On March 24, Marjorie Perloff, a poetry researcher and critic who was born in Austria and lived in the United States, passed away. She was 92 years old. As well as teaching classes and writing about poetry and poetics from the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries, Marjorie Perloff has written about intermedia and the visual arts, as well as Anglo-American and Comparatist perspectives on poetry and poetics.
Yeats, Robert Lowell, and Frank O’Hara were the subjects of her first three volumes, which were concerned with individual poets. She then went on to publish The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (1981), a book that has been published in a number of editions.
This book was the catalyst for her extensive investigation of avant-garde art movements, which she subsequently explored in The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (1986, new edition, 1994), as well as in subsequent books (a total of thirteen). Wittgenstein’s Ladder introduced philosophy into the scene, and Perloff has just lately written her cultural memoir, The Vienna Paradox (2004), which has been the subject of a great deal of discussion.
Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Huntington Foundation are among the many accolades and distinctions that have been bestowed upon Perloff.
Her previous positions include serving on the Advisory Board of the Stanford Humanities Center and holding the position of President of the Modern Language Association in the year 2006.
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society both count her as a member of their respective organizations.
In 2008, she was awarded an honorary degree from Bard College, and in 2012, the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania honored her with a special symposium. Jacket 2, an online journal, published a diverse collection of the individual contributions that were made to the symposium.
