles - November 2012

On 'The Poetics of Indeterminacy'

In the early 1980s I was asked to review Marjorie Perloff’s The Poetics of Indeterminacy (Princeton, 1981) for Parnassus: Poetry in Review. I had not yet met Perloff, though I knew her Frank O’Hara book and had seen her in action as the only female panelist at an intensely intimate NEH sponsored conference at the Folger Library in Washington, DC.

November 8, 2012

Sound bytes and computer blips

Marjorie Perloff's electronic world

Dee Morris

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?

November 8, 2012

On the unoriginal genius of Marjorie Perloff

Jerome McGann

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”

November 8, 2012

Clarity and sincerity

Disillusionment in George Oppen's postwar poetic

Eric Hoffman

We have to live today by what truth we can get today, and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood. — William James

When we consider George Oppen’s post-1958, post-silence poetry through the prism of his politics, it is crucial that we consider his continued belief in Marxism as a political solution. Oppen’s interest in and later disavowal of Maoism as an experiment in large-scale Marxism inspired his 1960s poetry to interrogate the needs of the people and the sincerity of leftist political movements in addressing those needs in any significant way. That a poem can interrogate political beliefs in such a way is in concert with Oppen’s then-newfound conviction that it is possible for the poet to reconcile artistic and political concerns, much as he was attempting to accomplish in his own poetry at that time.

November 8, 2012