She coined the term "unoriginal genius" to reflect the desire of some contemporary poets to create poetry by using other people's words and constraint-based practices rather than inspiration or other personal sources.
[1] The annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany exacerbated Viennese antisemitism, and so the family emigrated in 1938, when she was six-and-a-half, going first to Zürich and then to the United States, settling in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, where she attended the Ethical Culture Fieldston School.
[1] According to Adam Kirsch, "Perloff can be counted as perhaps the youngest of the great wave of European Jewish intellectual refugees who immeasurably enriched American culture.
In 1981, she changed directions with The Poetics of Indeterminacy, which began her work on avant-gardist poetry, paving the way for The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture in 1986 and many subsequent titles.
She was credited with coining the term — "unoriginal genius" — to reflect the interest of some contemporary poets in generating their work by citational and constraint-based practices rather than inspiration or other personal sources.
[12] In 2001, she gave the British Academy's Sarah Tryphena Phillips Lecture in American Literature and History, on Gertrude Stein's Differential Syntax.