Sound Poetry, Language Poetry, Conceptual Poetry, and Ouplio:An Interview with Professor Marjorie Perloff*

Marjorie Perloff

FENG Yi Northeastern University

Abstract: As one of the foremost and most influential American critics of modernist and contemporary poetry, Professor Marjorie Perloff is the author of seventeen monographs——the most recent of which is Edge of Irony:Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire, published in 2016——and nearly four hundred essays.I was very honored to meet Professor Perloff during the CAAP conference in 2019, when she gave a keynote speech entitled “Reading the Verse Backward:Visual and Sound Design in Ezra Pound’s Cantos.” This interview mostly centers around the sound of poetry and its significance in conveying meanings in poetry.Beginning with a discussion of Pound’s silent Chinese ideograms in The Cantos,Professor Perloff elucidates her unique understandings on a variety of topics,ranging from sound poetry, homophonic translation, and Oulipo, to language poetry,conceptual poetry, and the latest trends of contemporary American poetry.She argues that Pound uses Chinese ideograms to thicken and multiply the meanings in The Cantos.As a prominent critic who has long studied language poetry, Professor Perloff presents her profound understanding of the relationship between language poetry and its successor, conceptual poetry.She expresses her faith in the future of poetry in the era of digitalization and multimedia.She also provides her definition of sound poetry, exemplifies how sound patterns can create meanings, and discusses the significance of the Oulipo movement.At the end of this interview, Professor Perloff recalls her seventy-year career as a poetry critic and affirms the importance of understanding contemporary poetry in the context of history and culture.

Keywords: sound poetry; language poetry; conceptual poetry; Oulipo;contemporary American poetry; Marjorie Perloff

This interview was conducted via email between February 3 and August 29

,

2020

.

FENG Yi (hereafter referred to as FENG):

During the CAAP conference in 2019, you talked about the prominent role of Chinese ideogram in Pound’s

Cantos

in your keynote speech,“Reading the Verse Backward:Visual and Sound Design in Ezra Pound’s

Cantos

.” You argue that Pound creates an orchestration of many voices and tones, and you also point out that these ideograms are visually striking but remain unsounded when Pound reads the poem aloud.Would you like to talk about how these “silent” ideograms can be so crucial in the sound aesthetics of

The Cantos

?

Marjorie G.Perloff (hereafter referred to as Perloff):

When Pound first placed Chinese ideograms in his

Cantos

, most readers disapproved.The great poet Octavio Paz, for example,complained that the ideograms either had to be translated into English by the reader or were meaningless.But on the contrary, Pound used the ideogram to “thicken the plot,” as John Cage,following Buddhist thinkers, put it.The ideograms give a different angle on what is being said in the “normal” part of the text.Pound does translate them, usually right below the ideogram in question.But a single ideogram can convey what would take many words of normal writing.And Pound wants us to see that reading silently is not the same thing as reading aloud.In oral performance of a given

Cantos

(see the wonderful selection on PENNSOUND) he omits the ideogram but when we both read

The Cantos

silently and listen to the performance, a tension occurs between the written and the oral and forces us to consider the relationship of the two.The written page becomes a work of art and functions a bit differently from the oral performance so that the reader must both LISTEN and LOOK.In other words, we must both read and reread.“Poetry is news that stays news.”

FENG:

In your keynote speech, you say:“If you think of

The Cantos

as a visual constellation,meant to be seen as a whole rather than read linearly, the ideograms...receive pride of place,dominating the whole.It is as if Pound were saying that the Chinese ideograms, here derived from Confucius, provide an alternative perspective to the Western linear drive that insists on forward movement from A to B to C.” This opinion echoes with some Chinese scholars, such as Wai Limyip who argues that the ideograms in

The Cantos

are the condensed motif of the whole poem,which aims to break the lineation/limits of English language.For you, the ideograms are“achronos”——“out of time.” For Wai Lim-yip, Pound intends to “project meanings out of the superficial meaning of words.” Would you please tell me how the ideograms are not only “out of time,” representing “achronicity” and deviation, but also, in your words, “defy the containment of a given line” and supply meaning?

Perloff:

Well, I think I’ve already answered this in my first response but let me say that I agree with Wai Lim-yip that the ideograms contest the very notion of lineation and that makes Pound’s prosody in

The Cantos

very distinctive.We are so used to reading poetry line by line and so the placement of ideograms defies that linear movement and controls the larger meaning of a given page or passage.

FENG:

When you say a “Canto page is like [a] visual constellation,” it implies the juxtaposition and fragmentation of Pound’s poetics.Would you please tell me about the relationship between Pound’s poetics and Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language?

Perloff:

Both Pound and Wittgenstein believe that in any given text, every word counts, and not only every word but every phoneme and morpheme.To read is to try to figure out what a given word means in a given context.“Blue” may mean one thing in one context, and another thing in a different one.But Wittgenstein differs from Pound in being especially interested in the way ordinary words mean, words like pain, read, good, bad, etc.Generic words.Pound, as a poet is just the opposite, finding the most complex and abstruse words.But Wittgenstein’s basic question,“Isn’t the same at least the same?” is Pound’s too.The very repetition of a word or phrase changes its meaning, it is not the same twice.And that’s an interesting conundrum.

FENG:

I read the wonderful interview with you by Felipe Cussen.In reply to one question, you spoke about the authenticity of sound poetry.See Felipe Cussen, “There is No ‘Science’ of Poetry:Interview with Marjorie Perloff,” in (in Spanish), https://letrasenlinea.uahurtado.cl/no-existe-una-ciencia-de-la-poesia-entrevista-a-marjorie-perloff , [August 29,2020].Would you please let me know your definition of sound poetry? Conventionally, poetry should be authentic and the authenticity of poetry is a very crucial quality in poetry and is immensely emphasized.You once pointed out that in contemporary poetry, the materiality of language takes the place of the signified meaning of words.Does that mean authenticity has lost its past prominence in contemporary poetry such as sound poetry or concrete poetry?

Perloff:

The term “sound poetry” refers to poetry using non-verbal or pre-verbal sounds to create meaning.For example, in “Gadji beri bimba,” Hugo Ball uses nonsense words to create mood and meaning.Or there is Kruchyonykh’s famous avant-garde poem “Dyr bul schyl”——where the vowels and consonants create a mood of ominousness, perhaps violence.Sound poetry is not just nonsense——the “words” may almost be real words——but it calls attention to the power of subliminal sound to create meaning.Authenticity? Well, in its own way sound poetry is very “authentic”:it mimics a real voice trying to express itself.But it is not realistic, it doesn’t deal with, say, what happened to me yesterday when I went downtown, or whatever.

FENG:

In your paper of Charles Bernstein’s libretto

Shadowtime

, is a libretto written by American language poet Charles Bernstein for the first opera by British composer Brian Ferneyhough; it was published by Green Integer in 2005. was based on the work and life of the German philosopher, essayist, and cultural critic Walter Benjamin.The opera had its premiere at the Munich Biennale in 2004 and has been performed in Paris and several German cities.In 2005, the opera was performed at Lincoln Center in New York.you suggest that Walter Benjamin mourns for the dying out of the mimetic faculty of language in “The Doctrine of the Similar,” and to a large extent, Bernstein reverses Benjamin’s idea:“the landscape of similarities is in fact a world turned upside down.”Marjorie Perloff, “Constraint, Concrete, Citation:Refiguring History in Charles Bernstein’s ,” 30, no.4 (Winter 2009):710.Homophonic translation is a kind of sound poetry, which creates similar sound with the original poem but also the estranged referentiality of the words in the original.How significant do you think homophonic translations is in terms of evoking the mimetic faculty of language, to form semantic density?

Perloff:

In Charles’s wonderful poem-libretto

Shadowtime

, Walter Benjamin is presented as admirable and brilliant and yet hampered by his trust in mimetic language——that is, language that can represent reality in a direct way.To turn this upside down, Charles used homophonic translation, so as to show how complex and difficult the relationship between words and things really is.I don’t, on the whole, find homophonic translation especially interesting:it seems a bit of a gimmick.But Charles has used it brilliantly, creating new meanings and subtexts in the poems chosen.

FENG:

Professor Bernstein’s homophonic translations in

Shadowtime

are indeed brilliant; for instance, his homophonic translation of Heinrich Heine’ s famous poem “ Die Lorelei.”Homophonic translation is a kind of sound poetry.Pound also did some homophonic translation,such as “Cho-fu-sa” in his translation of Li Po’s “The River-Merchant’s Wife.” So did Louis Zukofsky in

Catullus

.Could you tell me why poets prefer to use homophonic translation rather than traditional translation based on semantics?

Perloff:

It is an entertaining exercise for poets to do homophonic translations, good practice in seeing what sound can do! And, as you say, it’s a kind of sound poetry that can create new meanings and force you to rethink a particular idea.Charles Bernstein’s homophonic translation of Heine’s “Die Lorelei” is brilliant, although if you didn’t tell me its source text was “Die Lorelei,”I wouldn’t know it.Mainly, the earlier poem gives Charles permission, so to speak, to create his own sardonic ballad! It’s a sound poem with very rich overtones.Your analysis of it (in your letter!) is really excellent.Homophonic translation is a way of bringing out the subtext of the original poem, to see where the new language and rhythm will take you.Like Oulipo, it’s a way of getting rid of the ego, as Charles Olson put it.And Charles Bernstein uses it to very good effect in

Shadowtime

so as to ironize the whole tragic and absurd situation of Walter Benjamin in World War II!

FENG:

I am interested in your opinion about language poetry in the American literary tradition and its future.In your book

Poetics in a New Key

, you write:“Language poetry had become so dominant, an orthodoxy which new people like the conceptualists had to oppose.”Marjorie Perloff, : (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 2015), 166.Could you please illustrate further the relationship between language poetry and its “successor” conceptual poetry?

Perloff:

This is a good question and tricky! The original Language poets——Charles Bernstein,Bruce Andrews, Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, Bob Perelman, Rae Armantrout, etc.——worked by the notion that the poet BEGINS with language, rather than beginning with some external idea and then trying to “express” that idea or emotion in poetry.Gertrude Stein would be perhaps the key ancestor.In a text like

Tender Buttons

, the very first poem “A Carafe” begins with the words “A kind in glass and a cousin.” This is not meaningless:Stein is describing a kind of glass object, a carafe resembles a pitcher, a bottle, a tall glass cylinder, etc.But, as Craig Dworkin recently pointed out to me, the words also refer to

Hamlet

, where the hero refers to his uncle, who killed his father, as “A little more than kin and less than kind,” and then later Hamlet reproaches his mother Gertrude by telling her to look into her glass and see herself for what she is.In other words, the sentence has many meanings:it does not represent some prior reality.But in the course of a few years, language poetry became just a mannerism for writing nonsense, things that don’t add up and that aren’t interesting.It became worn out.Conceptualism,really a term from the visual arts, was the response that one can make too much fuss about language and that in fact the key was to begin with a concept that is challenging and then let the execution be secondary to the original idea.In art, it meant that the visual would be subordinated to the verbal, as in a work’s title.The father of Conceptualism is Duchamp, who would go to a hardware store and buy an ordinary snow shovel, hang it from a nail, give it the title

In Advance of the Broken Arm

, and make you see it as if for the first time.Can one transfer this concept to poetry?Not really, because poetry is made with words.So it came to mean something a little bit different:namely, the poetry of appropriation, as in Kenneth Goldsmith’s

Day

, in which one day’s

New York Times

is reprinted with all the headlines and print features gone, including the language inside of ads——everything is given equal weight and then we respond to the text very differently.

Day

shows how influenced we are by the way something is presented, by how subtle the media control how we see things.So in Conceptualism, none of the “poem” may be original.But the best language poets like Charles Bernstein had already used this notion, so the difference is not as great as some critics would have you think.Craig Dworkin, for instance, has made wonderful poems that are partly appropriated from, say, scientific texts, partly his own language.

FENG:

As you suggested, language poetry and conceptual poetry seem to influence each other by using each other’s notions.Both language poetry and conceptual poetry use “found language” to express new things.How can originality or innovation come from using unoriginal “found language”?

Perloff:

I wrote the entry on “Found Poetry” for the Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics,See Roland Greene, Stephen Cushman, Clare Cavanagh, Jahan Ramazani, and Paul Rouzer, eds., (Princeton University Press, 2013).in case you want to refer readers to that.In any case:found language is clearly one form of appropriation and is used when the poet thinks the issue in question is better stated in the words of the found text than in the poet’s own.It’s a time honored device used in satire:you hold up the text for its nonsense or irrationality.This would be the case in, say, Kenneth Goldsmith’s

The Weather

,See Kenneth Goldsmith, (Los Angeles:Make Now Press, 2005).where the whole text consists of actual weather reports, although in fact Kenneth has played with them and transformed them quite a bit.For example, he inserts, right at the center of the book,weather reports from Iraq because of the Iraqi War; these reports are juxtaposed to ones about the weather in New York.But the great example of found text would be Walter Benjamin’s

The Arcades Project

was an unfinished project of German literary critic Walter Benjamin, written between 1927 and 1940. is Benjamin’s effort to represent and to critique the bourgeois experience of nineteenth-century history, and, in so doing, to liberate the suppressed “true history” that underlay the ideological mask.The book was translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin and published by Belknap Press:An Imprint of Harvard University Press in 2002.:the entire fat book consists of street names, shop names, signs in shops, quotations in newspapers, and so on, collaged so as to present the reader with a stark image of Second Empire Paris in its cruel but seductive capitalist creation of THINGS.The found text makes much clearer than Benjamin’s own words could do, what the Paris milieu is like!

Beginning with “Canto VIII,” the first Malatesta Canto, Pound uses a great deal of found text to make his Renaissance characters and scenes vivid, but he changes a lot and turns his historical document into comedy so that, for example, Sigismundo Malatesta is referred to as Siggy and he has his Renaissance courtiers use ampersands (&), Business English and so on, so that they are at once contemporary and yet “historical.”

FENG:

In

The Poetics of Indeterminacy

, when talking about Cage’s and Antin’s highly conceptual poems, you write:In the very indeterminacy of their sound, their imagery, and their narration, they challenge us,once again, to take up

ideas

.When, in other words, the poetry of indeterminacy, of antisymbolism, has reached its outer limit, it comes back once more to such basic “literary”elements as the hypnotic sound pattern, the chant, the narrative account, the conceptual scheme.Marjorie Perloff, : (New Jersey:Princeton University Press, 1981),338.

How can sound pattern be related to making the meaning of ideas or concepts?

Perloff:

Well, sound pattern is central to creating meaning.Take the opening of T.S.Eliot’s“Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock”:

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table;Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, and Jon Stallworthy, eds., (Shorter Fifth Edition) (New York:Norton & Company, 2005), 862.

That first line has seven syllables, and a break after “then” so that it scans

/ X / X || / X /

The rhythm is very slow, as if the speaker can hardly get the words out.And then the second line rhymes with the first, but has eleven syllables and is even slower, getting the reader ready for the talk of being etherized in line 3.Now compare that to any poem that has regular meter, and you’ll see the role sound plays.

FENG:

Jacques Roubaud points out that Oulipo writing offers a link between the oral and the written, and it has as much to offer prose and performance as it does poetry.See Jacques Roubaud, “Prelude:Poetry and Orality,” in /, eds.Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 2009), 25.What is Oulipo writing? Could you briefly introduce Oulipo writing to us?

Perloff:

As for Oulipo, I think it was/is a very important movement, relating closely to Conceptualism and Language Poetry.The Oulipo poets used specific rules to generate a given text.For example, M+7 rule, where you take a given word (

mot

in French, hence the “M”) in the dictionary, then go to the seventh word after that word, and so on, and make a text out of those words.There are dozens of rules, the point being to get away from the ego, from direct expression,and become “other.” But of course the poet or novelist is always THERE.The greatest Oulipo work is Georges Perec’s novel

La Vie mode d

’

emploi

(

Life:A User

’

s Manual

),:’ (the original title is ) is Georges Perec’s most famous novel, published in 1978, first translated into English by David Bellos in 1987.where the whole story is based on the diagram of an apartment house and uses chess rules to move from apartment to apartment and describe precisely what’s in it——the pictures on the wall, the furniture, etc., etc.It seems at first innocuous but has a great plot! And one can read it as a great narrative without knowing all the hidden rules that generated each “move.”Another great work by Perec is

La Disparition

, translated by Gilbert Adair as

A Void

, (the original title is ) is a novel written by Georges Perec and was first published in 1969.a whole novel written without the letter

e

, which in French is almost impossible.The rule is not just a rule but generates the meaning:the novel is about the disappearance of the Jews in World War II,their removal to concentration camps and death.Jacques Roubaud himself has written many fine Oulipo poems with specific rules generating the text, for example

Quelque chose noir

(

Some Thing Black

), (the original title is ) is a poetry collection by Jacques Roubaud and was published by Dalkey Archive Press in 1990.which is about the death of his wife and based on Dante’s

Vita Nuova

,Dante’s () was written about 1293, regarding his feelings for Beatrice, who comes to represent for Dante the ideal woman.using various number games.In the US Oulipo never quite caught on; perhaps it is too cerebral, too mathematical, but it certainly influence the Language Poets and a work like Ron Silliman’s

Tjanting

is a poetry collection by American language poet Ron Silliman, published by Salt Publishing in 2002.was rule generated.

FENG:

It is still so fascinating for me to read and re-read your great book

The Poetics of

Indeterminacy

nowadays, which you finished and published almost forty years ago.Conceptual poetry and language poetry, to a large extent, belong to the poetics of indeterminacy.Does Oulipo writing, this important movement, also show the poetics of indeterminacy? If so, could you please illustrate how?

Perloff:

Yes, very much so.Oulipo is based on the premise that

representation

must be questioned.That is, that we cannot just make direct truth statements, with a one-to-one relationship between signifier and signified.The referent is always slippery.Hence a writer like Perec never states directly that he is writing about World War II or concentration camps in his great novel

W

, is a semi-autobiographical work of fiction by Georges Perec, published in 1975.but as readers go along, they see that the ostensible story about the camp for athletes, very literally told, is really not about athletics at all! Like language poetry and conceptual poetry, Oulipo emphasizes the

how

, not the

what

.

FENG:

In the past decades, we have seen the fusion of poetry, music, painting, TV and digital technology.There are poetry website, such as Pennsound and EPC,offering performances of poetry by poets themselves.Jacques Roubaud says in “Prelude:Poetry and Orality” in

The Sound of Poetry

/

The Poetry of Sound

:“It’s possible that what I call poetry will disappear (except among the belated few), vanish into prose, or be replaced by performance.’”Roubaud mainly refers to the traditional idea of poetry that will disappear, I think.Do you agree with Roubaud? What can poetry performance offer to its listeners, which reading poetry silently cannot?

Perloff:

There

is

poetry, like Tracie Morris’s, that is written explicitly for performance.A work like “Slave Sho to Video aka Black but Beautiful” depends on sounding, musical rhythm, speech patterning——you really couldn’t “read” it.At the same time, Tracie herself also writes what she calls “page poetry”——poetry to be read and I think she gives this poetry precedence over performance because performance is more transient, it depends so much upon recording.I think that when Roubaud made the statement above, he meant it quite negatively:in other words, he was saying that in the current moment, poetry is so misunderstood and underrated, that it is all but disappearing.And I’m afraid I agree.Most people, even very “literary” people, read many novels,watch films, etc.——but poetry? Only for the belated few as Roubaud says.Then again, except in the Romantic period, poetry was always for a smaller audience and that’s OK.It’s a difficult art but endlessly rewarding for those who take the trouble to read poetry! And it will make a comeback, not as performance, etc., but as

poetry

!

FENG:

Would you please share with us some of the new trends of contemporary American poetry which you have discovered in recent years?

Perloff:

I wish I could, but with identity politics and “cancel culture,” poetry has become very reactionary:directly confessional and straightforward narrative about the problems of race, gender,ethnicity.The best book published this past year is probably Susan Howe’ s wonderful

Concordance

, is American language poet Susan Howe’s latest poetry collection, published by New Directions in 2020.a part concrete poetry, part collage text that is brilliantly put together and has gotten wonderful response.But Susan is eighty years old, hardly a new young voice! So I am hoping there will soon be some brilliant new young poets and I think the visual and digital will be integral to their works.

FENG:

I am very excited about Susan Howe’s new book

Concordance

.Howe’s concrete poetry is dramatic and dynamic.There are usually large blanks juxtaposed with the blurred and multilayered collage text to create the visual image in Howe’s concrete poems.It seems to me that the blank as the silence and the blurred and fragmented words as noise interplay with each other to create a symphony in Howe’s concrete poetry.In what way can concrete poetry sound its visual?What role do you think silence and noise can play in concrete poems in general?

Perloff:

Howe herself would say sound is central! Of course.If you pronounce a line of Concrete poetry, the sound is just as important as the visual.Indeed, the visual and the blank spaces direct you how to read it.The blank spaces, the silence, is part of the poem.Your comment is exactly right! You have an excellent understanding of contemporary poetry and poetics!

FENG:

As one of the foremost critics of American modern and contemporary poetry, you have written many prominent academic books, which I highly admire.Through your writings, you have changed the course of American poetry criticism for forty years, as Brian Reed pointed out in 2012.ee Brian Reed, “Becoming Marjorie Perloff,” in , https://jacket2.org/article/becoming-marjorie-perloff,[August 29, 2020].When recalling your seventy years of literary academic research, what do you think is very important for you in academic research?

Perloff:

I consider myself a literary critic who is also a literary historian! I feel that one can only understand contemporary poetry and poetics in the context of earlier work, especially the Modernism of the early twentieth century.I agree with Ernst Gomrich, the great art historian, who argued that every painting is a response to an earlier painting.Of course!! T.S.Eliot has written brilliantly on this issue in his “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” One’s very notion of what a poem is is derived from earlier work or a reaction to it.

When the Language poets came of age, the dominant poetic was Confessionalism——“telling it like it is”——which was, of course, a convention like any other.The Language poets felt that the notion of poetry as mere expression was insufficient; they were influenced by Deconstructionist theory which made us all wonder about the stability of the referent and the ease of creating meaning in poetry.But it also helps to know Renaissance and 18th-century poetry so as to understand what the issues are.So my research has always been historical and also cultural, in trying to understand how and why poetries work as they do.

FENG:

Thank you so much for accepting this interview, Professor Perloff.