Perloff covers a lot of the same ground that Kenneth Goldsmith covered in his book "Uncreative Writing." The two books were published within a year of each other, Goldsmith's first. But whereas Goldsmith scampers, Perloff traverses the territory with a heavily-footed and foot-noted tread, which makes sense; she's a scholar and Goldsmith is a poet. As a result, Goldsmith's book is a lot more accessible, inspiring, and fun to read; it's more a manifesto than a literary critique.
Goldsmith is bombastic, enthusiastic, and over-the-top in his declarations, all to be expected in a manifesto; Perloff is staid, thoughtful, and balanced, all to be expected of a revered literary critic of 83. She traces, as she did in The Poetics of Indeterminancy the early use of citation—every bit as controversial at the beginning of the 20th century as the concepts of unoriginal genius and uncreative writing are at the beginning of the 21st—to its origins in T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Pound's Cantos, and to Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project. Having firmly established the roots of such strategies with these now-venerated geniuses, Perloff goes on to make her case for "unoriginal" genius. She shows how appropriation, citation, plagiarization or "the writing through" of texts is not only a perfectly viable way to create in the digital age, it may well be the only truly appropriate way to do so.
She discusses, in depth, some of the major figures to have emerged on the scene, such as Charles Bernstein, Caroline Bergvall, Yoko Tawada, and Kenneth Goldsmith, himself. In her in-depth discussion of Goldsmith's work, she tempers his intentionally inflammatory and provocative claims that all he does is transcribe and copy by revealing the authors not-quite-so invisible hand at work on his "found" texts, the authorial decisions that are made to compress, edit, alter, and shape the work. Efforts that, in fact, take genius. She discusses Brazilian Concrete poetry, an important, if overlooked, stepping stone between postwar and contemporary avant garde poetics. And, in one of those synchronicities so common in the reading life, she provides a chapter-length interpretation of Susan Howe's The Midnight, which just happens to be the book I just finished before reading this one. It's a chapter I wish I'd read before I read Howe.
One thing's for sure…Marjorie Perloff sure is smart! Even if I had another three hundred years to catch up and a bigger, more roomier brain cleared out of all the useless clutter and crap that cram the small studio-brain I have now, I still wouldn't be half as smart as Marjorie Perloff. She's so smart it hurts, so smart it makes you ashamed to even be reading her book, to even be trying to understand it. Every page you read of Marjorie Perloff doesn't make you feel smarter, it only makes you realize how stupid you are, how little you still don't know. It's the mental equivalent of taking one step forward and two steps back. At the end of a Marjorie Perloff book you sag heavily in the hammock of your own ignorance as did James Wright and and say to yourself, "I have wasted my life." But no, no there is nothing you could have done, even if you had followed Rilke's advice a long time ago when he said "you must change your life" you still would never have been as smart as Marjorie Perloff, not even close. It just wasn't meant to be, wasn't in the cards. So reminding yourself of this yet again you feel a little bit better, at least for the moment, and you tell yourself to remember this moment for the future, not that anything is any different, but knowing that nothing is any different nor could anything ever have been any different, you feel a calming fatalism and your thoughts bend inevitably towards the ice cream in the freezer, the vibrator in the panty-drawer, the delicious languor of an afternoon nap because wallowing in your ignorance is always better than weeping in it.
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