“Philosophy,� Ludwig Wittgenstein once wrote, “should actually be written only as poetry.� That Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus—Wittgenstein’s masterwork, and the only book he published during his lifetime—endures as the definitive modern text on the limits of logic, inspiring artists and philosophers alike, comes as no surprise. Consisting of 525 hierarchically numbered declarative statements, each one “self-evident,� Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is imbued, as translator Damion Searls writes, with the kind of “cryptic grandeur� and “awe-inspiring opacity� we might expect—might want—from such an iconic philosopher. Yet previous translations, in their eagerness to replicate German phrasing and syntax, have a stilted, even redolently Victorian air. With this new translation and an important introduction on the language of the book, prefaced by eminent scholar Marjorie Perloff, Searls finally does justice to Wittgenstein’s enigmatic masterpiece, capturing the fluid and forceful language of the original without sacrificing its philosophical rigor—indeed, making Wittgenstein’s philosophy clearer than ever before in English.

In "Unoriginal Genius" Marjorie Perloff explores a new development in contemporary poetry: the repurposing of other people's words in order to make new works, by framing, citing, and recycling already existing phrases, sentences, and even full texts. Paradoxically, she argues, this 'unoriginal' poetry is more accessible and, in a sense, 'personal' than the hermetic poetry of the 1980s and '90s. Perloff traces this poetics of "Unoriginal Genius" from one of its paradigmatic works, Walter Benjamin's encyclopedic "Arcades Project", a book largely made up of citations. She discusses the processes of choice, framing, and reconfiguration in the work of Brazilian Concretism and Oulipo, two movements now understood to be precursors of such hybrid citational texts as Charles Bernstein's opera libretto "Shadowtime" and Susan Howe's documentary lyric sequence "The Midnight". "Unoriginal Genius" concludes with a discussion of Kenneth Goldsmith's conceptualist book "Traffic" - a seemingly "pure" transcript of one holiday weekend's worth of radio traffic reports. In these instances and many others, Perloff reveals 'poetry by other means' of great ingenuity, wit, and complexity.

Ysko Tawada: Voices from Everywhere is the first volume of criticism dedicated to the work of Ysko Tawada, one of the most highly acclaimed writers of her generation. Douglas Slaymaker has collected a range of essays including many that were featured at the 2006 MLA Conference, where a presidential panel featuring Ysko Tawada was organized by MLA President Marjorie Perloff, who has contributed a preface to this volume. The essays explore the plurality of voices and cultures in Tawada's work and push on to explicate the poetics and intellectual underpinnings of her writing. Analyses of her fiction are paired with examinations of its philosophic and aesthetic foundations. The essayists represent a wide range of scholars and translators who are intimate with Tawada's work in German, Japanese, and/or English. Many of the essays begin as close readings of the German and Japanese texts.Ysko Tawada: Voices from Everywhere is an essential collection for anyone with an interest in this important young writer.

Yoeko Tawada: Voices from Everywhere is the first volume of criticism dedicated to the work of Yoeko Tawada, one of the most highly acclaimed writers of her generation. Douglas Slaymaker has collected a range of essays including many that were featured at the 2006 MLA Conference, where a presidential panel featuring Yoeko Tawada was organized by MLA President Marjorie Perloff, who has contributed a preface to this volume. The essays explore the plurality of voices and cultures in Tawada's work and push on to explicate the poetics and intellectual underpinnings of her writing. Analyses of her fiction are paired with examinations of its philosophic and aesthetic foundations. The essayists represent a wide range of scholars and translators who are intimate with Tawada's work in German, Japanese, and/or English. Many of the essays begin as close readings of the German and Japanese texts.Yoeko Tawada: Voices from Everywhere is an essential collection for anyone with an interest in this important young writer.

An exploration of the legacy of The Waste Land on the centenary of its original publication, looking at the impact it had had upon criticism and new poetries across one hundred years. T. S. Eliot first published his long poem The Waste Land in 1922. The revolutionary nature of the work was immediately recognised, and it has subsequently been acknowledged as one of the most influential poems of the twentieth century, and as crucial for the understanding of modernism. The essays in this collection variously reflect on The Waste Land one hundred years after its original publication. At this centenary moment, the contributors both celebrate the richness of the work, its sounds and rare use of language, and also consider the poem's legacy in Britain, Ireland, and India. The work here, by an international team of writers from the UK, North America, and India, deploys a range of approaches. Some contributors seek to re-read the poem itself in fresh and original ways; others resist the established drift of previous scholarship on the poem, and present new understandings of the process of its development through its drafts, or as an orchestration on the page. Several contributors question received wisdom about the poem's immediate legacy in the decade after publication, and about the impact that it has had upon criticism and new poetries across the first century of its existence. An Introduction to the volume contextualises the poem itself, and the background to the essays. All pieces set out to review the nature of our understanding of the poem, and to bring fresh eyes to its brilliance, one hundred years on. Contributors: Rebecca Beasley, Rosinka Chaudhuri, William Davies, Hugh Haughton, Marjorie Perloff, Andrew Michael Roberts, Peter Robinson, Michael Wood.

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? For poets in such a climate, 'originality' begins to take a back seat to what can be done with other people's words - framing, citing, recycling, and otherwise mediating available words and sentences, and sometimes entire texts. Marjorie Perloff here explores this intriguing development in contemporary poetry: the embrace of 'unoriginal' writing. Paradoxically, she argues, such citational and often constraint-based poetry is more accessible and, in a sense, 'personal' than was the hermetic poetry of the 1980s and '90s. Perloff traces this poetics of 'unoriginal genius' from its paradigmatic work, Benjamin's encyclopedic Arcades Project, a book largely made up of citations. She discusses the processes of choice, framing, and reconfiguration in the work of Brazilian Concretism and Oulipo, both movements now understood as precursors of such hybrid citational texts as Charles Bernstein's opera libretto "Shadowtime" and Susan Howe's documentary lyric sequence "The Midnight". Perloff also finds that the new syncretism extends to language: for example, to the French-Norwegian Caroline Bergvall writing in English and the Japanese Yoko Tawada in German. "Unoriginal Genius" concludes with a discussion of Kenneth Goldsmith's conceptualist book Traffic - a seemingly 'pure' radio transcript of one holiday weekend's worth of traffic reports. In these instances and many others, Perloff shows us 'poetry by other means' of great ingenuity, wit, and complexity.

Among the brilliant writers and thinkers who emerged from the multicultural and multilingual world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were Joseph Roth, Robert Musil, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. For them, the trauma of World War I included the sudden loss of the geographical entity into which they had been born: in 1918, the empire was dissolved overnight, leaving Austria a small, fragile republic that would last only twenty years before being annexed by Hitler's Third Reich. In this major reconsideration of European modernism, Marjorie Perloff identifies and explores the aesthetic world that emerged from the rubble of Vienna and other former Habsburg territories--an "Austro-Modernism" that produced a major body of drama, fiction, poetry, and autobiography. Perloff explores works ranging from Karl Kraus's drama The Last Days of Mankind and Elias Canetti's memoir The Tongue Set Free to Ludwig Wittgenstein's notebooks and Paul Celan's lyric poetry. Throughout, she shows that Austro-Modernist literature is characterized less by the formal and technical inventions of a modernism familiar to us in the work of A Joyce and Pound, Dada and Futurism, than by a radical irony beneath a seemingly conventional surface, an acute sense of exile, and a sensibility more erotic and quixotic than that of its German contemporaries. Skeptical and disillusioned, Austro-Modernism prefers to ask questions rather than formulate answers.

The first complete English translation of a far-seeing polemic, written in 1933 by the preeminent German-language satirist, unmasking the Nazi seizure of power Austrian satirist and polemicist Karl Kraus's Third Walpurgis Night was written in immediate response to the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 but was withheld from publication for fear of reprisals against Jews trapped in Germany. Acclaimed when finally published by Koesel Verlag in 1952, it is a devastatingly prescient exposure, giving special attention to the regime's corruption of language as masterminded by Joseph Goebbels. Bertolt Brecht wrote to Kraus that, in his indictment of Nazism, "you have disclosed the atrocities of intonation and created an ethics of language." This masterful translation, by the prizewinning translators of Kraus's The Last Days of Mankind, aims for clarity where Kraus had good reason to be cautious and obscure. The Austrian Jewish author Karl Kraus (1874-1936) was the foremost German-language satirist of the twentieth century. As editor of the journal Die Fackel (The Torch) he single-handedly after 1912 conducted a sustained critique of propaganda and the press, expressed through polemical essays, satirical plays, witty aphorisms, and resonant poems.

Among the brilliant writers and thinkers who emerged from the multicultural and multilingual world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were Joseph Roth, Robert Musil, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. For them, the trauma of World War I included the sudden loss of the geographical entity into which they had been born: in 1918, the empire was dissolved overnight, leaving Austria a small, fragile republic that would last only twenty years before being annexed by Hitler's Third Reich. In this major reconsideration of European modernism, Marjorie Perloff identifies and explores the aesthetic world that emerged from the rubble of Vienna and other former Habsburg territories--an "Austro-Modernism" that produced a major body of drama, fiction, poetry, and autobiography. Perloff explores works ranging from Karl Kraus's drama The Last Days of Mankind and Elias Canetti's memoir The Tongue Set Free to Ludwig Wittgenstein's notebooks and Paul Celan's lyric poetry. Throughout, she shows that Austro-Modernist literature is characterized less by the formal and technical inventions of a modernism familiar to us in the work of Joyce and Pound, Dada and Futurism, than by a radical irony beneath a seemingly conventional surface, an acute sense of exile, and a sensibility more erotic and quixotic than that of its German contemporaries. Skeptical and disillusioned, Austro-Modernism prefers to ask questions rather than formulate answers.

Marjorie Perloff writes in her preface to "Poetics in a New Key" that when she learned David Jonathan Y. Bayot wanted to publish a collection of her interviews and essays, she was "at once honored and mystified." But to Perloff's surprise and her readers' delight, the resulting assembly not only presents an accessible and provocative introduction to Perloff's critical thought, but also highlights the wide range of her interests, and the energetic reassessments and new takes that have marked her academic career.
The fourteen interviews in "Poetics in a New Key"--conducted by scholars, poets, and critics from the United States, Denmark, Norway, France, and Poland, including Charles Bernstein, Helene Aji, and Peter Nicholls--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. Also featured in the collection are three pieces by Perloff herself: an academic memoir, an exploration of poetry pedagogy, and an essay on twenty-first-century intellectuals. But across all the interviews and essays, Perloff's distinctive personality and approach to reading and talking resound, making this new collection an inspiring resource for scholars both of poetry and writing.

When the great avant-gardist John Cage died, just short of his eightieth birthday in 1992, he was already the subject of dozens of interviews, memoirs, and discussions of his contribution to music, music theory, and performance practice. But Cage never thought of himself as only (or even primarily) a composer; he was a poet, a visual artist, a philosophical thinker, and an important cultural critic.
"John Cage: Composed in America" is the first book-length work to address the "other" John Cage, a revisionist treatment of the way Cage himself has composed and been "composed" in America. Cage, as these original essays testify, is a contradictory figure. A disciple of Duchamp and Schoenberg, Satie and Joyce, he created compositions that undercut some of these artists' central principles and then attributed his own compositional theories to their "tradition." An American in the Emerson-Thoreau mold, he paradoxically won his biggest audience in Europe. A freewheeling, Californian artist, Cage was committed to a severe work ethic and a firm discipline, especially the discipline of Zen Buddhism.
Following the text of Cage's lecture-poem "Overpopulation and Art," delivered at Stanford shortly before his death and published here for the first time, ten critics respond to the challenge of the complexity and contradiction exhibited in his varied work. In keeping with Cage's own interdisciplinarity, the critics approach that work from a variety of disciplines: philosophy (Daniel Herwitz, Gerald L. Bruns), biography and cultural history (Thomas S. Hines), game and chaos theory (N. Katherine Hayles), music culture (Jann Pasler), opera history (Herbert Lindenberger), literary and art criticism (Marjorie Perloff), cultural poetics (Gordana P. Crnkovic, Charles Junkerman), and poetic practice (Joan Retallack). But such labels are themselves confining: each of the essays sets up boundaries only to cross them at key points. The book thus represents, to use Cage's own phrase, a much needed "beginning with ideas."

During the pandemic, Marjorie Perloff, leading scholar of global literature, found her mind ineluctably drawn to the profound commentary on life and death in the wartime diaries of eminent philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951). Upon learning that these notebooks, which richly contextualise the early stages of his magnum opus, the Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus, had never before been published in English, the Viennese-born Perloff determinedly set about translating them. Beginning with the anxious summer of 1914, this historic, en-face edition presents the first-person recollections of a foot soldier in the Austrian Army, fresh from his days as a philosophy student at Cambridge, who must grapple with the hazing of his fellow soldiers, the stirrings of a forbidden sexuality and the formation of an explosive analytical philosophy that seemed to draw meaning from his endless brushes with death. Much like Tolstoy's The Gospel in Brief, Private Notebooks takes us on a personal journey to discovery as it augments our knowledge of Wittgenstein himself.

Drawing extensively upon the poet's unpublished manuscripts--poems, journals, essays, and letters--as well as all his published works, Marjorie Perloff presents Frank O'Hara as one of the central poets of the postwar period and an important critic of the visual arts. Perloff traces the poet's development through his early years at Harvard and his interest in French Dadaism and Surrealism to his later poems that fuse literary influence with elements from Abstract Expressionist painting, atonal music, and contemporary film. This edition contains a new Introduction addressing O'Hara's homosexuality, his attitudes toward racism, and changes in poetic climate cover the past few decades.
"A groundbreaking study. [This book] is a genuine work of criticism. . . . Through Marjorie Perloff's book we see an O'Hara perhaps only his closer associates saw before: a poet fully aware of the traditions and techniques of his craft who, in a life tragically foreshortened, produced an adventurous if somewhat erratic body of American verse."--David Lenson, "Chronicle of Higher Education"
"Perloff is a reliable, well-informed, discreet, sensitive . . . guide. . . . She is impressive in the way she deals with O'Hara's relationship to painters and paintings, and she does give first-rate readings of four major poems."--Jonathan Cott, "New York Times Book Review"

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.

Sound--one of the central elements of poetry--finds itself all but ignored in the current discourse on lyric forms. The essays collected here by Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin""break that critical silence to readdress some of thefundamental connections between poetry and sound--connections that go far beyond traditional metrical studies.
Ranging from medieval Latin lyrics to a cyborg opera, sixteenth-century France to twentieth-century Brazil, romantic ballads to the contemporary "avant-garde," the contributors to "The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound" explore such subjects as the translatability of lyric sound, the historical and cultural roles of rhyme, the role of sound repetition in novelistic prose, theconnections between "sound poetry" and music, between the visual and the auditory, the role of the body in performance, and the impact of recording technologies on the lyric voice. Along the way, the essaystake on the "ensemble discords" of Maurice Sceve's "Delie, " Ezra Pound's use of "Chinese whispers," the alchemical theology of Hugo Ball's Dada performances, Jean Cocteau's modernist radiophonics, and an intercultural account of the poetry reading as a kind of dubbing.
A genuinely comparatist study, "The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound "is designed to challenge current preconceptions about what Susan Howe has called "articulations of sound forms in time" as they have transformed the expanded poetic field of the twenty-first century.

Marjorie Perloff's stunning book was one of the first to offer a serious and far-reaching examination of the momentous flourishing of Futurist aesthetics in the European art and literature of the early twentieth century. Offering penetrating considerations of the prose, visual art, poetry, and carefully crafted manifestos of Futurists from Russia to Italy, Perloff reveals the Moment's impulses and operations, tracing its echoes through the years to the work of "postmodern" figures like Roland Barthes. This updated edition, with its new preface, reexamines the Futurist Moment in the light of a new century, in which Futurist aesthetics seem to have steadily more to say to the present.

Transpoetic Exchange  illuminates the poetic interactions between Octavio Paz (1914-1998) and Haroldo de Campos (1929-2003) from three perspectives--comparative, theoretical, and performative. The poem Blanco by Octavio Paz, written when he was ambassador to India in 1966, and Haroldo de Campos’ translation (or what he calls a “transcreation�) of that poem, published as Transblanco in 1986, as well as Campos’ Galáxias, written from 1963 to 1976, are the main axes around which the book is organized.   The volume is divided into three parts. “Essays� unites seven texts by renowned scholars who focus on the relationship between the two authors, their impact and influence, and their cultural resonance by exploring explore the historical background and the different stylistic and cultural influences on the authors, ranging from Latin America and Europe to India and the U.S. The second section, “Remembrances,� collects four experiences of interaction with Haroldo de Campos in the process of transcreating Paz’s poem and working on Transblanco and Galáxias. In the last section, “Poems,� five poets of international standing--Jerome Rothenberg, Antonio Cicero, Keijiro Suga, André Vallias, and Charles Bernstein. Paz and Campos, one from Mexico and the other from Brazil, were central figures in the literary history of the second half of the 20th century, in Latin America and beyond. Both poets signal the direction of poetry as that of translation, understood as the embodiment of otherness and of a poetic tradition that every new poem brings back as a Babel re-enacted.   This volume is a print corollary to and expansion of an international colloquium and poetic performance held at Stanford University in January 2010 and it offers a discussion of the role of poetry and translation from a global perspective. The collection holds great value for those interested in all aspects of literary translation and it enriches the ongoing debates on language, modernity, translation and the nature of the poetic object. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press. 

The "infrathin" was Marcel Duchamp's playful name for the most minute shade of difference: that between the report of a gunshot and the appearance of the bullet hole, or between two objects in a series made from the same mold. "Eat" is not the same thing as "ate." The poetic, Marjorie Perloff suggests, can best be understood as the language of infrathin. For in poetry, whether in verse or prose, words and phrases that are seemingly unrelated in ordinary discourse are realigned by means of sound, visual layout, etymology, grammar, and construction so as to "make it new." In her revisionist "micropoetics," Perloff draws primarily on major modernist poets from Stein and Yeats to Beckett, suggesting that the usual emphasis on what this or that poem is "about," does not do justice to its infrathin possibilities. From Goethe's eight-line "Wanderer's Night Song" to Eliot's Four Quartets, to the minimalist lyric of Rae Armantrout, Infrathin is designed to challenge our current habits of reading and to answer the central question: what is it that makes poetry poetry?

The "infrathin" was Marcel Duchamp's playful name for the most minute shade of difference: that between the report of a gunshot and the appearance of the bullet hole, or between two objects in a series made from the same mold. "Eat" is not the same thing as "ate." The poetic, Marjorie Perloff suggests, can best be understood as the language of infrathin. For in poetry, whether in verse or prose, words and phrases that are seemingly unrelated in ordinary discourse are realigned by means of sound, visual layout, etymology, grammar, and construction so as to "make it new." In her revisionist "micropoetics," Perloff draws primarily on major modernist poets from Stein and Yeats to Beckett, suggesting that the usual emphasis on what this or that poem is "about," does not do justice to its infrathin possibilities. From Goethe's eight-line "Wanderer's Night Song" to Eliot's Four Quartets, to the minimalist lyric of Rae Armantrout, Infrathin is designed to challenge our current habits of reading and to answer the central question: what is it that makes poetry poetry?

One of our most important contemporary critics, Marjorie Perloff has been a widely published and influential reviewer, especially of poetry and poetics, for over fifty years. Circling the Canon, Volume I covers roughly the first half of Perloff's career, beginning with her first ever review, on Anthony Hecht's The Hard Hours. The reviews in this volume, culled from a wide range of scholarly journals, literary reviews, and national magazines, trace the evolution of poetry in the mid- to late twentieth century as well as the evolution of Perloff as a critic. Many of the authors whose works are reviewed in this volume are major figures, such as W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Sylvia Plath, and Frank O'Hara. Others, including Mona Van Duyn and Richard Hugo, were widely praised in their day but are now all but forgotten. Still others--David Antin, Edward Dorn, or the Language poets--exemplify an avant-garde that was to come into its own.

One of our most important contemporary critics, Marjorie Perloff has been a widely published and influential reviewer, especially of poetry and poetics, for over fifty years. Circling the Canon, Volume II focuses on the second half of her prolific career, showcasing reviews from 1995 through her 2017 reconsiderations of Jonathan Culler's theory of the lyric and William Empson's classic Seven Types of Ambiguity. In this volume Perloff provides insight into the twenty-first-century literary landscape, from revaluations of its leading poets and translations of European poetry from Goethe to the Brazilian Noigandres group and interart studies and performance art. Key issues of the past few decades, such as the controversy over the role and function of poetry anthologies, receive extended treatment, and Perloff frequently voices a minority view, as in the case of the acclaimed British poet Philip Larkin.

Marjorie Perloff, among our foremost critics of twentieth-century poetry, argues that Ludwig Wittgenstein provided writers with a radical new aesthetic, a key to recognizing the inescapable strangeness of ordinary language. Taking seriously Wittgenstein's remark that "philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetry," Perloff begins by discussing Wittgenstein the "poet." What we learn is that the poetics of everyday life is anything but banal. "This book has the lucidity and the intelligence we have come to expect from Marjorie Perloff.--Linda Munk, American Literature "[Perloff] has brilliantly adapted Wittgenstein's conception of meaning and use to an analysis of contemporary language poetry."--Linda Voris, Boston Review "Wittgenstein's Ladder offers significant insights into the current state of poetry, literature, and literary study. Perloff emphasizes the vitality of reading and thinking about poetry, and the absolute necessity of pushing against the boundaries that define and limit our worlds."--David Clippinger, Chicago Review "Majorie Perloff has done more to illuminate our understanding of twentieth century poetic language than perhaps any other critic. . . . Entertaining, witty, and above all highly original."--Willard Bohn, Sub-Stance