Unoriginal Genius
Poetry by Other Means in the New Century
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.
About the Author
Marjorie Perloff is professor of English emerita at Stanford University and the Florence R. Scott Professor of English Emerita at the University of Southern California. She is the author of many books, including, most recently, "Poetics in a New Key and Unoriginal Genius", also published by the University of Chicago Press.
Reviews
"'Unoriginal Genius' showcases, yet again, why Marjorie Perloff is the most respected expositor for the avant-garde in poetry. She demonstrates why lauded, modern poets (many of whom have questioned the values of both 'the original' and 'the creative') might prefer instead to 'cheat' on their assignments by handing in poems that steal words and remix lines, verbatim, from the databases of the deja dit. I recommend that every genius read this omnibus –then copy its poetics" – Christian Bok, author of "Eunoia"
"Perloff is savvy to the workings and influence of electronic or media-driven innovations... She is equally astute in her analyses of modernist texts such as T. S. Eliot's 'The Wasteland' and poems by Stephen Crane, Ezra Pound, and W. B. Yeats... Highly recommended" – Choice
"Perloff is an erudite and enthusiastic guide through some beautiful (and often beguiling) work" – National Post
