Marjorie Perloff at the Editorial Institute, Sept. 10

 

 

Before her retirement, Marjorie Perloff was Sadie D. Patek Professor of Humanities at Stanford University. She is also Florence Scott Professor Emerita of English at the University of Southern California. She teaches courses and writes on twentieth—and now twenty-first—century poetry and poetics, both Anglo-American and from a Comparatist perspective, as well as on intermedia and the visual arts. Her first three books dealt with individual poets—Yeats, Robert Lowell, and Frank O’Hara; she then published The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (1981), a book that has gone through a number of editions, and led to her extensive exploration of avant-garde art movements in The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (1986, new edition, 1994), and subsequent books (13 in all), the most recent of which is Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century (2011), which appeared in Portuguese translation in 2013. Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (1992) has been used in classrooms studying the “new” digital poetics, and 21^st Century Modernism (Blackwell 2002) is a manifesto of Modernist Survival. Wittgenstein’s Ladder brought philosophy into the mix; it has recently been translated into Portuguese (Sao Paulo), Spanish (Mexico), and Slovenian and will be translated in France for 2014 publication. Perloff has published a cultural memoir The Vienna Paradox (2004), which has recently appeared in German translation in Vienna and will soon be published in Brazil. The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound, co-edited with Craig Dworkin was published by Chicago in 2009. A collection of interviews, Poetics in a New Key, will be published by University of Chicago in the fall of 2014. And Perloff is currently under contract with Chicago for a book called The Other Austrians, a study of the still largely misunderstood contribution of the late Hapsburg empire to the literature of Modernism. In this study, Perloff returns to her Viennese roots but also engages what is for her a new area—Modernist fiction, theatre, and memoir.

Marjorie Perloff has been a frequent reviewer for periodicals from the TLS and The Washington Post to all the major scholarly journals, and she has lectured at most major universities in the U.S. and at European, Asian, and Latin American universities and festivals. In 2009, she was the Weidenfeld Professor of European Literature at Oxford University.  Perloff has held Guggenheim, NEH, and Huntington fellowships, served on the Advisory Board of the Stanford Humanities Center, and was President of the Modern Language Association in 2006. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society  and recently was named Honorary Foreign Professor at the Beijing Modern Languages University. She received an Honorary Degree, Doctor of Letters, from Bard College in May 2008. In 2012, the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania honored her with a special symposium; a varied set of the individual contributions to that symposium appeared in the online journal Jacket 2.