Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century

About this book

What is the place of individual genius in a global world of hyper-information a world in which as Walter Benjamin predicted more than seventy years ago everyone is potentially an author? For poets in such a climate "originality" begins to take a back seat to what can be done with other peoples wordsframing citing recycling and otherwise mediating available words and sentences and sometimes entire texts. Marjorie Perloff here explores this intriguing development in contemporary poetry: the embrace of "unoriginal" writing. Paradoxically she argues such citational and often constraint-based poetry is more accessible and in a sense "personal" than was the hermetic poetry of the 1980s and 90s. Perloff traces this poetics of "unoriginal genius" from its paradigmatic work Benjamins encyclopedic Arcades Project a book largely made up of citations. She discusses the processes of choice framing and reconfiguration in the work of Brazilian Concretism and Oulipo both movements now understood as precursors of such hybrid citational texts as Charles Bernsteins opera libretto Shadowtime and Susan Howes documentary lyric sequence The Midnight. Perloff also finds that the new syncretism extends to language: for example to the French-Norwegian Caroline Bergvall writing in English and the Japanese Yoko Tawada in German. Unoriginal Genius concludes with a discussion of Kenneth Goldsmiths conceptualist book Traffica seemingly "pure" radio transcript of one holiday weekends worth of traffic reports. In these instances and many others Perloff shows us "poetry by other means" of great ingenuity wit and complexity.