Infrathin: An Experiment in Micropoetics (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780226798509)

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?

Author: Marjorie Perloff
ISBN-10: 022679850X
ISBN-13: 9780226798509
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Language: English
Published: 09/03/2021
Pages: 240
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.90lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.90w x 0.70d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 07/01/2022