Death of Marjorie Perloff Marjorie Perloff was an American-born Austrian poet, critic, and researcher who died away on March 24. Her age was ninety-two.
Marjorie Perloff teaches seminars and writes on twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry and poetics. She also writes about Anglo-American and Comparatist views on poetry and poetics, intermedia, and the visual arts.
She focused on specific poets in her first three books, including Yeats, Robert Lowell, and Frank O’Hara. Her next publication, The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (1981), has been reprinted several times. Her thorough research into avant-garde art movements began with this book and continued with The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (1986, new edition, 1994) and other publications (a total of thirteen).
Philosophy was first presented by Wittgenstein’s Ladder, and more recently, Perloff wrote her cultural memoir, The Vienna Paradox (2004), which has generated a lot of controversy.
Among the numerous honors and distinctions that Perloff has received are fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Huntington Foundation.
Her prior roles include being President of the Modern Language Association in 2006 and sitting on the Advisory Board of the Stanford Humanities Center.
She is a member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, respectively. She received an honorary degree from Bard College in 2008, and the University of Pennsylvania’s Kelly Writers House feted her with a special symposium in 2012.
A varied selection of the individual presentations to the symposium were published in Jacket 2, an online journal.
