Unoriginal genius: poetry by other means in the new century

Abstract

In Unoriginal Genius Marjorie Perloff explores a new development in contemporary poetry: the repurposing of other people's words in order to make new works, by framing, citing, and recycling already existing phrases, sentences, and even full texts. Paradoxically, she argues, this 'unoriginal' poetry is more accessible and, in a sense, 'personal' than the hermetic poetry of the 1980s and '90s. Perloff traces this poetics of Unoriginal Genius from one of its paradigmatic works, Walter Benjamin's 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, two movements now understood to be precursors of such hybrid citational texts as Charles Bernstein's opera libretto Shadowtime and Susan Howe's documentary lyric sequence The Midnight. Unoriginal Genius concludes with a discussion of Kenneth Goldsmith's conceptualist book Traffic - a seemingly pure transcript of one holiday weekend's worth of radio traffic reports. In these instances and many others, Perloff reveals 'poetry by other means' of great ingenuity, wit, and complexity.