By Elin Käck
The Williams Society received the news of Marjorie Perloff’s death at the age of 92, on Sunday March 24, with heavy hearts. Perloff’s invaluable service to modern American poetry is difficult to summarize, but it has throughout been characterized by a capacious learning rooted in European literary and philosophical traditions and meticulous close reading. These qualities have continuously been combined with an extraordinary capacity to write in an engaging, clear prose and a fearless interest in and advocacy for new poetic, experimental forms (a term which she repeatedly questioned). She always placed the poem higher than any theory and insisted on rigorous readings that paid attention also to rhythm and formal aspects, often thereby revealing unexpected facets about a poem, which she would put in relation to all sorts of things from her broad reading.
While Perloff is more immediately associated with poets like Frank O’Hara, John Cage, John Ashbery or the Language poets, Williams studies has benefited enormously from her pioneering work. Who can forget her reading of “The Young Housewife” as “an updated version of the chanson courtois” in the introduction to Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy (2004, p. xv) She details a teaching situation in which the students had decided that the housewife must be a prostitute and then declared it impossible to bow while driving, leading Perloff to demonstrate a hat-wearing driver’s bow in her chair. The energetic and astute presentation she provided of Williams in the Voices and Visions documentary belong to its most memorable and fetching moments. In the printed volume Voices and Visions: The Poet in America (1987), furthermore, she offered pedagogical close readings that situated Williams’s work firmly in a context of avant-garde art and that showed his attention to the visual aspects of the poem on the page, refusing to play along with the idea that Williams simply presented objects as they were or was not as sophisticated as, say, Eliot.
Susan McCabe, Marjorie Perloff, and Elin Käck
For Williams scholars, the most influential texts among her body of work have probably been The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (1981) and The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition (1985). In the essay “Lucent and Inescapable Rhythms: Metrical ‘choice’ and Historical Formation” in Poetry On and Off the Page: Essays for Emergent Occasions (1998), she stressed the importance of technology in Williams’s work, particularly for his typography and lineation. While she was less occupied with Williams’s work later in her career, she did give an online talk on him at a Chinese university as late as in 2023. And even in books in which he is not given his own essay or chapter, such as the relatively recent Infrathin: An Experiment in Micropoetics (2021), the index sometimes reveals Williams’s presence, with a sequence of page numbers in which he occurs, amid discussions of Stevens, Pound, and others. It is safe to say that Perloff’s work will continue to shape the critical discussion on poetry and poetics in the decades to come.
