Infrathin: An Experiment in Micropoetics

Perloff, Marjorie

ISBN 10: 022679850X / ISBN 13: 9780226798509

Published by University of Chicago, 2021

About this Item

This first edition has soft covers that are clean with straight edges and lightly creased corners. Spine is uncreased with a softly creased head. Text block is square. Binding is firm. 253p. There is a small closed tear present on the lower edge of page 253 and rear fly leaf. Interior is unmarked with crisp white pages through out.

Seller Inventory # 105862

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Infrathin: An Experiment in Micropoetics
• Publisher: University of Chicago
• Publication Date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 022679850X
• ISBN 13: 9780226798509
• Binding: Softcover. 8vo
• Edition: 1st edition.
• Condition: Very Good.
• Seller catalogs:
  • LITERARY CRITICISM
  • POETRY

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.