Marjorie Perloff, "whose incisive, at times idiosyncratic readings of avant-garde artists like Ezra Pound, John Cage and John Ashbery made her one of the world's leading scholars of contemporary poetry," died March 24, the New York Times reported. She was 92.
Perloff, who spent the latter part of her career at Stanford University, "made her name as a forceful advocate for experimental poetry, reaching back to early 20th-century writers like Pound and Gertrude Stein and embracing more recent movements like Language poetry and conceptual poetry," the Times wrote, noting she argued that a critic's task was not to search for meaning, but to explicate the form and texture of a poem.
"Many people faced with difficult, abstract, nontraditional writing don't know what to say," Charles Bernstein, a poet and professor emeritus of English at the University of Pennsylvania, observed. "She'd make it familiar, she'd solve the puzzle, to some degree."
Perloff was a critic of the Western canon, though her concern "was not that it left out people of color or of non-European heritage, but that it was an obstacle to the avant-garde," the Times noted, adding that she was an advocate of close reading.
"She definitely turned against the reigning mode of whom to read and how to write about them to expand the canon and look at more challenging experimental work," said Andrew Epstein, a professor of English at Florida State University.
Perloff gained notice with her book Frank O'Hara: Poet Among Painters (1977). Beginning in the early 1980s, she wrote a series of works that traced the history of avant-garde poetry, as well as exploring art, music and philosophy. She also argued that the rise of electronic media required radical new ways of writing and thinking.
After teaching at the Catholic University of America in Washington from 1966 to 1971, she moved to the University of Maryland, and later taught at the University of Southern California until 1986, when she started at Stanford.
Though she took emeritus status in 2001, Perloff remained active, writing reviews and essays for journals as well as seven more books, including a memoir, The Vienna Paradox (2004), and, in 2022, her translation of notebooks that philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein kept during World War I.
Her other works include Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire (2016), Poetics in a New Key: Interviews and Essays (2014), Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century (2010), and Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy (2004). A few weeks before her death, Liveright released a new translation of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, with a foreword by Perloff.
"Many people in my field were always waiting to see what she'd do next," Epstein said.