Marjorie Perloff and the Cake Shops in the Nevsky
Remembering an indefatigable genius.
My personal discovery, and subsequent embrace, of conceptualism during my art student years unfolded always in conflict with my equal interest in modernist poetry. This was not least because my older brother, who also was my first artistic mentor, taught me a lot about modernism but did not really like contemporary art. I struggled for many years to reconcile both, and it pained me that I felt I perfectly understood my brother’s modernist aesthetic allegiance while he did not understand mine, sometimes characterizing my pursuit of it as some kind of fool’s errand. Many years later, still contending with this conflict, I met someone who would help me more than anyone else to reconcile both traditions: Marjorie Perloff.
This past Sunday we learned of Marjorie’s passing, at age 92. The countless and heartfelt tributes of her are testament of the enormity of her importance in the literary world: she was, probably, the most influential and respected avant-garde poetry scholar of our time. I received the news in disbelief, partially because of how the stages of grief work, but mainly because Marjorie Perloff to me always felt eternally present and available, always there, always quick to reply to an email, always actively engaged on social media to inform, update, and comment on matters large and small.
As I was reading the many tributes of her, from small university press newsletters to the New York Times, I observed how not enough attention was being given to the quiet influence of her thought in the visual arts. Relatedly, because she was not an artist, curator or art historian, I suspect the art press has not even deemed her worth of an obituary. In reality, just as we have artist’s artists, she was what I would call an artist’s thinker— someone who thought through difficult problems about the artistic practice for us, the artists, and offered us solutions to take and run with. She was one of those key reference figures that are seldom, if ever, known about by the art viewing public. So here is this minimal appreciation of someone who played a unique, defining, and mediating role in the dialogue between writing and the visual arts.
I first met her in January of 1998, when I helped organize an event at the MCA Chicago in connection of an exhibition of works by Jasper Johns around In Memory of My Feelings by Frank O’Hara. The logical speaker to bring for that show was no other than Marjorie Perloff, the authority on the work of O’Hara since her 1977 book Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters, which is credited for bringing critical attention to O’Hara’s work. She joined the prominent poet and scholar Charles Bernstein in conversation. Marjorie and Charles were dear lifelong friends, and seeing them interact with one another and argue about aesthetics was absolutely delightful, like a erudite, witty and sophisticated, avant-garde poetry version of The Car Guys. While they engaged in playful banter, they helped us all learn and reflect on the intricacies of modern and contemporary poetry. I vividly recall that first dinner with Marjorie. She was a gifted conversationalist, capable of maintaining three entirely different and detailed conversations across the table, not wanting to miss a single comment and never missing the opportunity of making one in response, which is why guests like her should always sit at the center during dinner; she would be interested in opining about anything, from Chinese poetry to Paul Celan to the political events of the moment (incidentally, the day they came to speak at the MCA happened to be the day when the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal burst out into the open, and we were debating it at dinner. “I predict he will resign”, Marjorie said).
For decades she remained a central academic presence in the art circles I frequented that were concerned with the relationship between word and image. In 2002, I saw Marjorie again at Whitebox in New York, as part of a series of readings organized by Sergio Bessa, on that occasion doing a talk titled “The Cake Shops on the Nevsky”, (a passing reference in one of Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos, which I will come back to), and one more time in a slightly controversial symposium that James Elkins and I organized at MoMA, “Art Speech: A Symposium on Symposia” in 2011, where we invited Marjorie to speak to the poetics of the art historical lecture (the symposium was controversial because some miffed art history scholars thought that the whole event was a lopsided critique of academic rigor). Marjorie, regardless, delivered a thoughtful and elegant reflection on the literary underpinnings of art historical writing.
But Perloff’s most important contribution in the dialogue between poetry and the visual arts is her 2010 book, “Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century.” More than revealing a new phenomenon, she explained and provided a clear historical context, and theoretical defense, for the (by then) well-established practice of conceptual poetry of the 21st century, also defined as “uncreative writing”. In the visual arts, the notion of appropriation has been around for more than a century, starting with Duchamp’s urinal; but for the world of poetry, the idea that one could cut and paste the information from, say, the back of a cereal box and present it as a poem, until recently (and even now) has been hard to accept by the literary establishment, which is also why it is not hard to understand that conceptual poets usually feel more at home in the visual arts world than in the mainstream literary world. In her book, Perloff showed that conceptual poetry actually has long roots in the strategy of the 1950s Concretists and the Oulipo poets. She created a theoretical framework to explain and advocate for those poets who refuse to conform to the conventions of originality of yore, and showed that in the digital internet age this form of appropriation is not only natural, but inevitable.
In the few opportunities I’ve had in my life to meet truly exceptional minds, I have always encountered great humanity in the person, an unmistakable intellectual curiosity and the ability to take any conversation into a truly fascinating direction; such was the case with Marjorie. While her intellect was monumental, she never flaunted her knowledge; she was always approachable, easy to talk to, funny, generous and willing to engage with anybody. She was endlessly curious and in love with the world. She was the kind of person that, when conversing with her, one would feel smarter.
Those of us who got to know her, but also her readers, were also able to appreciate her personal journey of which she spoke candidly, from the time when she, born in Vienna in 1931 to a Jewish family, had to flee Austria at 6 years old as Nazism was on the rise (her family left two days after the Anschluss). This and her deep and rich relationship to Austria is documented in her memoir The Vienna Paradox. She only returned to Austria as an adult, where she was honored for her scholarly work, and never lost her command of the German language.
She sometimes spoke about the difficulties of caring for her husband Joe during his last years (Joseph Perloff, a noted cardiologist, who died in 2014). From what I was able to glean from our interactions, she seemed to always take adversity in stride, not with denial or sadness, but with stoicism. Even on occasions like that, her love for life and passion for knowing never faded, and when she reached her 90s her intellectual curiosity and productivity remained intact. At 91 she published her English translation of Wittgenstein’s wartime “secret” diaries, which she worked on during the 2020 Covid lockdown. Her energy and motivation seemed inexhaustible up to the very end.
What I will remember the most about Marjorie is her upbeat optimism. It was by no means the complacent, blind, or unexamined happiness that some people have, but the almost child-like, enthusiastic fascination with life and the excitement of decoding it with the gift of her unique insights; that made every experience and every interaction meaningful for those around her.
In “Poetics in a New Key”, a 2014 book of interviews and essays, there is one of the many spirited dialogues that Marjorie had with Charles Bernstein, this one titled “The Alter(ed) Ground of Poetry and Pedagogy”. In that dialogue, which took place via email in 2002 and clearly draws from the common themes at the event in Whitebox I attended earlier that year, Perloff speaks at some point about the multi-layered allusions in poetry and the fact that the reader does not need to know every one of them in order to extract meaning from a poem, and in fact, obscure references can help a poem withstand close readings. One of the examples Perloff poses is the reference to “the cake shops in the Nevsky” that Pound makes in the Pisan Canto LXXVI, which, as Perloff points out, “he never saw any more than I’ve seen them!” (Pound never visited that famous street in Saint Petersburg, nor anywhere in Russia in his lifetime for that matter). She adds: “That’s what makes poetry so infinitely re-readable. And poetry that has none of this thickness quickly gets boring. “
At the end of that conversation, Charles Bernstein tells Marjorie:
Criticism engages and extends the work of the poem, but criticism is not the end of poetry. Nor is the poem the final destination of a process of analysis and research.
The poem is an initial point of embarkation on journeys yet to come, on earth as they are in the imaginary space between here and there, now and then, is and as.
So, hey, if you have time now, let’s go together on a trip to those cake shops on the Nevsky.
I envision Marjorie now, in the other realm and in that extended journey (in the imaginary space between here and there, as Charles said), with her ever-present smile, strolling down the Nevsky Prospect, admiring those mythical cake shops just as she admired every book and every poem that landed on her hands, permanently conducting a close reading of the world and enlightening us with her observations.
I have spent the afternoon looking for Marjorie’s books and setting them aside in a special place so that I can stay in conversation with her— by other means.
Great essay, thanks for sharing!
Just a wonderful tribute. I can see her smiling at you.