Scope and Contents L. "les193" Amazon.com: Perloff is one of the great boosters of the 'alternative modernists' -- the theme of this book -- and spends a good deal of time in the trenches, doing polemical readings of recent poets in the avant-garde. Lyn Heijnian versus, e.g., Seamus Heaney -- Perloff wants radical approaches, and she finds the best of those who'll never be reviewed in the New York Times because of their newness. Maybe fifty years from now, the Times will pretend that, of course, we all knew they were great from the start. Obscure to god-like, with no intervening step. In contrast to some of the avant-garde LANGUAGE types, Perloff is fair and low BS when it comes to her criticism (constrast Charles Bernstein's insufferable Poetics.) Her close readings are in the style of someone like Helen Vendler (although Perloff and Vendler are near-contemporaries, so it's unlikely that one's derivative of the other.) There aren't many people who can write with such acuity -- the only thing worse...

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...