During a season of two-word movie titles with hard consonantal punch — Home Alone, Total Recall, Die Hard, Naked Gun — I listened to Charles Bernstein and Marjorie Perloff pair other words to communicate the essence of her forthcoming book. Old terms — avant-garde, experimental, innovative — seemed worn out. So did the academically toned nuances of “studies,” “approaches,” or “investigations.” More tired were the residuals of the plague of postmodern “signs” of the “hetero-hegemonic” “(un)conscious” and other neo- and pseudologisms. How better to signal the wind change of 1980s poetics than by imitating the language styles abroad in media culture.
Radical Artifice (University of Chicago Press, 1994) took up the challenge of coming to terms with how, why, and to what effect the uses of media culture were changing the ground from which poetry emerged. Perloff addressed the syntactic and structural elements of these texts, not just thematics or linguistic motifs, to understand the role and place of poetry in a world where language was reinvented, recycled, banalized, produced, extruded, put into lights, taken down off the screen, put on display, flaunted, tarted up, and toned down in rapid refresh cycles of commerce and entertainment. The internet did not exist. The graphical user interface was still a pixilated screen space on a desktop computer. The beginnings of electronic literature as experiments in hyper-this-and-that circulated only on disks and CDs, whose production had a geeky technical character that put it all just out of reach of any but the dedicated codesters. My point? The megaburst of mass media from which the work studied in Radical Artifice had burgeoned forth was a post-WWII electronic and commercial wave of television, advertisement, large circulation glossy magazines, billboards, and film. Fueled by a feverish economic expansion, the language of media overtook all other forms of cultural expression. Nineteenth-century writers and early twentieth-century poets may have recognized the exhaustion that their own overstimulated psyches experienced in the face of posters layered onto hoardings, radio transmissions, and photographic images, films, and newspapers. But with each passing decade the increase in the sheer scale of visual-verbal-musical media culture was unprecedented. The question was not simply how the individual voice was to take shape in such a heteroglot linguistic field, but how, if it did, it might register and be heard at all.
In the 1970s, theoretically inclined poets in Canada, New York, the Bay Area, and elsewhere in the Anglophone world had embraced and embodied the tenets of Roland Barthes’s death of the author, constituting themselves as produced subjects and their texts as expressions of cultural processes. Conceptual work abounded, procedural in its methods of production, antilyrical, combinatoric, and methodologically formal, concerned with external structure rather than interior life. The techniques of John Cage and Jackson Mac Low, the new sentence announced by Ron Silliman, poems made as lists or from restricted vocabularies, or improvised in performance to an unstructured line of associations and sounds — all were infused with a conceptual premise, that to make a contemporary work one went as far from emotional, perceptual, epiphanic experience as possible. Conceptual, minimalist, and procedural works had another feature in common — they eschewed the terms and terminology of mass media culture. Unlike pop art, and then hip hop, the edgy art and poetry of 1970s and 1980s was still committed to the notion of difficulty, of explorations esoteric and arcane that necessarily distinguished their zones of operation and methods of expression from the consumable pulp and pablum of mass media.
Modernism had engaged the vernacular, the individual voice freed from the constraints of literary formulations and prescriptive forms. But by the late twentieth century, the forces conspiring against poetic expression were not those of tradition and its conventions, but the tidal wave of consumable discourses let loose in the massive production machines of entertainment, commerce, and media. What was the role of poetry in such a world? Its identifiable features? Its methods and reasons for being? How to explain the many unreadable works of contemporary literature? Why write works so difficult they were almost illegible to a wide number of readers? Explanation and critical description are the critic’s task, but it took courage to champion the cause of the works examined in this volume when few academics ventured beyond the well-mapped territories of modernism, the Beats, and the New York school. Radical Artifice called attention to modes of expression at work in living poetic discourse, to show the method in their peculiar made-ness.
Form is resistant. In the words of the linguist Roman Jakobson, quoted by Marjorie Perloff in one of her more influential books, Radical Artifice: Poetry in the Age of Media (University of Chicago, 1994), “form exists only insofar as it is resistant.” This insistence on the materiality of textual form is one of Marjorie Perloff’s methodological and ideological constancies, one of her main critical vantage points. Form as cognate structure, context carrier, unfixed play, semantic regeneration. Thinking beyond the transcendent poet’s “voice” through to the complex sonorous ghosts of its inscriptions. Articulation of textual decipherabilities and mediated performance.
Bypassing genres and refusing the divisive separation between prose and poetry, Perloff’s unwavering restlessness towards what defines, and holds (back), writing today, “given the particular options (and nonoptions) of writing at the turn of the twenty-first century,” and more specifically her concern with the “formations and transformations of literary and artistic discourses today,” has made and kept her work vibrant and singular for more than two writing generations. The dreadful and morbid polarizations that have encamped and fossilized poetry scenes between lyric and nonlyric for most of the twentieth century are displaced by the way she defines the working parameters of poetry itself as “an alternate language system,” a thinking through of poetry’s application to language as a “cognate art.”
She envisages rule-based structures as values that extend and transpose the line, the verse, as poetic measure altogether. These also assist the analysis of nonverbal units as part of a textual frame. Through meticulous close readings, from Rimbaud to Bernstein, from O’Hara to Language Poets and on to Goldsmith, she examines and promotes the profound nature of “interferences in the reading process.” What could seem contradictory, she makes complementary. Her examinations of the graphic poetics of Cubist collage cohabit with her work on Brazilian Concrete poets, the textual compositions of John Cage, the “residuae” of Beckett, the archival poetics of Susan Howe, Christian Boltanski’s fictional documents, as well as commercial advertising and performative modes that operate beyond the page.
The main allies and travelling companions we find throughout her vast work are four iconic and indexical figures: “Duchamp,” “Stein,” “Klebnikov,” and “Cage,” nonreferential art, ordinary language and poetic literalism, verbivocovisual space, rule-based structures. They are the four wheels that in her work absorb the incoming methodologies of contemporary writing practices. Four wheels across the text’s broken glass. These have turned over her close readings and reflections, and have allowed for the critical inclusion of examples drawn from painting, collages, documentary photography, advertising, architecture, video installation, and sound composition, along with graphic and visual works. The aspects that make a text interdisciplinary are not only its intertextual criss-crossings but also the media and techniques used and its openness to knowledges explored.
More recently, the effect of externalized multilingual practices, which move radically away from the multilingual eruditions of “Pound-Eliot,” has teased her interest in new poetic practices and reverberates back to her suspicion of unified identity. This last point however is the one that in a final count remains where her argument is the least open, where her suspicion of historical identitarian impositions leads to a lack of interest in some of the performatively more radical and conducively “blind” (Brathwaite) poetics that have emerged as an investigation of colonialist and postcolonialist ideologies. Yet the sympathetic nature of her methodological concerns could easily favor the examination of poetic works that uses “identity” structurally while recognizing its ideological adhesions.
In Stein’s essay “What are masterpieces and why are there so few of them,” discussed by Perloff in her 21st Century Modernism: The New Poetics (Wiley-Blackwell, 2002), artforms must at crucial intervals start “doing something else.” The need arises when an artform’s habitat and social and symbolic conventions are radically upended by new social engines. In Stein’s piece, it is the very displacement of painting by mass communication (radio, newspapers, televisions, and advertising) and especially by the art of photography that robs the painter of their hold on description and realism. “There have been too many photographs,” hence the painter has to find another purpose for his work, “he has to say that he does something else.” Whether he does it, or says that he does it, or does that he says it, is a difference of variables familiar to Steinian equations. Marjorie Perloff insists and shows how poetry has long been doing something else, and crystallizes it with this marvelous statement: “poetry now being the discourse that defers reading.” Her commitment to elucidating this fascinating conundrum confirms that in an epoch of intense technological melee and the increased viability of audiovisual literacies, poetry finds itself treating the transformations and apperceptions of reading habits as its something else. Saying so, saying that it does so, it turns and plows vast new existential terrains for its mysterious mediations.
Her work has inspired my practice.
According to Wikipedia, a “Wittgenstein’s ladder” is a reductive explanation of complex material, a “lie-to-children” or “tender introduction,” such as falling apples are to Newton’s Second Law. For her part, Marjorie Perloff’s Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (University of Chicago Press, 1999) supplied an introduction, neither tender nor reductive, to the place where poetry meets the everyday, a place both aesthetic and ethical. For in WL, Perloff set forth what would prove to be the primary concern of the contemporary avant-garde: “To put it more concretely: what role does the interrogation of language that dichten (composing poetry) entails play in the mass culture of the later twentieth century?” Furthermore, to détourne Perloff: “what role does mass culture play in the interrogation of language that dichten (composing poetry) entails in the early twenty-first century?” Bringing us to her Unoriginal Genius (University of Chicago Press, 2010), and what I see as the birth of conceptualist criticism.
Perloff’s ongoing engagement with Wittgenstein, like her involutions with Cage and Duchamp, provides a rough guide to her steady preoccupation with what makes poetry poetry. The touchpoints here involve the readymade, the everyday, and the constant press of context. One of Perloff’s favorite Wittgenstein moments is found in Culture and Value, when the philosopher asks us to imagine a theater: “the curtain goes up and we see someone alone in his room walking up and down, lighting a cigarette, seating himself etc. so that suddenly we are observing a human being from outside in a way that ordinarily we can never observe ourselves; as if we were watching a chapter from a biography with our own eyes — surely this would be at once uncanny and wonderful. More wonderful than anything that a playwright could cause to be acted or spoken on the stage. We should be seeing life itself.” The predicate problem, of course, is that in imagining a theater, we are already within a context that cannot produce “life itself,” but only an aestheticized object — like a biography, like poetry. Life as we know it is not “life” as we frame it. To wit, Duchamp’s Fountain, Cage’s 4’33”, Goldsmith’s Weather. In emphasizing the way poetry has most recently intersected with “life itself,” Perloff’s work has moved us from considering the readymade as argument (Language poetry) to the readymade as context (Conceptual poetry), in other words, embodied, constructed, contingent on the spectral gaze. In this sense, though Perloff does not make this claim, the poetic readymade becomes an essentially feminist gesture. (Some hot ass! — Duchamp) As does the refusal of the retinal. (No more retinal poetry! — Place) Whether pro- or con-, text remains objectified, situated. And in a brilliant aphoristic moment, Perloff fuses the two: “To put it simply, artworks are always site-specific.”
If the question at the end of the twentieth century was whether poetry matters at all, the question at the start of the twenty-first is what happens if the very stuff of poetry is all matter. The first preoccupied the postmoderns, particularly the Language poets. They used the quotidian to convey the common, and in conveying the common, argued for an ethical commons. The second preoccupies the Conceptualists, who use the ordinary to convey the real, and in conveying the real, stop right there. As Perloff percipiently noted about my own Statement of Facts: “But what is the ‘real’ anyway? What is the difference between fact and the interpretation of fact?” Thus the famous Duchampian aesthetic indifference is equally a Kantian moral indifference — i.e., the state of being without prejudice. In her latest book, Perloff takes the made-ready of Benjamin’s Arcades Project — a book not written by Benjamin, inasmuch as he copied most of it, and a book not written by Benjamin, inasmuch as it was assembled by the editors at Harvard University Press — and treats it as a work of conceptual literature. A genre not written by Benjamin the essayist, nor, at this point, presumably vetted by the editors at Harvard University Press. Perloff’s indifference to all but context, in this case, the context of a literary critique, appears to be the first public performance of a conceptualist criticism. Reading the work outside all forms of authorial or affective intent and right into the site-specificity of the current reading of the work. Content only as context. The ordinary language of Benjamin’s notes on ordinary life in nineteenth-century Paris is conceptual literature because Perloff treats it as such. The man in the theater is performing “life itself” — because the use of the reflexive pronoun is crucial, and absolute. (All games are first played in language.) Aesthetics necessarily involve objects, or reflected experience. “Life,” like “poetry,” exists only as a categorical conceit, as the infra-thin of ordinary being, as poetry is the infra-thin of ordinary language. The theater, after all, is just a room in which we all agree to face forward.
At the end of Wittgenstein’s Ladder, Perloff quotes Wittgenstein: “Aesthetics is descriptive.” In other words, not normative. At the beginning of Wittgenstein’s Ladder, Perloff quotes Wittgenstein: “Philosophie dürfte man eigentlich nur dichten.” (“Philosophy ought really to be written as a form of poetry.”) In other words, what? The reciprocal readymade, according to Duchamp, returns art to its fundamental nature as object — use a Rembrandt as an ironing board. So too aesthetics and ethics may now be returned to their fundamental nature as rhetoric and rhetorical. Not as the conveyance of singular sublimity or transcendent collectivism, not as exhortation to right thoughts or narcissistic epiphanous uplift, but as language as such, as how language works. Once climbed, the ladder is thrown over for a new ladder, one that takes the earlier ladder into account. Criticism, like poetry, is a matter of accretion. Accretion, like criticism, is a matter of natural extension. By way of its extended interrogations and descriptions, its casting and recastings, Perloff’s criticism is poetry, because it is a model for a poetry that is no more or less than language itself, that does not tell us how to be but that we be as we be, for what good is poetry if we cannot articulate ourselves with at least the elementary elegance of an ordinary clavicle.
 This seems to be a rather louche adaptation of Wittgenstein’s proposition 6.54 in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which states: “My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them — as steps — to climb beyond them. He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.”
“Did you ever make real life into a drama?” said the Earl. “Now just try. I’ve often amused myself that way. Consider this platform as our stage. Good entrances and exits on both sides, you see. Capital background scene: real engine moving up and down. All this bustle, and people passing to and fro, must have been most carefully rehearsed! How naturally they do it! With never a glance at the audience! And every grouping is quite fresh, you see. No repetition!”
It really was admirable, as soon as I began to enter into it from this point of view. Even a porter passing, with a barrow piled with luggage, seemed so realistic that one was tempted to applaud. He was followed by an angry mother, with hot red face, dragging along two screaming children, and calling, to some one behind, “John! Come on!” Enter John, very meek, very silent, and loaded with parcels. And he was followed, in his turn, by a frightened little nursemaid, carrying a fat baby, also screaming. All the children screamed.
“Capital byplay!” said the old man aside. “Did you notice the nursemaid’s look of terror? It was simply perfect!”
“You have struck quite a new vein,” I said. “To most of us Life and its pleasures seem like a mine that is nearly worked out.”
“Worked out!” exclaimed the Earl. “For any one with true dramatic instincts, it is only the Overture that is ended! The real treat has yet to begin. You go to a theatre, and pay your ten shillings for a stall, and what do you get for your money? Perhaps it’s a dialogue between a couple of farmers — unnatural in their overdone caricature of farmers’ dress — more unnatural in their constrained attitudes and gestures — most unnatural in their attempts at ease and geniality in their talk. Go instead and take a seat in a third-class railway-carriage, and you’ll get the same dialogue done to the life! Front-seats — no orchestra to block the view — and nothing to pay!”
 Perloff has noted that Wittgenstein was “not interested in connotation, nuance, or in word choice based on considerations of rhythm and sound, but in the uses of the denotative properties of words, phrases, and particular syntactic constructions” (“‘But isn’t the same at least the same?’: Translatability in Wittgenstein, Duchamp and Jacques Roubaud,” Jacket 14, July 2001). However, she begins WL by discussing Wittgenstein the “poet.” In part because of this maxim, in part because his interrogations of grammar are the interrogative moves of poetry (17). To which I would simply note as well the sly rhythms and rhymes of Wittgenstein’s line: dur/nur; phie/ei; lich/dich. Put another way, maybe there are no other words.
 As duly noted by Eliot — “the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past” (“Tradition and the Individual Talent”). Or, as Wittgenstein put it: “What belongs to a language game is a whole culture” (Lectures on Aesthetics no. 25, 9). Current culture creates (and is created by) a set of language rules; given that the past now exists in the present (as we exist in an age of simultaneity rather than repetition), a rigorous conceptualist criticism can engage in a (duly noted) dehistoricized critique that is nonetheless not ahistorical.
For well over three decades, Marjorie Perloff has been one of the most engaging and engaged poetry critics in America. Her commentaries on individual poets, modernist and contemporary, as well on key poetry movements and directions, have become the go-to source for interested readers, students, and scholars. And these essays are among the best introductions to the poets about whom she writes. Whether you agree with her or not, Perloff has frequently defined the terms of the discussion; and indeed, disagreeing with Perloff can be as productive as agreeing with her, which is, for me, a clear measure of the success of her work.
Perloff is a pragmatic critic, employing a practice-based approach to reading poems based on aesthetic conviction and lucid analysis. While Perloff’s criticism sometimes resembles close reading, and much of her work includes detailed discussions of individual poems, she does not shy away from contextual, historical, and biographical framing and backfill eschewed by the New Critics of the 1940s and ’50s. Peter Middleton calls such socio-historically informed commentary “distant reading.” Still, in Perloff’s commitment to accounting for the minute particulars of a poem, she departs from many of her contemporaries, who in their valuable critiques of “Close Reading” have sometimes lost the poetry baby in the contextual bath water. Indeed, Perloff swims against the tide of cultural and historical criticism that focuses more on the bath than the baby, leaving poetry to take a bath, that is get soaked, while the aesthetic languishes high and dry.
Reading Perloff, the immediate sense is of an inductive criticism grounded in a grappling with the poem at hand. Contrary to common academic practice, poems are not used to illustrate a thesis, whether cultural or historical. Perloff leads with the poem, drawing conclusions based on her readings.
Or does she? What is the poem “at hand”?
More than meets the eye: every one of Perloff’s readings makes historical, aesthetic, and philosophical claims, which are all the more convincing, and persuasive, because of her method. Indeed, vital to her method is an “Or does she?” moment, where after laying down a plausible interpretation of a work, Perloff pulls the rug from under complacent assumptions and superficial readings, offering an alternative statement of the case. As with a detective story, Perloff often sets up the reader to see the clues leading to one conclusion only to delight us by coming to a surprisingly different way of seeing what’s what.
Unconventional poems require ingenious readings. Forms need first to be apprehended, contrasted with other related forms, modernist and contemporary, and then interpreted. The interpretation of a form is usually understood as considering not what a poem is saying but how it is saying it. But in the multidimensional field of formally inventive poems, forms are dynamic systems or processes, not static containers. Forms might better be described as poetic architectures, structures, environments, methods, or compositional principles. Whenever Perloff interprets a sound pattern in a line or speculates on the source of an appropriated segment, she makes a claim for its significance and places it into an articulated conception of the poem’s overall structure or process. In this sense, the value of her criticism is dependent on her ability to make judgments about the complex of formal elements that comprise the poem.
Perloff’s exemplary interpretations of poems do not provide closure but rather, crucially, model strategies for reading the poems. Perloff’s commentaries focus not only on sound patterning, forms, visual shapes, vocabulary, syntax, allusion, and tone, but also on contexts and frames. First and foremost, she gives an account of the possible meanings of, in other words reasons for, formal and structural features of a poem; she then contextualizes those formal features into an implicit literary history. This history is given as needed in any individual essay but also is provided full-blown in several of her books and in literary historical essays included in each of her collections.
Consider Perloff’s reading-in-detail of Susan Howe’s The Midnight, in an essay first published in American Poetry after 1975, a special issue of boundary 2 I edited in 2009 (and that Perloff included in her most recent book, from 2011, Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century). Through sharp detective work, Perloff brings to light a range of textual sources and biographical information not readily available to the reader of Howe’s montage poem. She then provides a tour-de-force reading of the poem that would be startlingly informative to even Howe’s most dedicated readers. This is what is so captivating about Perloff’s writing: by the end of the essay you can’t help feeling how much you missed on your own. Then again, one of her most recent essays, on Duchamp’s Fountain (presented in the spring of 2011 at the Kelly Writers House at Penn) is structured like a detective story. We follow Perloff as she hunts down a relatively unknown context in which Duchamp showed his urinal at the Armory Show. In this case, reading-in-detail means seeing Duchamp’s signature work not simply “for itself” as a readymade but rather in terms of other images of fountains in more conventional works at the Armory Show. Perloff lets us see one of the most iconic works of modernist art in a fresh light by pursuing a novel sense of its context. What is “seen” makes sense not just in itself but also in relation.
Perloff is one of the few critics who will risk giving specific interpretations toward the meaning of resolutely non- or ambi-representational poems, taking into account the multidimensional field that establishes possible meanings. While many poets and critics alike are happy to celebrate or denounce unfamiliar poems as uninterpretable or empty (or free) of meaning, Perloff has shown over and again that anything that can be read can be interpreted and that meaning isn’t restricted to conventional forms or syntax, or to the conveyance of a preexisting message, but that, indeed, poetry can make its meanings by syncretizing unrecognized forms and syntaxes. Critical response has the potential to make concrete the experience of encountering the unfamiliar, which means also discussing the specific ways in which such strange encounters are both unfamiliar and familiar, including the ways a poem departs from the familiar and the ways it may articulate the familiar through its aversions.
Those of us in and around L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E provided, in our poetics, frames for reading and extensive discussion of compositional methods, along with many interventions on literary and historical contexts. But early on there was an aversion to close readings of specific poems based on a conviction that the poems were aversive to such interpretations and also out of a fear that a specific interpretation of what a poem meant would be reductive and cast the poem as something stable rather than as a dynamic process or performance that allows for multiple, discrepant readings and listenings. As a result, the ways of reading we used, in practice, for conceptualizing and reading formally inventive, unconventional poems were intuitive and often inexplicit. You could get the hang of such reading styles by participating in a subculture of discussion and exchange and production, but without needing to give a detailed account (even to yourself) of what happened when you read a particular poem. For some, initiated into these practices, the aversion to close reading may have made the poems seem more hermetic than they were. One reason for Perloff’s great popularity is that she makes explicit a set of otherwise unstated, not to say hidden, codes for reading and interpreting, indeed for perceiving and grasping, unfamiliar poems. Her criticism is tied to teaching.
All literary interpretations are fungible. There cannot be a final and definitive interpretation of a poem, if poetry is understood as works in words we read as art. Even transparency and artlessness need to be interpreted. The point of local envisionments of a poem, an interpretation that makes a guess at what is happening and why, are not to give paraphrases but rather to suggest ways of reading: a concrete instance of how a particular passage might be interpreted. Perloff’s readings are remarkably apt but their aptness is part and parcel with their aversion of the definitive or of a logic of substitution. Her readings are probes, not summaries. They elucidate rather than explain. They model reading practices that are suggested by, even necessary for, the poem at hand (rather than deductively using poems to illustrate a previously existing idea). At the same time, they are often aversive to the claims made by the poets themselves about their work. For example, in Unoriginal Genius, Perloff resituates the discussion of new developments in conceptualism in poetry, placing the work in a spectrum of earlier writing, including Benjamin and Howe, which uses textual citation and composition by selective arrangement. The effect is to give close readings to work sometimes put forward as unreadable and to emphasize the brilliant ingenuity (and creativity and originality) of the aesthetic choices made in the poems she addresses.
Perloff’s readings-in-detail and readings-for-context are emphatically framed within literary-historical timelines that rely not on an invariant view of the unilinear development of radical literary form (as is sometimes the case with formalist art criticism), but rather on a historically informing and philosophically perspicacious sense of multiple, uneven developments in the poetic field. There isn’t one sort of new form or one dominant development, no single “right” kind of poem. Rather Perloff, the pragmatist, lays out how a poem plays in the language game that is its form, which also means defining every poem in contrast to other modes of poetic practice (but not to an absolute sense of quality based on a fixed conception of poetic craft).
Perhaps this is best exemplified by a series of historical framing essays Perloff has written to highlight emerging developments, from “indeterminacy” in The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (1981), to her 1985 piece on L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, several signal essays on poetic rhythm after free verse (prosody in nonlinear poetry), her article on feminism and innovative poetics, digital and procedural poetry, including the recent focus on conceptualisms, along with her series of influential, and often polemical, articles on the vexed category of postmodernism, the importance of poetry as an object of study for the literary academy, and the predicament of the humanities. A fine example of the iconicity of Perloff’s essays is “Pound/Stevens: Whose Era?” (1982). The answer to the question in the title is both. Instructive here, as in Perloff’s other essays on canon formation, affiliation, and anthologies, is the discussion of how poetics is organized around competing lineages, neither of which is right or wrong. The goal is less the selection of winners and losers and more bringing to consciousness how the poem works (a small or large machine made of … verbs): what to look for, what counts, what you might miss, what the significance of the formal choices are, how a poem stacks up against other historical and contemporary particulars, and how aesthetic affiliations and allegiances are fundamental to grappling with the meaning of poem.
Perloff has written trenchant essays on first-wave Anglo-American modernist poets, including Yeats, Eliot, Stevens, Stein, Loy, Williams, and Pound, as well as such second-wavers as Beckett, Jolas, and Oppen. Her critical approach allows her to situate such poets, as well as subsequent poetic innovators, in the broader context of radical European modernist art, from Russian and Italian Futurism to Dada and Surrealism. Duchamp is fully as much a core reference for Perloff as Pound; and indeed she has in recent years focused more on Wittgenstein and Duchamp than on any of the Anglo-American modernist poets.
When reading contemporary American poetry, Perloff’s commentaries assume that the historical and formal context of poetry is the dynamic field of performance, abstraction, and conceptualisms from the Futurist moment onward — a perspective that is at odds with an American insularity and hostility to the European avant-gardes that dogs the poetry and criticism of the immediate postwar period (and beyond). Perloff’s wide-ranging arts perspective has served readers well in her incisive essays on postwar American poets such as Creeley, Ginsberg, O’Hara, Ashbery, Plath, Howe, Hejinian, Andrews, Mullen, Armantrout, and Silliman. Her works on these poets have also benefited from the wider context provided by her influential essays on Cage, Celan, Mac Low, Beckett, Antin, Rosmarie Waldrop, Bergvall, Raworth, Haroldo de Campos, O’Sullivan, Place, McCaffery, Tawada, Drucker, Bök, and Goldsmith — and vice versa. Perloff has also written appreciatively of the literary criticism of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner as well as encouraged work by two of the most compelling younger literary scholars of the time, Craig Dworkin and Brian Reed.
In this respect, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (1986) is a touchstone book, in which Perloff provides a historical and aesthetic foundation for many of her other essays. The Futurist Moment is the most comprehensive account of the multiple strands of poetic innovation that emerged 100 years ago. Tellingly, Perloff sets her study of radical modernist poetry in the context of the concurrent, and interconnected, revolutions in the visual arts. (A good companion piece for The Futurist Moment is Peter Nicholls’s Modernisms.)
It is instructive to read 21st Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics (Wiley-Blackwell, 2002) alongside The Futurist Moment. In the later book, Perloff brings Duchamp and Eliot into a relation that would seem as first counterintuitive, if one were thinking along the lines of linear literary history and the canonical reception of Eliot. But thinking of Eliot in the context of Duchamp opens up the reading of Eliot in a way that more strictly Anglo American modernist readings cannot. Perloff teaches her readers to look at poetry as part of the arts, and in the context of the visual arts, as well as seeing American poetry as not just, or even primarily, related to British poetry, but also to European poetry and poetics and visual art aesthetics. Indeed, The Futurist Moment provides a cogent case for the need to go beyond medium-specificity in the interpretation of both modernist and contemporary visual art and poetry.
At the same time, Perloff’s expanded aesthetic field of reference makes a decisive break from the normalizing lyric poetry criticism of her Official Verse Culture contemporaries, as exemplified by the modernist and contemporary poetry criticism from the past three decades and more in The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, and The New Yorker, publications which Perloff has neither written for nor been reviewed in, and that have either ignored or been contemptuous of many of the postwar poets she has advocated. There are two related exceptions: in 2000, in a group review in The London Review of Books, Stephen Burt briefly takes up Perloff’s 1977 Frank O’Hara book (the first book on O’Hara) on the occasion of its 1998 reissue. Helen Vendler devotes one paragraph to the same book in a 1980 review in The New York Review of Books, in which she manages to condescend to both Perloff and O’Hara: “Perloff … wants to make her writer better than he is, to claim a cumulative effect for the Collected Poems greater than the effect of its parts, and to defend, as successful, writing too often dubious.” In contrast, Vendler’s reliably unsuccessful aesthetic judgments have made her the ideological bedrock of The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, and The New Yorker. If blame is to be cast, it should fall on the editors of these publications for their ongoing choice of propaganda in place of critical dialog, and not on Vendler, who, after all, demonstrated her dubiousness early on. (Perloff has appeared frequently in the TLS and Bookforum.) [Subsequent to the writing of this essay, Stephen Burt reviewed Unoriginal Genius in the London Review of Books — May 10, 2012.]
Perloff has not shied away from controversy and hostility in standing up for the necessity of poetic invention. When she published “The Word as Such: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry in the Eighties” in the American Poetry Review in 1984, it was one of the highest profile accounts of this work to be published up until that time, and the article had a substantial effect on the reception of the poetry and poetics that was her subject. Perloff has often been out front in seriously considering — but not necessarily endorsing unequivocally (a point often missed) — the work of many poets whose work is not on the map of Official Verse Culture. But when you do that, you take some hits, as when Walter Benn Michaels tried to discredit a critique by Perloff of his work in a 1996 issue of Modernism/Modernity by writing, with imperious authority, “It is, of course, a little disconcerting to be lectured on aesthetic value by someone who thinks that Charles Bernstein is a major poet.”
The value of Perloff’s work rests heavily on her aesthetic judgments. Her work carries a reader along on its enthusiasm and conviction. Of course, a reader may value a work differently than Perloff, or value different works, but I think the greatest satisfaction comes from conceding her point: acknowledging that she has selected a poem worth our attention and made a convincing case for why. This precludes nothing but does hold a challenge that any alternate formulation be made as powerfully, as convincingly, and in at least as much detail.
Perloff has often lamented the unwillingness of many poets and critics to separate the wheat from the chaff — not only across large aesthetic fields, which is more common, but also within a given aesthetic frame, or even within an individual poet’s work. This is not a matter of connoisseurship for her — selecting “the best” or “the major” — but rather a prerequisite of making a convincing case for the value of a poem, which can only be explained in contradistinction from other, often apparently similar, poems. Selecting some poems over others provides the opening for critical articulation. It is not the silent judgment that counts but the criteria for the judgment.
There is a pattern. The network of stoppages that is Perloff’s taste makes one of the most compelling maps of twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry. She earns our trust not by any asserted authority but by the power of her words to make us see, and hear, anew.
France is a country of translations, but it has taken more than four decades before a book by Marjorie Perloff will have been published in France (a translation of Wittgenstein’s Ladder [University of Chicago, 1996] is to be released in 2012). This situation is not exceptional per se. Other important Anglo-Saxon authors have been ignored in Paris, the most blatant example being the almost Surrealist delay with which the major texts of cultural studies were revealed to Francophone readers. Yet the case of Perloff is different. If the resistance toward cultural studies can be explained by French universalism and the fear of communitarian drifts from the Jacobin center, it would be difficult to find any seeds of incompatibility between Perloff’s lifelong commitment to experimental poetry and the political, cultural, and ethical values that pervade poetical analysis in France. Unlike what has happened in the US, poetry in France is not reduced to the shallow forms of self-expression, self-help, political correctness, and community-building that Perloff has unceasingly denounced in her defense of real contemporary writing. In France, there is still room for experiment, and it is not an exaggeration to say that the avant-garde continues to define what poetry is or ought to be. This is demonstrated, for instance, by the funding policy of a key public player in the field, the Centre National du Livre (CNL), which consistently privileges experimental poetry with its frequent and well-mediatized anthologies of avant-garde writing that appear on the market (e.g. 2000’s Pièces détachées: une anthologie de la poésie française aujourd’hui and 2006’s Caisse à outils: un panorama de la poésie française aujourd’huiEspitallier and directly published in cheap pocket editions in Paris), and by continuously emphasizing this type of literature in higher education. Moreover, Perloff has always paid great attention to French poetry, which she reads firsthand and of which she is one of the most lucid analysts outside France.
If none of the reasons mentioned above can explain the delayed reception of Perloff in France (or more precisely, its confinement to the small circles of progressive American studies), there must be something else: and that something is, I would like to argue, threefold.
First of all, Perloff is a fundamentally antiparochial thinker, a truly comparative voice characterized by the blending of close reading, cultural analysis, and literary theory (I do not claim this list to be exhaustive). In principle, such an antiparochialism can be embraced enthusiastically by French scholars (and it should be stressed that I haven’t found anywhere any negative or dismissing remark on Perloff’s work), but contrary to the French variants of what Perloff is defending, her approach is never monodisciplinary, and this is what goes against the grain of the institutionalized study of poetry in France. French poetry scholars remain monolingual when they are doing theory, and become very descriptive (i.e. nontheoretical) when they are doing comparative literature. True, there are exceptions to this rule, but the gap between the theoretical and the comparative is probably the backbone of the lack of curiosity for Perloff in France.
A second aspect can be found in the fact that Perloff’s thinking does not only exceed the barriers between languages (and by the way, this is quite a problem in French academe), but is also, to a certain extent, antiformalist and anti-language-centered. This statement may come as a surprise, if not an absolute misreading of Perloff, who is after all one of the ultimate close readers of the last decades. What I want to say is simply this: in Perloff’s work, literary writing has always a strong procedural and programmatic dimension, which links the materiality of the text to the ideality of a concept, a project, a poetics. Literary writing can never be reduced to just language. Such a stance diverges in the most radical way from the absolute vision of language with a capital L one finds at the core of many avant-garde movements and theory in France, where the work on the signifier is often considered a strategy against the idea.
Last but not least, there is a third reason, which is named John Cage. Although Cage is a mythical figure in France as well, his textual experiments, his poetics, and his philosophy of chance do not match the lastingly rationalist subtext of the French literary avant-garde, where humor, randomness, loss of control, ephemerality, refusal of authorship, etc., remain rather absent.
However, to translate is also a perlocutionary act: it does not only replicate a form and an idea, it also produces a change where it takes place. The translation of Wittgenstein’s Ladder (1996) will undoubtedly trigger a different reading of French literary theory by itself: Perloff discloses gaps, suggests bridges, and performs shortcuts — in other words — offering something new in France that will not go unnoticed. In that sense, the upcoming translation will not only reveal an author outside the inner circle of avant-garde specialists — it will transform the host culture, and this is what matters in the long run.