• Aprill Brandon •
• Originally published January 13, 2009 at 1:49 p.m., updated January 13, 2009 at 1:49 p.m.

Since its reading series began in 2006, the American Book Review at the University of Houston-Victoria has been bringing in renowned authors, writers, poets and critics to the campus. On Jan. 22, the 2009 spring reading series will kickoff with one of the foremost American critics of contemporary poetry, Marjorie Perloff.

"The spring semester will feature a world-class group of distinguished authors who are regularly reviewed in the pages of the American Book Review," Jeffrey Di Leo, ABR editor and publisher, said. "The authors are excited to participate in the UHV/ABR Reading Series because word has gotten out about the warm welcome writers receive on their visits to Victoria."

Perloff is a professor emerita at Stanford University and is the former president of the Modern Language Association, according to an American Book Review news release. Also the author of 18 books, Perloff has written on a range of topics, from books that deal with a specific poet to her 2004 cultural memoir "The Vienna Paradox." One of her most recent books, "Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy" won the Robert Penn Warren Prize for literary criticism in 2005.

Perloff is also a frequent reviewer for periodicals, from The Washington Post to major scholarly journals. According to The Encyclopedia of Literary Critics and Criticism, Perloff's work is mainly concerned with the writing of experimental and avant garde poets and relating it to the major currents of modernist and postmodernist activity in the arts.

At the reading series, Perloff will present her lecture "Unoriginal Genius: New Directions in Poetry."

"The reading series and the American Book Review add so much to the community and I am honored to have them based at the university," university president Tim Hudson said. "I encourage everyone to listen to and meet these inspiring authors."

• Excerpt of "Crisis in the Humanities"

  By Marjorie Perloff

  The treatment of poetry as truth or knowledge has produced some marvelous criticism, especially in the Romantic period and again after the Second World War when Heidegger came to prominence, but ...

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Excerpt of "Crisis in the Humanities"

By Marjorie Perloff

The treatment of poetry as truth or knowledge has produced some marvelous criticism, especially in the Romantic period and again after the Second World War when Heidegger came to prominence, but it has its own problems, perhaps most notably that it favors a limited corpus of literature at the expense of all others-the lyric of Wordsworth and Shelley, for example, at the expense of, say, a Jane Austen novel, which doesn't lend itself to comparable philosophical reflection. Then, too-and I shall have more to say on this below-the equation of poetry and philosophy tends to shortchange the former: when a given artwork is seen to exemplify or illustrate, say, Adorno's aesthetic theory, its heterogeneity is ignored, the pedagogical aim being one of exemplification rather than respect for the poem's own ontology.

From antiquity to the present, poetry has also been classified as one of the arts (this time Aristotle is more important than Plato). In this configuration, poetics becomes a form of discourse that regards its object as inherently other from the ordinary writings and events of everyday life. A poem will be read, less for its potential truth value or its specific rhetorical properties, than as the product of particular human skills and genius, and its context now comes from the other arts--music, dance, painting, architecture, and so on. As such, discourse about poetry involves what Plato calls in the Ion technê kai episteme. Technê was the standard Greek word both for a practical skill and for the systematic knowledge or experience which underlies it. So technê, meaning "craft," "skill," 'technique," "method," "art," coupled with epistemê, meaning "knowledge," is the domain of the arts. Plato himself concludes in the Ion that discourse about poetry doesn't seem to have sufficient technê kai epistemê and that the rhapsode's skill at speaking about Homer (but not about other poets) is a matter of inspiration - in other words, a second-order poetry, that cannot be taught or learned - it simply is.

-Boston Review, 24: 6 (1999).

If you go:

The American Book Review reading series featuring Marjorie Perloff begins at noon Jan. 22 in the Alcorn Auditorium at the University of Houston-Victoria.

American Book Review reading series lineup:

Jan. 22: Author and poetry critic Marjorie Perloff

Feb. 19: Author Michael Martone

March 12: Review of Contemporary Fiction founder John O'Brien

April 2: Novelist, poet and short story writer Zulfikar Ghose

April 30: Poet, novelist and short story writer Ana Castillo

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