Rolling Obituary Thread 2024

She was an apologist for racism in the academy, implied during a panel discussion that I attended that Mexican people were more apt to molest their children, was a virulent Zionist, etc. She was, by many accounts, one of the most poisonous elements haunting American poetry of the last 50 years. Spare me your handwringing and snide commentary around a subject you know little to nothing about, it seems

You are a ghoul

I know as much or more than you about poetry anyway, so take your subject specialist elitism out to the garbage disposal and let it rot

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet-books/2015/12/at-entropy-jen-hofer-comments-on-marjorie-perloffs-recent-public-remarks

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-program-era-and-the-mainly-white-room

Marjorie Perloff, preeminent critic and academic gatekeeper of avant-garde poetry, has on numerous occasions shared her distaste for identity politics literature. Here is an excerpt she wrote for the MLA newsletter:

“Under the rubrics of African American, other minorities, and post-colonial a lot of important and exciting novels and poems are surely studied. But what about what is not studied? Suppose a student wants to study James Joyce or Gertrude Stein? Virginia Woolf or T.E. Lawrence or George Orwell? William Faulkner or Frank O’Hara? The literature of World Wars I and II? The Great Depression? The impact of technology on poetry and fiction? Modernism? Existentialism? What of the student who has a passionate interest in her or his literary world—a world that encompasses the digital as well as print culture but does not necessarily differentiate between the writings of one subculture or one theoretical orientation and another? Where do such prospective students turn?”

I found this excerpt in the scholar Dorothy Wang’s excellent book, Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry. Wang notices that in this excerpt, Perloff immediately sets up a kind of “us vs. them” opposition, which is of course a favored rhetorical tool used by avant-garde schools in the past from Futurists and Dadaists to Language School poets. Avant-garde manifestos have always assumed a tone of masculine and expansionist militancy, enforcing an aggressive divide-and-conquer framework to grab the reader’s attention. Of course, this “us vs. them” rhetoric can be used to an exhilarating effect when there is a revolutionary legitimacy to that opposition, when “we” are the rabble-rousing outliers and “they” are the hegemonic majority. But Perloff sets up an opposition that’s far more disconcerting: oddly, the hegemony has become the nameless hordes of “African Americans, other minorities, and post-colonials” while “us,” those victimized students who are searching for endangered “true” literature (read as "white") are the outliers (since when has Ulysses taken a nose-dive from the canon’s summit down to the rare-and-hard-to-find-books list?).

From her Boston Review essay "Poetry on the Brink" where she lambasts Rita Dove, to countless other instances, Perloff has persistently set up these racially encoded oppositions and the sentiment is always the same: these indistinguishable minority writers with their soft, mediocre poetry and fiction are taking over our literature. How is this advocate of experimental poetry any different from the icon of literary conservatism, Harold Bloom, who once declared that writers like Sherman Alexie are "enemies of the aesthetic who are in the act of overwhelming us?" Although Perloff has made these misguided observations for years, no one has taken her to task for it until recently, as if poets in the experimental community, afraid to fall from her good graces, look away as one looks away during Thanksgiving dinner when an aunt might complain how "those people" are driving down the property value of "our neighborhood."

https://shc.stanford.edu/arcade/interventions/delusions-whiteness-avant-garde

uh

Call me whatever names you like, Keyes. Perloff was still a racist and negative force in American letters. Good riddance.

yeah, there are some racist and/or embarrassing sentiments from a lot of aging experimental writers about the rise of identity politics in literature. I read Perloff's writing in the 90s, before a lot of these quotes came along.

I disagree she was a negative force in American letters. And I will call you names when you stink up the obituary thread with your uncontrollable spite.

I own the 1998 Best of American Poetry where Harold Bloom denounces the Adrienne Rich-edited 1996 volume for containing poetry "of a badness not to be believed" because Rich included poems by female innmates and other non-professionals.

Didn’t know it was illegal to study Virginia Woolf

Bloom probably also hated the writing that Perloff championed

Oh no, I called a racist a racist and Keyes is upset about it!

Tell us your opinion on Rita Dove table.

Or does she somehow fall outside your usual category of "mediocre" establishment approved writers?

You can call people racist until your fingers blister. This kind of shit doesn't belong here imo though: "Some would say that was 92 years too long, and I would tend to agree." It's pure bile and you can fuck right off with it.

I don’t know her work very well, to be honest! I’ve only read one of her books (Museum) and liked it well enough. One of my mentors loves her work, but we spent more time reading local poets (Sonia Sanchez and Ursula Rucker) than on Dove’s work

Darren Ellis aka Splash RIP

all time classic

Shit, missed this. Few tunes captured so perfectly the balance of everything that scene represented at the time.

Keyes, sorry for opining on the Obit thread— you are perhaps right that I was too harsh. I could have simply left it at “controversial critic Marjorie Perloff” or something to that degree.

That said, check out the receipts from above and I think your opinion about her might be changed— the moment during the Rethinking Poetics conference left the room speechless, the bald racism was so shocking.

Sorry for popping off.

Coincidentally I guess, when I was reading Perloff I was in class with the Jen Hofer from the link you posted.

Jen and I have only met a few times— she once gave a bilingual reading with Mexican poet Dolores Dorantes, whom she translates, that was among the most intense and memorable readings I have ever attended. You could hear a pin drop by the end.

Jen is a dear friend and neighbor, and also the person i was referencing in my last post lol

Cool!

Richard Serra, 85

RIP. Can only imagine the headstone.

RIP! I have enjoyed a number of Serra installations.

Loved his work. Have at least 3 or 4 photos of myself standing in front of his pieces; I use them for author photos and on LinkedIn and whatnot.

Yeah, my favorite of those associated with capital-M Minimalism

The Times obituary (gift link) finds several graceful ways to discuss the fact that he was a huge asshole.

That Chuck Close quote.

To be fair, his work doesn't make me think "This guy is probably super fun."

have always liked his film/video work from the 70s - thought about this one a lot at the onset of covid when zoom calls started to become ubiquitous

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8z32JTnRrHc

as much as i want to hate big dick work by grumps i can't deny richard serra. he was the real deal as they say. that picture of tilted arc in the times obit is so damn cool. his drawings were awesome too.

https://assets.phillips.com/image/upload/t_Website_LotDetailMainImage/v1/auctions/UK010721/158693_001.jpg

Big Dick Work by Grumps is actually one of the most underrated albums of 1996.

Daniel Kahneman, of Thinking Fast and Slow, 90.

Joe Lieberman

Are we allowed to say anything bad about this guy then?

"He hated healthcare until the end"

(He died from "complications from a fall")

Go ape on this clown

He was great on ALF...

No more Joementum
Was hoping for Joementia

At least he lived long enough to enjoy the genocide

Eric Morecambe's widow, Joan.

i'm kinda glad i never need to hear that slow-ass voice again. ugh. not a fan.

Alas, no more Joementum

https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2024/03/27/joe-lieberman-senator-vice-president-dead/

He died again.

Not to be weird, since it’s not a person, but RIP to Small Press Distribution, the longest-running distributor of independent presses in the US. 55 years. A real loss to the literary world.

Just in time to impact the release of my wife's second book. It's been very frustrating.

and my fourth, the one about nearly dying of cancer. i am furious