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Summary: Perloff captures Wittgenstein's poetic insights.
Review: Anyone interested in either Wittgenstein or poetry should read this book. It does a remarkably good job of both philosophical and literary analysis, making the case that poetry, like philosophy as conceived by Wittgenstein, embodies the curious collision of the mystical with the mundane which best demonstrates the limits of language. Tightly reasoned and methodical, the book explains why Wittgenstein has had so much influence on aesthetic and ethical projects of the Twentieth Century, and suggests why that will continue. "The pursuit of the ordinary may well be the most interesting game in town."
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Summary: the ordinariness of perloff's thinking
Review: i've been consistently disappoint with perloff: her writing merely confirms the opinion one might hold after a first reading. these are not extraodinary thoughts if you please. in term of ladder drill's deleuzian musings (poor fellow, procrastinating grad student) perhaps uni and bivalence should be replaced by wittgenstein's own contextual emphasis: a polyvalence which exists fully in pragmatic usage but is institutionalized (territorialized) as stagnant grammatical catergories, which 'poetic' usage then transgresses (master-slave, deterritorialization whatever). in terms of repetition and institutionalization, i think any serious thinking through poetic site needs a more thorough model of meaning/signification that acknowledges speech, where reiteration is polyvalent simultaneously with its capacity for univalent recognition within official discourses. whether we'd like to think this through with simple shifters, wittgenstein's pattern of substitution, or a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is your choice... the simplification of communication/language/speech/whatever into ordinary/poetic doesn't even start to do the question justice.(as some people's idiolectical adoption testifies to quite nicely) cheers.
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Summary: The range and reach, again, is amazing per se.
Review: The range and reach of M Perloff, again, is amazing per se in this helpful book on language forms and social poetics, but more than that her lifelong work has proven her to be the rightful heir to Jack Spicer and Josephine Miles as the "genuis loci" of westcoast multi-lingual US poetics. In that sense, she can said to be preserving US poesy from the forms and formulae of Yvor Winters and his school of moral prosody and common sense thinking. We need Marjorie Perloff to write like we need the air, light, and sun over the Hudson River valley. But the stables of "official verse culture" are full of lyric manure, and the job of building a different vision of US cultural poetics and lyric poesy is endless. Stein, Wiggenstein, and Perloff bring tools that help in the struggle in Hawai'i, or Amherst, or anywhere USA.
Rating: 
Summary: An Easy Climb
Review: This is an engaging, down-to-earth book about the connections between Wittgenstein's aphoristic philosophy and some of the 20th-century writers who've followed his lead up the 'ladder of the ordinary.' Perloff's at her best with the close readings of difficult writers like Stein, Beckett and Creeley, who magically flower into comprehensibility under her sharp attention and good sense. The authors she chooses to illustrate Wittgenstein's influence seemed a little arbitrary to me though. She admits that Beckett and Stein didn't read Wittgenstein, and that Wittgenstein would probably have disliked their art. So why put them 'under his sign'? It makes more sense to me to see Wittgenstein as part of a wider generation who felt dissatisfied with the pre-war language they'd inherited. With later poets like Silliman and Waldrop, who explicitly cite Wittgenstein's writings as an inspiration, I think Perloff misses what separates them from Wittgenstein: he had no earlier model to cite. Wittgenstein's faith in ordinary language led to a manner of writing and thinking that was largely self-sufficient--an interested reader can dive right in and think through the problems for herself. His more allusive postmodern heirs rely to a large extent on your prior knowledge of texts like Wittgenstein's for their effects. Where Wittgenstein himself struggled to keep his religious and hierarchical values in check through the discipline of ordinary language--concepts like beauty, God and the self seemed to have some meaning for him, you just couldn't talk about those meanings with language--later writers' easy acceptance of notions like a language game, the 'constructed self' and the fundamental indeterminacy of language seems to drain some of the drama from their writing. You don't feel the same struggle (or modesty) that you sense in Wittgenstein's open, user-friendly illustrations. Describing one of his poems, Ron Silliman writes: "Every sentence is supposed to remind the reader of his or her inability to respond." I can't imagine Wittgenstein saying something like that. Still, the book is an interesting take on Wittgenstein and the poetic he unwittingly inspired. Well worth reading.
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Summary: Ladder Drills
Review: While I found myself largely indifferent to Marjorie Perloff's Wittgenstein's Ladder, it did prompt me to ask a particular question: Can one plausibly conclude that there is a certain reflexive property to language as it is used in both ordinary and poetic modes? That is, if it is the case, as Perloff argues, that the poetic use of ordinary language estranges one from its mundanity, is the reverse also true? Does the poetic use of language estrange one from ordinary use? Is it possible that a singular attention to the practical/utilitarian value of language effectively render one purblind to its inherent strangeness, which poetic use brings to the fore? I found this to be the fundamental concern of her work, although it appears that, in the absence of any definitive conclusion concerning the preeminence of ordinary language and the parasitism of poetical language upon it (or vice versa), Perloff maintains that the distinction is ultimately a matter of preference.
To see the above uncertainty regarding the relative primacy of ordinary language over poetic language (or vice versa), as Perloff does, is to accept this uncertainty as constitutive of the inherently aporetic nature of language, particularly semantics. In other words, prior to, during, and long after its instantiation within a given utterance, every word possesses a bivalent potentiality: a certain equal "suitability" toward either ordinary or poetic usage. Thus a word's semantic value within a particular utterance is ultimately a matter of divining the strategy of the speaker in employing that word. This problem, becomes a problem of other minds, then, and not a problem of language. However, I wonder if it is possible return the problem to one of language itself. In the interest of so doing, I offer the following hypothesis: Instead of ascribing to a word a particular semiological bivalency, one should regard a word as essentially univalent, and that singular valence is its ordinary signification. Poetic use thus becomes not a particular mode of employment but a method of destruction, specifically the destruction of ordinary, singular semantic value. Thus what one sees in poetry is not the quantum movement of semantic value from one valence to another, but the ordinary semantic value of a word at its point of obliteration.
I realize of course that this hypothesis is completely debatable, yet I believe that it might be useful, if treated provisionally. I do not claim that the univalent nature of a word is a transcendental, a-historical cohesion of sign, signifier and signified; rather, the univalent nature of a word emerges from a statistical aggregate of repeated usage, which later becomes conventionally and institutionally recognized. This evolution transpires over time, and thus the univalent semantic value is also bound up in time; the value resolves and dissolves, and in the interim achieves a relative fixity for a particular duration, which emerges from a complex interaction of "bottom-up" decentralized self-organization and "top-down" strategic intervention. Absolutely essential to the hypothesis above is a certain epistemological adjustment: i.e., instead of seeing the semantic value as "fixed," one must regard it as in a state of deceleration asymptotically approaching zero velocity, which thus gives the impression of fixity. Statistical aggregation around a mean usage invites a normative assessment, which later becomes conventional-cum-institutional usage, at the level of analysis of the latter, the sign becomes fixed-it reaches it velocity asymptotically closest to zero-and thus becomes "fixed" for a time. Therefore, if the speaker's use of the word is contemporaneous with the institutional semantic univalence of the word, and if the speaker employs this word with no pretense to poetic expression, then the word's significance is univalent. For instance, my ordinary use of the word "software" in a conversation with a member of technical support at Apple Computers is quite unambiguous, because I exist at a time when the word "software'-a word that has only recently "shed" its neologistic "skin"-is an institutional signifier denoting a particular signified: the body of code that enables my computer to perform certain functions.
A word's poetic usage, then, does not exist a priori as an alternative semantic potentiality; rather, poetic use indicates a point of intervention where a countersignifying force is applied to the word, which accelerates it so violently and abruptly that the instantaneous increase of momentum gained by the word obliterates the assemblages appended to it by the abstract machine. Therefore, the aporia instantiated by poetic usage is none other than that word's deterritorialization as a result of the countersignifying violence done to it. However, every deterritorialization of a sign is followed by its reterritorialization. Analysis of a sign's poetic usage thus becomes a matter of locating/discovering "the site" of its reterritorialization.
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