Marjorie Perloff

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Marjorie Perloff (b. September 28, 1931— ) is a poetry critic and professor emerita of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford University and currently scholar-in-residence at the University of Southern California. Her work has been especially concerned with explicating the writing of experimental and avant-garde poets and relating it to the major currents of modernist and, especially, postmodernist activity in the arts, including the visual arts and cultural theory ^[1].

Perloff has done much to promote poetics that are not normally part of the discourse in the United States such as Louis Zukofsky and Brazilian poetry. Her work on contemporary American poetry and in particular poetry associated with the avant-garde (such as Language poetry and the Objectivist poets) has significantly opened up the "Official Verse Culture" to critique and dialogue from outside the classroom and lecture hall: even as poetry in the U.S. today continues its division between categories like "experimental" , "mainstream", and "spoken word"^[2].

Perloff's books include Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy, The Vienna Paradox: A Memoir, Poetry On and Off the Page: Essays for Emergent Occasions, Wittgenstein's Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary, Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media, Poetic License: Studies in the Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric, "The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture, and The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition