Bøker av Marjorie Perloff

The more radical poetries today are known by their admirers and detractors alike for their extreme difficulty, a difficulty, Marjorie Perloff argues, dependent less on the recondite imagery and obscure allusion one associates with early modernism than on a large-scale deconstruction of syntax and emphasis on morphology and pun, paragram and paratext. She suggests this new "non-sensical" poetry cannot be explained away as some sort of pernicious fad, designed to fool the gullible and flatter the pretentious; it is, on the contrary, an inevitable--and important--response to the wholesale mediaization of postmodern culture in the United States. But the conventional alienation model, the still-dominant myth of the sensitive and isolated poet, confronted by the hostile mass media, is no longer adequate. On the contrary, Perloff argues, we must recognize that poetry today, like the visual arts and theater, is always contaminated by media discourse; there is no escape into some bucolic, purer realm. What this means is that poetry actively engages the communication models of everyday discourse, producing language constructions that foreground the artifice of the writing process, the materiality of writing itself. How the negotiation between poetic and media discourses takes place is the subject of Marjorie Perloff's groundbreaking study. Radical Artifice considers what happens when the "natural speech" model inherited from the great modernist poets comes up against the "natural speech" of the Donahue "talk show", or again, how visual poetics and verse forms are responding to the discourse of billboards and sound bytes. Among the many poets whose works are discussed are John Ashbery, GeorgeOppen, Susan Howe, Clark Coolidge, Lyn Hejinian, Leslie Scalapino, Charles Bernstein, Johanna Drucker, and Steve McCaffery. But the strongest presence in Perloff's book is a "poet" better known as a composer, a philosopher, a printmaker, a polymath, one who understood, almost half a century ago, that from now on no word, no musical note, no painted surface, no theoretical statement could ever again escape "contamination" from the media landscape in which we live. That poet is John Cage and it is under his sign that Radical Artifice was composed.

Esteemed literary critic Marjorie Perloff reconsiders the nature of the poetic, examining its visual, grammatical, and sound components.

"An earlier version of chapter 1 appeared as "Avant-Garde in a Different Key: Karl Kraus's The Last Days of Mankind," Critical Inquiry 40, no. 2 (Winter 2014): 311-38."

Presents an accessible introduction to Marjorie Perloff's critical thought. In this book, fourteen interviews cover a broad spectrum of topics in the study of poetry: its nature as a literary genre, its current state, and its relationship to art, politics, language, theory, and technology.

Previously known as an art-world figure, but now regarded as an important poet, Frank O'Hara is examined in this study. It traces the poet's "French connection" and the influence of the visual arts on his work. This edition includes a new introduction with a reconsideration of O'Hara's lyric.

When the avant-gardist John Cage died, he was already the subject of many interviews, memoirs and discussions of his contribution to music. This text includes a revisionist treatment of the way Cage himself has composed and been "composed" in America.

This text considers what happens when the "natural speech" model inherited from the Modernist poets comes up against the "natural speech" of the "Donahue" talk show, or again, how visual poetics and verse forms are responding to the languages of billboards and sound bytes.

Marjorie Perloff, critic of 20th-century poetry, argues that Wittgenstein speaks to poets because he provides a way out of the impasse of high versus low discourse, demonstrating the inescapable strangeness of ordinary language.

Ranging from medieval Latin lyrics to a cyborg opera, sixteenth-century France to twentieth-century Brazil, romantic ballads to the contemporary avant-garde, this book explores such subjects as the translatability of lyric sound, the historical and cultural roles of rhyme, and the role of sound repetition in novelistic prose.

This examination of the flourishing of Futurist aesthetics in European art and literature of the twentieth century, offers considerations of futurist work from Russia to Italy.

What is the place of individual genius in a global world of hyper-information - a world in which, as Walter Benjamin predicted more than seventy years ago, everyone is potentially an author? This title explores this intriguing development in contemporary poetry: the embrace of 'unoriginal' writing.

Argues that it is only at the turn of the 21st century that the powerful lessons of the avant-garde - an avant-garde cruelly disrupted by the Great War and subsequent political upheavals - were learned. This book offers readings of T S Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Marcel Duchamp, and Velimir Khlebnikov. It examines various related poetic concerns.