Unoriginal genius
Subtitle: poetry by other means in the new century
By: Marjorie Perloff
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 2010
Place of publication: Chicago; London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 201
ISBN-13: 9780226660615
Subjects: History and criticism; Criticism and interpretation; Poetry; Multilingualism and literature
Description: 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 1980's and 90's.

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's 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{u1D61} 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. --Book Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 171-194) and index.
Table of contents: title: Unoriginal genius: an introduction; title: Phantasmagorias of the marketplace; title: Citational poetics in Benjamin's Arcades project; title: From avant-garde to digital; title: The legacy of Brazilian concrete poetry; title: Writing through Walter Benjamin; title: Charles Bernstein's "Poem including history"; title: "The rattle of statistical traffic"; title: Documentary and found text in Susan Howe's The midnight; title: Language in migration; title: Multilingualism and exophonic writing in the new poetics; title: Conceptual bridges/digital tunnels; title: Kenneth Goldsmith's traffic.