Books by Marjorie Perloff

Esteemed literary critic Marjorie Perloff reconsiders the nature of the poetic, examining its visual, grammatical, and sound components.

"An earlier version of chapter 1 appeared as "Avant-Garde in a Different Key: Karl Kraus's The Last Days of Mankind," Critical Inquiry 40, no. 2 (Winter 2014): 311-38."

Presents an accessible introduction to Marjorie Perloff's critical thought. In this book, fourteen interviews 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.

When the avant-gardist John Cage died, he was already the subject of many interviews, memoirs and discussions of his contribution to music. This text includes a revisionist treatment of the way Cage himself has composed and been "composed" in America.

This text considers what happens when the "natural speech" model inherited from the 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 languages of billboards and sound bytes.

Marjorie Perloff, critic of 20th-century poetry, argues that Wittgenstein speaks to poets because he provides a way out of the impasse of high versus low discourse, demonstrating the inescapable strangeness of ordinary language.

Ranging from medieval Latin lyrics to a cyborg opera, sixteenth-century France to twentieth-century Brazil, romantic ballads to the contemporary avant-garde, this book explores such subjects as the translatability of lyric sound, the historical and cultural roles of rhyme, and the role of sound repetition in novelistic prose.

This examination of the flourishing of Futurist aesthetics in European art and literature of the twentieth century, offers considerations of futurist work from Russia to Italy.

Argues that it is only at the turn of the 21st century that the powerful lessons of the avant-garde - an avant-garde cruelly disrupted by the Great War and subsequent political upheavals - were learned. This book offers readings of T S Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Marcel Duchamp, and Velimir Khlebnikov. It examines various related poetic concerns.