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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Infrathin: An Experiment in Micropoetics

Infrathin: An Experiment in Micropoetics

Perloff, Marjorie

Hardcover

Literary CriticismPoetry Criticism

ISBN10: 022671263X
ISBN13: 9780226712635
Publisher: Univ Of Chicago Pr
Published: Sep 3 2021
Pages: 320
Weight: 1.17
Height: 0.63 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Esteemed literary critic Marjorie Perloff reconsiders the nature of the poetic, examining its visual, grammatical, and sound components.

The infrathin was Marcel Duchamp'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. Eat is not the same thing as ate. 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 make it new.

In her revisionist micropoetics, 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 about, does not do justice to its infrathin possibilities. From Goethe's eight-line Wanderer's Night Song to Eliot'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?

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