Perloff taught at Catholic University from 1966 to 1971. She then moved on to become Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California and Stanford University. She then became Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of Humanities at Stanford. She is currently scholar-in-residence and Florence Scott Professor of English Emerita at the University of Southern California. Her work has been especially concerned with explicating the writing of experimental and avant-garde poets and relating it to the major currents of modernist and, especially, postmodernist activity in the arts, including the visual arts and literary theory. The first three books published by Perloff each focused on different poets: Yeats, Robert Lowell, and Frank O'Hara respectively. In 1981, she changed directions with The Poetics of Indeterminacy, which began her work on the avant-garde, paving the way for The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture in 1986 and many subsequent titles. Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy, published in 2004, won the Robert Penn Warren Prize in 2005 as well as Honorable Mention for the Robert Motherwell Prize of the Dedalus Foundation. Perloff has done much to promote poetics that are not normally part of the discourse in the United States such as works of Louis Zukofsky, Kenneth Goldsmith, or Brazilian poetry. She is credited with coining the term — "unoriginal genius" — to reflect on the changing nature of literary writing including poetry in the Internet age after artistic originality and creativity were allegedly replaced by the ability to pass along information. Her work on contemporary American poetry and in particular poetry associated with the avant-garde has significantly opened up the "Official Verse Culture" to critique and dialogue from outside the classroom and lecture hall: even as poetry in the U.S. today continues its division between categories like "experimental", "mainstream", and "spoken word". In 2008-09, she was the Weidenfeld Visiting Professor of European Comparative Literature in St Anne's College, Oxford. She is also member of the International Jury of the :hu:Janus Pannonius K%C3%B6lt%C3%A9szeti Nagyd%C3%ADj|Janus Pannonius Grand Prize for Poetry Foundation.
Selected works
Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire
Poetics in a New Key: Interviews and Essays Read .
Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century . Spanish version: El genio no original: Poesía por otros medios en el nuevo siglo
