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...

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Includes a section by artists who recall experiences with Duchamp. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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This book celebrates ten years of Granary Press and the independent publications of Steven Clay. Charles Bernstein contributed a forward and Steven Clay wrote an introduction. Bernstein writes, "At Granary, books are not neutral containers but are invested with a life of their own, conceived as objects first and foremost, entering the world not as the discardable shell of some other story but piping their own tunes on their own instruments. Nothing is taken for granted - the binder is as much a star as the printer or writer. The design is an extension of (not secondary to) the content, just as the content is an extension of the design. For a book, a Granary Book, is never about delivering information in the most expeditious form." -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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Defining Zaum as a language beyond the other side or "beyond sense," Janecek traces the history of this Russian sound-language poetry through the works of its most prominent writers. He writes that "what might seem to be a minor episode in Russian avant-garde poetry has very broad implications and a historical scope that ranges from Plato to current theories of language and literature (e.g., Deconstructivism). Janecek gave this book to Marvin Sackner at the Eye Rhymes conference in Edmonton, Canada, May 1997. Janecek acknowledges that the image of Figure 25, page 279, a page from Zdanevich's "Dunkee for Rent." was reproduced by courtesy of the Sackner Archive. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.