Her formidable reputation precedes her: Marjorie Perloff is one of America's most revered critical analysts of modern poetry. Over the past few decades, her advocacy of authors who are often dismissed as obtuse, leftfield or difficult has advanced intelligent discussion about literature and the state of pedagogy.
Linking various fields of poetry, inter-media and the visual arts, her many books and essays have been landmarks in changing people's mindsets about modernist and postmodernist writings. She ranges widely from modernist greats like Eliot, Yeats and Pound to the Black Mountain Poets, the New York Poets, the Beats, the Language Poets and finally to the many-splintered 21st-century poetics – and yet, as critic Frank Kermode aptly puts it, she is fun to read.
Poet and academic Peter Barry considers Perloff "a theorist whose work has maintained its distinctiveness in the face of the rapid homogenisation of literary criticism and theory…We need her distinctive voice more than ever." Her latest book, Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century (2010), zeroes in on the phenomenon of contemporary poets who remix and recycle expressions in an age of information overload.
A professor emerita of English at Stanford University, she is currently scholar-in-residence at the University of Southern California.
I am reading (or rather rereading) a lot of Paul Celan and also works about him for a chapter I am writing on his work and Ingeborg Bachmann's right after World War II. And reading wonderful books about Celan: for example, a memoir by Brigitta Eisenreich on her relationship to Celan. Then reading Christa Wolf, whose novel I just reviewed.
But so far as new American things go, I just read Rae Armantrout's excellent new Just Saying and Aldon Nielsen's witty and moving book of poems A Brand New Beggar, Craig Dworkin's The Crystal Text (his riff on Clark Coolidge's book by that title), John Wilkinson's Reckitt's Blue.
Well, liking a character and wanting to be him or her is not the same thing. I love Marcel in A La Recherche du Temps Perdu (Remembrance of Things Past) and I love Anna Karenina, but I certainly wouldn't want to be them! Perhaps Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, but then I'd have to spend my time with Darcy and Jane and Mrs Bennet, and that wouldn't be much fun!
That I somehow don't like the lyric and only champion the avant-garde. Of course I love lyrics and especially the lyrics of the great German poets like Goethe and Heine but also the Romantics, and especially the Metaphysicals. Who cannot love these poets? It's just the vapid magazine lyric of our day that becomes tiresome.
Living: perhaps Charles Bernstein – funny, New Yorky, similar sense of humour, always excited about something.
Dead: Ludwig Wittgenstein – the most brilliant mind I know; I try to get inside it even if I can't.
By just sitting down at the computer and starting to write. And only write about things you really care about. And write regularly so that you don't break the habit.
"Poetry is language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree." I admire density, intensity, complexity, succinctness; in novels the ability to have reader suspend disbelief.
Lack of structure. Prolixity – just going on and on with no form. I also deplore self-importance and sentimentality – the literature of victimisation.
Ezra Pound: "Poetry is news that stays news."
Love soap operas; I've been watching The Young and The Restless for years and years – it's relaxing and cleanses the mind because it's so wonderfully silly.
10) You're a fan of OuLiPo – which generates texts using procedural devices – as it provides discipline. Is discipline lacking in much of what's being published today, and if so, why do you think that is so?
Discipline is lacking because literature is so badly taught in primary and elementary schools. Students should learn how to write (and read) the basic forms and genres early on and they should study earlier poetry and memorise it!
Most of what passes for poetry today is not poetry at all – just lines arbitrarily arranged in some sequence with extra words and boring sentiments.
Unfavourite word: "like" used as connective.
12) You've said we live in a technological age, and that the digital media has revolutionised writing and publishing. How technologically savvy are you?
I'm pretty adept at most computer manoeuvres like PowerPoint and so on, but not at all as a fetish and not that interested.
Morning or late night. I'm not an afternoon person.
Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein, Sam Beckett, because all three have an amazing sensitivity and sense of irony.
Proust had a kind of X-ray vision and I would like to sit next to him at dinner just as he sat next to the model for the Duchesse de Guermantes. Stein could be nasty to her dinner companions but she too saw exactly what was going on. And Beckett...well, he was the most profound of the three and sitting next to him at dinner would be a revelation!
16) What would you write in your own "letter to a young literary critic"?
I would cite Wittgenstein: "Do not forget that although poetry is written in the language of information, it is not written in order to give information."
I don't plan to have a tombstone.
External link to the Electronic Poetry Center.