Preeminent poetry critic Marjorie Perloff came to campus this week. The lecture I attended, “Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century,” argued towards the idea of “genius” in contemporary poetry.
Acknowledging that the idea of a solitary writer producing great works of original brilliance is pass??, perhaps impossible in our post-structuralist times, she proposed instead that techniques of collage, “citation,” of “writing through” another text into something (dare I write it?) new, could result in some work of “genius.” Although, unless I missed it, she did not quite define exactly what genius looks like.
Perhaps it looks something like T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” with which she began her talk.
Perloff quoted a review of the poem in The Times Literary Supplement that criticized Eliot’s abundant use of borrowed/stolen/cited lines, calling it an “indolence of imagination.” Of course today “The Wasteland” is considered Eliot’s most important work, and Perloff suggested that the kinds of criticisms that were once leveled at Eliot and which are now used today to discount contemporary work that borrows from other texts might also be proven as laughable.
But what we have today, of course, that Elliot didn’t have, is the Internet and electronic media, which opens up vast possibilities of collaboration and citation ??? and new forms of reader/text interaction. And it is these possibilities that are so interesting and exciting to me.
Perloff read us a marvelous Facebook email sent to her by a student in a northern European country (Finland? Norway? I display here for you my bad note taking skills and my US-centric bias/blindness). This student had read all of (“well, kind of”) Kenneth Goldsmith’s Soliloquy, the incredible project in which Goldsmith wore a microphone and recorder for an entire week and transcribed every single word he uttered each day. The student was thrilled that, via Facebook, she could connect with the “characters” in the piece (including Perloff) to construct an actual map of the (real/not real) world evoked in Soliloquy.
I’m very interested in this kind of reader/text interaction that can happen via the Internet.
In fact, the web-version of Goldsmith’s project requires a kind of physical engagement from the reader that is quite different from the text version of the project (and is more like, I imagine, the experience of attending the original gallery display). The text of Soliloquy doesn’t show up until you hover your mouse across the screen. And even then, only parts of it show up, making it almost impossible to get a sense of the text as a whole. Rather, you get fragmented speech, a disjointed, single-sided conversation. As Goldsmith says on the site, this experience “perhaps more truly references the ephemerality of language.”
While I was somewhat familiar with Goldsmith’s work, I had not heard of Cia Rinne, whose work Perloff briefly discussed. I found her interactive visual poetry at Archives Zaroum and was thoroughly engaged by the sense of play that her work evokes. It invites experimentation ??? what happens when you click the box? How does meaning change as the letters and words appear, disappear, rearrange? What happens when I click “Yes” instead of “No”?
In interacting with Rinne’s work, was I “reading” “poetry”? To the extent that poetry is word play, then yes, I suppose I was. I’m not sure I was profoundly moved or changed in the experience of interacting with this text, but I was certainly delighted.
Perloff suggested that this kind of work ??? today’s poems of collaborations that “write through” other texts and media ??? are more accessible (more so than, say, the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets) to general readers. Whether these works are “original” or not, I think that more people reading poetry is probably a good thing for this world.