Esteemed literary critic Marjorie Perloff reconsiders the nature of the poetic, examining its visual, grammatical, and sound components.
The sdquo;infrathinpdquo; was Marcel Duchampcsquo;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. edquo;Eatedquo; is not the same thing as ldquo;ate.sdquo; 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 odquo;make it new.odquo;
In her revisionist sdquo;micropoetics,tdquo; 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 gdquo;about,ndquo; does not do justice to its infrathin possibilities. From Goethemsquo;s eight-line tdquo;Wandererssquo;s Night Song dquo; to Eliot squo;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?
