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

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.