Marjorie Perloff

At the Poetry of the 1930s conference in Orono in 1992 (?) I was seated at breakfast near the head of a long cafeteria table, talking to a group that included Marjorie Perloff. Allen Ginsberg came running through the cafeteria and stopped, saying he had to read the dream he'd had the previous night. He opened his journal and began to read. At some point he got the part where he encountered "the lady critic." (I have some good stories about him, but I'll save them for later.)

 

I liked some of her essays, including the one about how New Yorker ads and New Yorker poems are essentially saying the same thing. It came with some images of shiny cars in meadows next to trees, and quotes from poems that, yes, kind of did that, too. Another essay showed that Denise Levertov and AR Ammons, who existed in very different poetry worlds, wrote very similar poems. And there was the essay about how John Ashbery, whose work had been out there, had been normalized by critics. And there were books like the one about the Futurists that were chock full of detail.

 

In later early 1990s, she came to UH to speak to the Phi Beta Kappa people. She gave a talk in the English department on Stein's _Tender Buttons_. Steve Bradbury and probably Rob Sean Wilson were there. She proceeded to explicate a whole series of the prose poems so that they all made perfect, linear sense. In retrospect, it was funny. Stein who tried so hard to evade the tyranny of the sentence and the paragraph, reduced to a series of narratives.

 

I could sense difficulties of various kinds from her, and kept some distance from her force field, but to me she was quite generous. We'd kept in touch until recent years. If I'd graduated from the U of Virginia without discovering her books, I never would have headed in the direction I did. I doubt that the writing in Tinfish was at all her cup of tea, but she supported the press year after year. As Mark Wallace wrote earlier today, she showed a lot of us the way, whether or not we kept to the straight and narrow path. 

 

Rest in peace, MP. You've left quite a wake behind you.