Perloff, Marjorie

Biography / Administrative History

Marjorie Perloff is one of the foremost American critics of contemporary poetry. Her work has been especially concerned with explicating the writing of experimental and avant-garde poets and relating it to the major currents of modernist and, especially, postmodernist activity in the arts, including the visual arts and cultural theory. She took her first degree at Barnard College, New York, followed by an M.A. and Ph.D. (in 1965) at CUA (Catholic University of America) in Washington DC. CUA also provided her first teaching post (as assistant and then associate professor) from 1966 to 1971. She moved to the University of Maryland as full professor in 1971, remaining there five years before moving to California in 1976. She has been a professor at Californian universities since 1976, with ten years at the University of Southern California, till 1986, and since then at Stanford University, becoming Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of Humanities in 1990. Her immense energies and enthusiasm as a writer and teacher have been devoted to creating a public for the work of writers whom many others have wanted to dismiss as too difficult, obscure, or marginal. Her own writing is always anything but that; as Frank Kermode has said, Marjorie Perloff is fun to read. She has never been a critic who wraps her insights in a daunting verbal carapace which only the truly intrepid can penetrate. She writes to explain, and always communicates her insights through vivid juxtapositions, formulations, and examples.

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