Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction: Toward an Infrathin Reading/Writing Practice -- "A Rose Is a Rose Is a Rrose Sélavy": Stein, Duchamp, and the "Illegible" Portrait -- Eliot's Auditory Imagination: A Rehearsal for Concrete Poetry -- Reading the Verses Backward: The Invention of Pound's Canto Page -- Word Frequencies and Zero Zones: Wallace Stevens's Rock, Susan Howe's Quarry -- "A Wave of Detours": From John Ashbery to Charles Bernstein and Rae Armantrout -- The Trembling of the Veil: Poeticity in Beckett's "Text-Soundings" -- From Beckett to Yeats: The Paragrammatic Potential of "Traditional" Verse.

"The "infrathin" was Marcel Duchamp's name for the thinnest shade of difference: that between, say, the report of a gunshot and the appearance of the bullet hole on its target, or between two objects in a series made from the same mold. In this book, the esteemed literary critic Marjorie Perloff shows how such differences occur at the level of words and argues that it is this infrathin space, this micropoetics of language, that separates poetry from prose. Perloff treats the relationship between Duchamp and Gertrude Stein; ranges over Concrete, Objectivist, and Black Mountain poetry; and gives stunning readings of poets from Eliot, Yeats, and Pound to Samuel Beckett, John Ashbery, and Rae Armantrout. Poetry, Perloff shows us, exists in the play of the infrathin, and it is the poet's role to create unexpected relationships-verbal, visual, and sonic-from the finest nuances of language"--