Perloff, Pleasure, and Postmodernism

Recollections of Marjorie Perloff at Stanford, and Some Thoughts on The Ghost of Meter and the Future of Poetics

Marjorie Perloff in the 1980s. Photo by Carey Perloff.

In 1991, a few months after the birth of my first baby, my 35-year-old ife turned upside down through a severe postpartum break. Before I was plummeted through that tumultuous abyss, before I was washed up on the threshold of the path I have followed ever since, things were starkly different. This blog, like all of my current writing, performing, and teaching, serves meter and magic with equally passionate joy and gratitude. It is based on my witchly understanding that Goddess spirituality and the metrical-formal body of poetry are equally sacred, inherently akin. But up until 1991, much of my time and energy was spent in attempting to reconcile two things that felt at the time sharply separated: thinking about the body of poetry, and experiencing the spirit of poetry.

The recent death of major avant-garde poetry critic Marjorie Perloff propelled me back to that time when I was a Ph.D candidate at Stanford, and the poetic body-spirit separation seemed impossible to surmount and even to express. Under the sharp constraints of academic protocol, my available spiritual vocabulary was made up of subterranean hints: subtle, coded shadings barely discernible within the wider, flatly patriarchal hues of acceptable, impersonal wording. And it was not only in academic discourse that the mind was paramount; subversion and liberation supposedly motivated the revolutionary-edge books admired in those days, from Jacques Derrida to Julia Kristeva to the L.A.N.G.U.A.G.E. poets. But wasn’t this flood of reactive postmodern discourse still shackled to the mind first and foremost? If liberation could be accessed primarily through un-making sense, wouldn’t the intellect, by definition, continue to reign as language’s inherent, original basis and ground?

As far as poetics goes, Marjorie Perloff and I might now appear to have little in common. But during my years at Stanford, she and I shared a mission as passionate lovers of poetry who were (unlike Brodsky, Levertov, Rich, Fields, or di Piero, the poets teaching at Stanford then) engaging with postmodern theory to forge a new kind of contemporary poetics. Although I identified primarily as a poet and Marjorie as a critic, I always felt her as something of an ally or kindred spirit. Increasingly I imagine that she may have been struggling through some of the same thicket of constraints as I was.

Marjorie, Adrienne Rich, and I all began our Stanford careers on the same day in September 1986. Marjorie was a 55-year-old professor “at the peak of her career,” and I a 30-year-old entering the Ph.D program in English and American