Marjorie Perloff is the Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of Humanities Emerita at Stanford University and the Florence R. Scott Professor of English Emerita at the University of Southern California. She is the author of many books on poetry, including Radical Artifice, Wittgenstein's Ladder, and Unoriginal Genius.

• List of FiguresPreface                                                                                                              A Note on Scansion and Notation                                                                    Introduction: Toward an Infrathin Reading/Writing Practice                                               1          “A Rose Is a Rose Is a Rrose Sélavy”: Stein, Duchamp, and the “Illegible” Portrait2          Eliot’s Auditory Imagination: A Rehearsal for Concrete Poetry                   3          Reading the Verses Backward: The Invention of Pound’s Canto Page               4          Word Frequencies and Zero Zones: Wallace Stevens’s Rock, Susan Howe’s Quarry5          “A Wave of Detours”: From John Ashbery to Charles Bernstein and Rae Armantrout         6          The Trembling of the Veil: Poeticity in Beckett’s “Text-Soundings”                    7          From Beckett to Yeats: The Paragrammatic Potential of “Traditional” Verse     Acknowledgments                                                                                               Notes                                                                                                               Index

“What is the difference between attending a botany seminar and immersing oneself in the forest in the company of a guide who passionately knows their flora and fauna? This is what one discovers by reading Perloff's Infrathin, an irresistible tour through the work of some of the main artisans of modernist and contemporary poetry, under the prism of an unusual mentor: Marcel Duchamp. A gift for lovers of the genre and a must-read for poets.”