Infrathin An Experiment in Micropoetics

Perloff, Marjorie

ISBN 10: 022679850X / ISBN 13: 9780226798509

Published by University of Chicago Press, 2021

About this Item

Card covers are a little marked from shelving, corners bumped; spine sturdy and uncreased; binding is tight; pages are crisp with previous owner's pencilled annotations in margins. Overall, this is a very good copy analysing Marcel Duchamp's concept of 'Infrathin' with accompanying illustrations throughout. ; 6 x 0.75 x 9 inches; 253 pages.

Seller Inventory # 55758

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Infrathin An Experiment in Micropoetics
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication Date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 022679850X
• ISBN 13: 9780226798509
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

Esteemed literary critic Marjorie Perloff reconsiders the nature of the poetic, examining its visual, grammatical, and sound components.

The “infrathin” was Marcel Duchamp’s playful name for the most minute shade of difference: that between the report of a gunshot and the appearance of the bullet hole, or between two objects in a series made from the same mold. “Eat” is not the same thing as “ate.” The poetic, Marjorie Perloff suggests, can best be understood as the language of infrathin. For in poetry, whether in verse or prose, words and phrases that are seemingly unrelated in ordinary discourse are realigned by means of sound, visual layout, etymology, grammar, and construction so as to “make it new.”

In her revisionist “micropoetics,” Perloff draws primarily on major modernist poets from Stein and Yeats to Beckett, suggesting that the usual emphasis on what this or that poem is “about,” does not do justice to its infrathin possibilities. From Goethe’s eight-line “Wanderer’s Night Song” to Eliot’s Four Quartets, to the minimalist lyric of Rae Armantrout, Infrathin is designed to challenge our current habits of reading and to answer the central question: what is it that makes poetry poetry?

About the Author

Marjorie Perloff (1931-2024) was the Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of Humanities at Stanford University and the Florence R. Scott Professor of English Emerita at the University of Southern California. She is the author of many books, including Poetics in a New Key and Unoriginal Genius, also published by the University of Chicago Press.