Marjorie Perloff - Career

Career

After completing her degrees at Catholic University, Perloff taught at the school from 1966–71. She then moved on to become Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park (1971–76) and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California (1976–86) and then at Stanford University (1986–90). She then became 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 cultural theory.

The first three books published by Perloff each focused on different poets: W. B. Yeats, Robert Lowell, and Frank O'Hara respectively. In 1981, she changed directions with The Poetics of Indeterminacy, which began her work on the avant-garde, 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.

Perloff has done much to promote poetics that are not normally part of the discourse in the United States such as Louis Zukofsky and Brazilian poetry. Her work on contemporary American poetry and in particular poetry associated with the avant-garde (such as Language poetry and the Objectivist poets) has significantly opened up the "Official Verse Culture" to critique and dialogue from outside the classroom and lecture hall: even as poetry in the U.S. today continues its division between categories like "experimental", "mainstream", and "spoken word".