Papers by Marjorie Perloff
The Iowa Review, 1975
What do his speeches in the Circe chapter mean? Bloom is articulate of speech, inarticulate of mi... more What do his speeches in the Circe chapter mean? Bloom is articulate of speech, inarticulate of mind; Stephen is inarticulate of speech, articulate of mind. For Molly mind and speech are the same she talks to herself to think, and thinks out loud to speak. Together they complement each other, and make a poem that speaks in three voices at once, as Hamlet when he speaks is a distraught prince of Denmark, a poet as enigmatic as Stephen Dedalus, and, ineluctably, the voice of Shakespeare. Is not Joyce in many ways more like Bloom than Stephen? Professor Ellmann has found a real Martha Clifford; Nora Barnacle's letters are as much Hke Molly's monologue as Joyce's city-dwelling habits are like Bloom's.
Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice
Common Knowledge, 2009
Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism
Common Knowledge, 2010
The American Journal of Cardiology, 2004
W hat happens when the coronary artery bypass patient is the cardiologist-a cardiologist who has ... more W hat happens when the coronary artery bypass patient is the cardiologist-a cardiologist who has taken care of hundreds of patients with the disease that now confronts him? The story that follows is a cautionary tale. Joseph Perloff tells the first part himself, but hazy memory immediately after the operation makes it incumbent for someone else-in this case the physician's wife, who was taking care of him-to flesh out the story. The patient's own impressions follow.
American Literature, 1997
American Poetry Wax Museum's application of Bennett's exhibitionary com plex is a useful companio... more American Poetry Wax Museum's application of Bennett's exhibitionary com plex is a useful companion and corrective to monolithic works like David Perkins's two-volume A History o f Modern Poetry and it is a clear statement of some of the aesthetic and political concerns informing the works of such poets as
The Prose Poem an International Journal, 1999
Michel Delville's excellent new book on the emergence and evolution of the prose poem in America ... more Michel Delville's excellent new book on the emergence and evolution of the prose poem in America is in many ways a first and hence deserves to have a wide readership. Building on the insights of such earlier studies as Jonathan Monroe's A Poverty of Objects (1987) and Stephen Fredman's Poet's Prose (2d ed. 1990), Delville is the first scholar to survey the surprising range of contemporary American prose poems, from the "deep image" epiphanies of Robert Bly, to the parabolic fantasies of Russell Edson and Margaret Atwood, to the "new sentence" works of the Language poets. By juxtaposing such unlikely poets as Charles Simic and Ron Silliman, Margaret Atwood and Diane Ward, Delville nicely undermines the us-versus-them rhetoric that continues, unfortunately, to haunt most critical discourse about contemporary poetry. What is a prose poem anyway? In his introduction, Delville immediately clears the air by announcing that "any attempt at a single, monolithic definition of the genre would be doomed to failure" (see Delville, p. 1). But if one cannot define the prose poem, one can historicize it, a useful project because the past century has witnessed such central and variegated examples, all of them, relating in one form or another, to Baudelaire's great foundational collection Paris Spleen (begun in 1855 but not published until 1869). In his preface to these "petits poemes en prose," Baudelaire famously declared that he was after "the miracle of a poetic prose, musical though rhythmless and rhymeless, flexible yet rugged enough to identify with the lyrical impulses of the soul, the ebbs and flow of reverie, the pangs of conscience." This notion of openness, of flexibility and suppleness, Delville notes, comes up again and again in the poets' explanations of their practice and suggests that the prose poem is best understood as a transgressive form: "By testing the validity of our assumptions concerning the nature and function of both poetic and prosaic language, the prose poem inevitably leads us to investigate a number of specific postulates underlying the act of defining genres and, above all, of tracing boundaries between them" (10). This is not entirely satisfactory, for what happens when, as has largely happened, prose poetry becomes, in its turn, a mainstream genre? Does it then lose its appeal? Delville can't quite get around this conundrum, to which I shall come back later, but, as he is the first to admit, he approaches "the notion of genre itself as a historical rather than a theoretical category" (8), and his central aim, in any case, is to read closely specific prose poems so as to show how they work. Since his focus is on American exemplars, he begins, not, as is usually the case, with Baudelaire and Rimbaud, but with the James Joyce of the youthful "lyrical epiphanies" (1900-1904) and the fragmentary prose pieces published posthumously under the title Giacomo Joyce, a sequence that "en
New Literary History, 1982
The Iowa Review, 2014
This conversation was conducted via e-mail, with Marjorie Perloff initiating most of the question... more This conversation was conducted via e-mail, with Marjorie Perloff initiating most of the questions and Vanessa Place not necessarily answering them in a straightforward way. The dialogue thus took many unexpected turns-a beginning again and again rather than a linear progression. We both found this non-method a useful way of proceeding. Marjorie Perloff: Vanessa, in your very dramatic lecture for the symposium "Lament of the Makers: Conceptualism and Poetic Freedom," hosted in April 2013 by the Princeton Graduate Colloquium on Contemporary Poetry, you launch a strong attack, as you have for years now, against the lyric "I." In what is printed as Part 3 on Harriet, the blog of the Poetry Foundation, you say scathingly that "the lyric 'I' is the gold standard of poetry, the presumptively inflexible ingot that is believed to be the purest of the pure, the surest of the sure, the thing that both permits poetry and makes semiocapitalism totally legit." But since "poetry," from the late eighteenth century on down, has been, for all practical purposes, equated with lyric poetry, since the lyric "I" has been ubiquitous from Goethe and Blake to the present and has been at the very heart of poetry in communist Russia as in the capitalist West (think Mayakovsky, Akhmatova, Tsvetayeva, Yevtushenko, Brodsky), why is it so objectionable NOW? When, precisely, did we start to question lyric subjectivity? Can we historicize the situation a little more fully? Why is lyric now related to capitalism and what is the geography of the lyric "I"? Vanessa Place: I don't object, just describe. But you are right to further particularize; I've said before that history is geography, and so, evidently, is poetry. The lyric "I" that served to flutter alongside the Soviet (if not strictly against communism, against the failure of its utopian ideal) may be considered somewhat differently than the lyric "I" that beats next to the heart of the Western capitalist, and that might too differ from the one in Paris, where the Academy would regulate the meter, or the one in London, with its redress of Industry, Aristocracy, and Enlightenment, or the one in New York, where rank individualism has always carried the day. And the postmodern riposte
Revue Française d Etudes Américaines, 2005
Distribution électronique Cairn.info pour Belin. © Belin. Tous droits réservés pour tous pays. La... more Distribution électronique Cairn.info pour Belin. © Belin. Tous droits réservés pour tous pays. La reproduction ou représentation de cet article, notamment par photocopie, n'est autorisée que dans les limites des conditions générales d'utilisation du site ou, le cas échéant, des conditions générales de la licence souscrite par votre établissement. Toute autre reproduction ou représentation, en tout ou partie, sous quelque forme et de quelque manière que ce soit, est interdite sauf accord préalable et écrit de l'éditeur, en dehors des cas prévus par la législation en vigueur en France. Il est précisé que son stockage dans une base de données est également interdit.
The Iowa Review, 1974
and all things that don't change.. .-Frank O'Hara, "To Hell with It" Despite the increasing sophi... more and all things that don't change.. .-Frank O'Hara, "To Hell with It" Despite the increasing sophistication of American literary theory, its growing assimilation of European critical concepts, whether Phenomenologist, Structur alist, or Marxist, and its exciting debates on hermeneutics and communication theory in the pages of New Literary History or Diacritics or Po?tique, the prac tical criticism of contemporary poetry continues to be largely a matter of old fashioned explication. Pick up, say, John Fuller's A Reader's Guide to W. H. An den (1970) and open to the chapter on Auden's 1966 collection, About the House. We read: Symbolical meanings are lightly touched on in the next pair of poems in the sequence, "Down There" and "Up There." The cellar is the deep area of our resources, our "safe-anchor" ("a father sends the younger boys to fetch something / For Mother from dawn there"), but such a journey sug gests less a psychological quest than a piece of controlled spiritual hus bandry, whose counterpart is the attic's disorganized detritus of the past which the feminine instinct has hoarded."1 After such knowledge what forgiveness? Perhaps there is always a certain time lag between the formulation of literary theory on the one hand and its practical applications on the other, but surely in our time theorists and practical critics often seem to be talking a different language. In any case, the current climate of practical criticism is such that, despite all the shouting about "exciting new voices" in poetry, the real innovators are all too often ignored or attacked. Thus, when in 1960 Donald M. Allen published The New American Poetry, which was the first anthology to devote considerable space to the poetry and poetics of the Black Mountain group, the San Francisco poets, and the New York school, the Academic Establishment reacted with silence or scorn. In the Hudson Review,2 Cecil Hemley declared that Allen's selection was a downright insult to those of us who recognized that "This is so obviously not the new American poetry." Frank O'Hara, for example, is grudgingly admitted to be "gifted," but, says Hemley, "It is apparent from O'Hara's stated aesthetic that he is not inter ested in writing good poetry in the usual sense. He has committed himself to the somewhat dubious task of tracing his experience in all its solipsistic grandeur. Since most of his experience, like everyone else's, is disjointed and incoherent, the
Modernist Cultures, 2005
Marjorie Perloff's wide-ranging essay reflects on the fate of Modernism in the twentieth cent... more Marjorie Perloff's wide-ranging essay reflects on the fate of Modernism in the twentieth century. She focuses in particular on claims that it was either elitist and authoritarian, and thus politically reactionary, or was caught up in processes of capitalist commodification, and therefore unable to resist the very alienation it diagnosed. In the period that ran from the 1960s to the early 1990s Modernism was typically seen as a failed project, which was compromised by its complicity with the bourgeois institution of art and by the reification of its art-works, seen now as the dead exhibits of a once resonant cultural moment. But it has become apparent that those who trumpeted the death of Modernism were premature with their obituary notices. Perloff traces some of the major shifts in recent critical work, and her essay questions earlier claims about Modernism's reactionary politics, anti-populism, and rejection of the everyday. She also draws attention to the non-academic int...
The Testing of Stanley Kunitz
Stanley Kunitz has always been a poet's poet. Editor, translator, anthologist, professor, dir... more Stanley Kunitz has always been a poet's poet. Editor, translator, anthologist, professor, director of the Poetry Center of the YMHA in New York, he has numbered among his close friends and admirers the two most celebrated poets of his generation: Robert LoweU and Theodore Roethke. When Kunitz gathered together his best poems of thirty years for the Selected Poems of 1959, James Wright called him "one of the finest American poets of the century, and re marked, "The truth is that 53-year old Stanley Kunitz is just beginning." It is no wonder, then, that when The Testing Tree, Kunitz's first volume of poetry in thirteen years, and a slim one at that (sixty-seven pages including the author's notes as well as seven translations from the Russian), was published earUer this year, it was greeted enthusiastically by the Poetic Establishment. LoweU, who gave The Testing Tree a generous tribute on the front page of the New York Times Book Review (March 21, 1971), is quoted on the book blurb as saying, "In these later poems, he again tops the crowd-^he surpasses himself, the old iron brought to a white heat of simpUcity. CaU no man old who can grow." Academic critics have been much less receptive to Kunitz's work. He is barely mentioned in the standard surveys of M. L. Rosenthal and Glauco Cam bon, and his poems rarely appear in the fashionable anthologies. The standard critical view is that he is too derivative, too unoriginal to merit sustained atten tion. In the forties, so the argument runs, Kunitz wrote neat Uttle rhyming stanzas full of clotted symboUsm, metaphysical conceits, and Marvellian ironies, in keeping with the going convention one associates with the early Auden, with Ransom, T?te, or MacLeish. Then, in the later fifties, when Lowell, Snodgrass, and Berryman were discovering that there's more enterprise in walking naked, Kunitz predictably switched from a third-person, impersonal, neo-metaphysical mode to the new confessionaUsm of Life Studies and Heart's Needle. Despite his inventive verbal structures, in short, Kunitz has failed to create a style that is recognizably his own. How can we reconcile these divergent views? The cynical will argue that when Lowell praises "the new style," the casting off of "the once redoubtable armor," he is simply looking into the mirror and admiring his own image. But then there are plenty of confessional poets around whom LoweU has not praised, and even Marius Bewley, who objected to the "verbal self-consciousness," "edu cated archaic ingenuity," and "tedious obscurity" of Kunitz's early verse, has re marked that the best poems in the 1959 volume are those later ones like "The Dragonfly" that avoid the metaphysical convention, working toward "a clarity and immediacy that comes directly from experience." It is just possible, then, that 66-year-old Stanley Kunitz has finally found a lyric mode that suits his
The Poetic Art of Robert Lowell
American Literature, 1974
Signs, Minds and Actions, 2010
His disposition," Bertrand Russell wrote of the young Wittgenstein in 1912, "is that of an artist... more His disposition," Bertrand Russell wrote of the young Wittgenstein in 1912, "is that of an artist, intuitive and moody." 1 A similar judgment was made some fifteen years later by Rudolf Carnap in Vienna: His point of view and his attitude toward people and problems … were much more similar to those of a creative artist than to those of a religious prophet or a seer. When he started to formulate his view on some specific philosophical problem, we often felt the internal struggle that occurred in him at that very moment, a struggle by which he tried to penetrate from darkness to light under an intense and painful strain. … When finally, sometimes after a prolonged and arduous effort, his answer came forth, his statement stood before us like a newly created piece of art or a divine revelation. (Monk 1990, 244). And Wittgenstein himself, hoping, in 1919, to persuade Ludwig von Ficker, the editor of the literary journal Der Brenner, to publish his controversial Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, remarked, "The work is strictly philosophical and at the same time literary" (Monk 1990, 177). What is it that makes Wittgenstein's philosophical writing also-or perhaps even primarilyliterary? "What is it," asks Terry Eagleton in the introduction to his own screenplay about the philosopher, "about this man, whose philosophy can be taxing and technical enough, which so fascinates the artistic imagination?" 2 The appeal is especially remarkable, given that Wittgenstein's writing, in the Tractatus, as well as in the Philosophical Investigations and the various posthumously published collections of notes and lectures, is known primarily in English translation-translation that for those of us who are native Austrian speakers often seems to distort what are in the original colloquial speech patterns and conversational rhythms.
PMLA, 2008
An onomatopoeic expression automatically entails the specification of what is being described. A ... more An onomatopoeic expression automatically entails the specification of what is being described. A pattering sound cannot come from a piece of wood. But when I was listening to [Peter Ablinger's Berlin sound] recordings, I sometimes couldn't tell whether a sound was coming from thunder or a sheet of metal. I wanted to represent the sound, not the person who was producing it, nor its metaphorical significance. It took me quite some time to come up with a solution: My solution was not to find a solution, but rather to enter into the crevice between sound and language and make countless little notes.-Yoko Tawada, "The Art of Being Synchronous"
Against Theatre, 2006
Where do we go from here? Towards theatre. That art more than music resembles nature. We have eye... more Where do we go from here? Towards theatre. That art more than music resembles nature. We have eyes as well as ears, and it is our business while we are alive to use them.-John Cage, "Experimental Music" (1957) 1 When asked by David Shapiro whether he considered himself "as antitheatrical the way Jasper Johns is sometimes called antitheatrical," John Cage responded emphatically: No. I love the theater. In fact, I used to think when we were so close together-Earle Brown, Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff, David Tudor, myself [in the early and mid-1950s]-I used to that that the thing that distinguished my work from theirs was that mine was theatrical. I didn't think of Morty's work as being theatrical. It seemed to me to be more, oh, you might say, lyrical.. . .And Christian's work seemed to me more musical.. .. whereas I seemed to be involved in theater. What could be more theatrical than the silent pieces-somebody comes on the stage and does absolutely nothing. 2 Yet the same Cage repeatedly insisted that, when it came to the real theater, he could "count on one hand the plays I have seen that have truly interested me or involved me" (Conversing 105
The Consolation Theme in Yeats's "In Memory of Major Robert Gregory
Modern Language Quarterly, 1966
Modernism Without the Modernists: A Response to Walter Benn Michaels
Modernism/modernity, 1996
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Papers by Marjorie Perloff