Marjorie Perloff

Marjorie Perloff (born September 28, 1931) is an Austrian-born poetry scholar and critic in the United States.

Perloff was born Gabriele Mintz into a secularized Jewish family in Vienna.

The annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany exacerbated Viennese anti-Semitism, 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 Riverdale, New York.

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.

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. (with a dissertation on W.B. Yeats) in 1965.

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).

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.

Her position was endowed as the Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of Humanities at Stanford (1990—2000; emerita from 2001).

She is currently scholar-in-residence and Florence Scott Professor of English Emerita at the University of Southern California.

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.

The first three books published by Perloff each focused on different poets: Yeats, Robert Lowell, and Frank O'Hara respectively.

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. In 2001 she gave the British Academy's Sarah Tryphena Phillips Lecture in American Literature and History, on Gertrude Stein's Differential Syntax.

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.

Perloff has done 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 is credited with coining the term — "unoriginal genius" — to reflect on the changing nature of literary writing including poetry in the Internet age after artistic originality and creativity were allegedly replaced by the ability to pass along information.

In 2008–09, she was the Weidenfeld Visiting professor of European Comparative Literature in St Anne's College, Oxford.

She is also member of the International Jury of the Janus Pannonius Grand Prize for Poetry Foundation (an award of the Hungarian PEN Club).