Lecture by Marjorie Perloff: "Conceptual Poetry and the Question of Emotion"

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Poetry is usually equated with lyric poetry, with the expressive utterance of an individual subject that “speaks” to a sympathetic readership. But suppose the text is a “plagiarized” or recycled version of other texts? Can such appropriative poetry satisfy the emotional demand of the audience or is it mere game-playing, mere intellectual exercise? Using examples from the work of Kenneth Goldsmith and Vanessa Place, from the Brazilian poet André Vallias’s TRAKLTRAKT and from Christian Marclay’s THE CLOCK, Perloff argues that contemporary conceptual poetry can generate powerful emotions. Marjorie Perloff is the author of over 13 books on twentieth and twenty-first century poetry and poetics, as well as on intermedia and the visual arts. Her books include The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (1981), The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (1986, new edition 1994), Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (1992), Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (1996), 21st Century Modernism (2002), Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy (2005) – and most recently, UNORIGINAL GENIUS: Poetry by Other Means in the Twenty-First Century (2010). She is Professor Emerita of English at Stanford University and Florence R. Scott Professor of English Emerita at the University of Southern California.