Marjorie Perloff^{[needs IPA]} (born Gabriele Mintz; September 28, 1931 – March 24, 2024) was an Austrian-born American poetry scholar and critic, known for her study of avant-garde poetry.^[1]

Perloff was a professor at Catholic University, the University of Maryland, College Park, the University of Southern California and Stanford University.^[2][3]

She wrote books about W. B. Yeats, Robert Lowell, and Frank O'Hara and promoted poetry that normally was not discussed in the United States, such as works by Louis Zukofsky, Kenneth Goldsmith, and Brazilian poetry. Perloff was widely considered the most influential critic of experimental poetry. She coined the term "unoriginal genius" to reflect the desire of some contemporary poets to create poetry by using other people's words and constraint-based practices rather than inspiration or other personal sources.^[4][5]

Early life

Perloff was born Gabriele Schüller Mintz on September 28, 1931, into a secularized Jewish family in Vienna.^[1] The annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany exacerbated Viennese antisemitism, and so the family emigrated in 1938, when she was six-and-a-half, going first to Zürich and then to the United States, settling in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, where she attended the Ethical Culture Fieldston School.^[1] According to Adam Kirsch, "Perloff can be counted as perhaps the youngest of the great wave of European Jewish intellectual refugees who immeasurably enriched American culture."^[6] She changed her name to Marjorie when she was a teenager, as she felt it sounded "more American".^[1]

After attending Oberlin College from 1949 to 1952, she graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Barnard College in 1953; that year, she married Joseph K. Perloff, a cardiologist focused on congenital heart disease.^[7] She completed her graduate work at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., earning an M.A. in 1956 and a Ph.D. in 1965; her dissertation on W. B. Yeats was later published as a book entitled Rhyme and Meaning in the Poetry of Yeats in 1970.^[8][9]

Career

Perloff taught at Catholic University from 1966 to 1971. She then moved on to become Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park (1971–1976) and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California (1976–1986) and Stanford University (1986–1990). Her position was endowed as the Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of Humanities at Stanford (1990—2000; emerita from 2001). She was also Florence Scott Professor of English Emerita at the University of Southern California.^[2][3]

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 literary theory.^[10]

The first three books published by Perloff each focused on different poets: Yeats, Robert Lowell, and Frank O'Hara respectively. In 1981, she changed directions with The Poetics of Indeterminacy, which began her work on avant-gardist poetry, paving the way for The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture in 1986 and many subsequent titles. Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy, published in 2004, won the Robert Penn Warren Prize in 2005 as well as Honorable Mention for the Robert Motherwell Prize of the Dedalus Foundation.^[11]

Perloff did much to promote poetics that are not normally part of the discourse in the United States such as works of Louis Zukofsky, Kenneth Goldsmith, or Brazilian poetry. She was widely considered the most influential critic of experimental poetry. She was credited with coining the term — "unoriginal genius" — to reflect the interest of some contemporary poets in generating their work by citational and constraint-based practices rather than inspiration or other personal sources.^[4][5] Her work on contemporary American poetry, and, in particular, poetry associated with Language poetry and the Objectivist poets, posits and critiques an "Official Verse Culture" that determines what is and is not worthy of publication, critique and emulation.^[12] In 2001, she gave the British Academy's Sarah Tryphena Phillips Lecture in American Literature and History, on Gertrude Stein's Differential Syntax.^[13]

In 2008–09, she was the Weidenfeld Visiting professor of European Comparative Literature in St Anne's College, Oxford.^[14] She was also member of the International Jury of the Janus Pannonius Grand Prize for Poetry Foundation [hu] (an award of the Hungarian PEN Club).^[15]

Personal life and death

Perloff and her husband, who died in 2014, had two daughters, Carey Perloff and Nancy Perloff.^[1]

Perloff died at her home in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, on March 24, 2024, at the age of 92.^[1]