September 23, 2013
Futurism Revisited: An Interview with Marjorie Perloff, Part I
[This interview, which will be published in parts, was preceded by an introduction; you can read that here.] The Kenyon Review: I was interested to learn that F. T. Marinetti was […]
September 15, 2013
Imagining an Atemporal Utopia: Marjorie Perloff on Italian and Russian Futurism
[This post serves as the introduction for a soon-to-be-published interview with Perloff.] The present liminal state of literature—and its anxious reexamination of questions about materiality, representation, ethics, communication, community, and even […]
August 19, 2012
Interrogations of the blank page: on Bern Porter (part i)
The question “Is it art?” has, beyond its usual employment by philistines, a more serious philosophical consideration behind it. Usually this question is posed in the context of an apparently […]
August 4, 2012
Notes on a gray area and a gripe
For a moment, the elliptical, discursive, and indirect debate about the state of American poetry took on a sheen at once confrontational and warm: Matvei Yankelevich, a poet, critic, and […]
May 17, 2012
Mix Tape: Reinvention
Is the “well-crafted” poem of today formulaic? According to Marjorie Perloff, yes. “The poems you will read in American Poetry Review or similar publications will, with rare exceptions, exhibit the […]
May 2, 2012
On Conceptual Poetry
No Conceptualist Poet has yet come up with a concept as mind-bogglingly difficult as mine: Create a poetry that exploits existing grammatical and syntactical paradigms (sometimes as deceptively simple […]
April 16, 2010
Make It New?
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” […]