Scope and Contents

Cover was designed by George Maciunas. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents Dust jacket description: 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...