Bob Perelman | |
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![]() Perelman in 2008. | |
Born | |
Nationality | American |
Alma mater | University of Michigan, Iowa Writers' Workshop. University of California at Berkeley |
Occupations | |
Website | https://www.english.upenn.edu/people/bob-perelman |
Bob Perelman (born December 2, 1947) [1] [2] is an American poet, critic, editor, and teacher. He was an early exponent of the Language poets, an avant-garde movement, originating in the 1970s. He has helped shape a "formally adventurous, politically explicit poetic practice in the United States", according to one of his chroniclers. [1] Perelman is professor of English emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. [3]
Robert Lawrence Perelman was born in 1947 to Mark and Evelyn Perelman. His father was a Youngstown, Ohio businessman and his mother had worked as a social worker. He was one of two siblings—a year and a half younger than his sister, Nancy. [1]
He attended the Putney School in Putney, Vermont from 1959, graduating in 1964—in the same class as his sister. Next, he attended the University of Rochester as a prospective concert pianist. There he changed his major from music and focused on his other strength, classical literature, having determined that he did not have a future in music. He then transferred to the University of Michigan to pursue that field in 1966. In 1969, he moved to Iowa City, Iowa to pursue his interest in poetry at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he received a Master of Fine Arts. He returned to Michigan to obtain a Master of Arts in Greek and Latin. He obtained a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. [1]
In 1975 Perelman married then Cambridge, Massachusetts artist, Francie Shaw, after a four-year relationship. [1] They made their home sequentially in Cambridge, Hills, Iowa, San Francisco [1] Philadelphia, Pennsylvania—finally returning to Berkeley, California. [4] They have two sons, born in 1979 and 1983. [2] Shaw's artwork appears in many of his works and he has dedicated each one to her. [1]
Perelman started his teaching career in 1975 with appearances at Hobart College, Northeastern University, and Cambridge Adult Education. [1] Starting in 1990, Perelman received a teaching appointment at the University of Pennsylvania. He made teaching appearances at the University of Iowa, and King's College, London between 1996 and 1998. As of 2014, Perelman was a professor with the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, teaching subjects, including, "Sounding Poetry: Music and Literature", "Topics in Modernism: Poetry and the New Woman", "British Poetry 1660-1914", "Poetics, Writing, Trending: Judgment and its Discontents", "The Sound of Poetry, the Poetry of Sound: from Homer to Langston Hughes", "Whitman and Williams: Contact, Utopia", and "American Poetry". [5]
Perelman was part of a poetic movement in the San Francisco Bay Area ca. 1970, called "Language writing" or "Language poetry", which movement was without a formal organization. Their works diverged from the "norms of persona-centered, 'expressive' poetry". [6] The exponents of the movement, following the lead of such avant-garde writers as Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky, [6] engaged in "experimental modernism" and "avant-garde self-publishing" [7] in what Perelman was quoted as having called the "opposition to the prevailing institutions of American Poetry", and "the still-dominant scenic monolog of the writing workshop". [8] The group was cited as notable for "its sense of purpose, seriousness and demonstrable productivity". [7] Perelman and fellow proponents of this writing movement wrote retrospectively that, "...the self as the central and final term of creative practice is being challenged and exploded in our writing." [6]
One of the Perelman's poems, "China", [9] evoked discussion as a focal point on the merits of Language poetry [10] and received praise from Bruce Boone as being "problematically" beautiful. [11] Frederic Jameson [10] and George Hartley [12] each used a discussion of the poem as an exemplar of Language poetry, Jameson to illustrate the Language poets' adoption of "schizophrenic fragmentation as their fundamental aesthetic" and Hartley to defend Language writing in general. [13]
In 1985 Perelman edited the proceedings of a series of talks by poets from this movement, entitled, Writing/Talks, [14] which included contributions by Alan Davies, Carla Harryman, Barrett Watten, Lyn Hejinian, Robert Grenier, and others. Topics encompassed: writing, politics, popular culture, language, and the human body. [15]
As of 2014, Perelman had published over 15 volumes of poetry. [5] The Dictionary of Literary Biography and Jacket magazine [16] have compiled overviews of Perelman's body of work, Jacket with multiple contributors.
Steve Evans, a 1998 contributor to the Dictionary of Literary Biography, [1] wrote that Perelman had a significant role "in defining a formally adventurous, politically explicit poetic practice in the United States", using "a variety of forms, "from the conventional essay to the dramatic monologue, from the carefully measured units of verse to the giddily hybrid pleasures of all manner of counterfeiture". In Evan's view, Perelman developed a poetry of "radical deconcealment" that searches for the "deep structure of social experience beyond ... postmodernity".
Contributors in a 2002 Jacket magazine feature on Perelman discussed aspects of his work. Alan Golding gave an overview of Perelman’s continuing dialectic between the avant-garde and academia in his body of poetry, subtitled "Pedagogy, Poetics, and Bob Perelman’s Pound", wherein he cast Ezra Pound as a forerunner of Perelman's interest in the pursuit of "poetic learning and poetic knowledge". [17] Lyn Hejinian wrote that "there is no impulse anywhere in Bob Perelman’s writings, critical or poetic, toward totalization. Instead, his imagination plays strange host to an odd form of omniscience, one that doubts its own senses and eschews power." Yet she ascribes to Perelman a scrutiny of the human uses of power through "persuasion, hypocrisy, deceit, and other powers of language; judicial and legislative and corporate ... power; powers of image and information and technology; familial and sexual powers." [18] Andrew Klobucar described Perelman’s poetry as using "dream-work" poetic elements, which "become key factors in the ongoing interplay between symbolic frameworks, ideology and knowledge construction that informs his writing practice." [19] Kit Robinson described the "sense of the sentence as life in fractal" as characteristic of Perelman's work. [20] Nada Gordon wrote that Perelman is a poet of whom a curmudgeon might say, “I don’t like language writing, except for Bob Perelman.” [21]
Joshua Schuster placed Perelman’s poetry into two sets, each tied to a geographic setting and to his avant-garde vs. academic literary environments. One set, stemming from his participation in the San Francisco avant-garde scene addressees "the spread of capitalist realism versus the withering of critical platforms, from the fading utopianism of the 60s, to the inability to sustain class or grass roots activism, to the dilution of the radicalism of desire by the near full invasion of commercialism into all human systems of affect. In most of these poems, the poet is thematized in a largely passive-aggressive manner, barely able to record let alone piece together the conflicts, never able to change the situation." With the other set, pertaining to his Philadelphia and university-based work, Perelman transitions to "creating mixed forms that can engage with writing in the long run, to find out how eras of poetry such as the classics and modernism might repeat and reinvent themselves." [22]
An excerpt from The Marginalization of Poetry [8] gives a sense of Perelman's approach to writing and thinking about poetry, as it combines historical reference with literary analysis and criticism—in real time, of the very poem that one is reading—using structured free verse delivered with humor and irony, first to question, then to hint, and finally to assert that the piece is a poem: [23]
it's hard to think of any
poem where the word "marginalization" occurs.It is being used here, but
this may or may not bea poem: the couplets of six
word lines don't establish an audiblerhythm; perhaps they haven't, to use
the Calvinist mercantile metaphor, "earned" theirright to exist in their present
form—is this a line breakor am I simply chopping up
ineradicable prose? But to defend this(poem) from its own attack, I'll
say that both the flush leftand irregular right margins constantly loom
as significant events, often interrupting whatI thought I was about to
write and making me write somethingelse entirely. Even though I'm going
back and rewriting, the problem stillreappears every six words. So this,
and every poem, is a marginalwork in a quite literal sense.
Perelman wrote two works of literary criticism in book form, The Trouble with Genius, which examines the antecedents of the Language writing movement, and The Marginalization of Poetry, which comments in verse form on the history and historiography of that movement. According to Lilley, Language writers were "assemblages of young, experimental, left-identified writers, ... , [who] were motivated by what Perelman calls ’opposition to the prevailing institutions of American Poetry’" and took up the "tradition of experimental modernism and avant-garde self-publishing", neglected by academia. [7]
Perelman's 1994 book, The Trouble with Genius, [24] is a literary critique of his modernist forerunners, Pound, Joyce, Stein and Zukofsky. Al Filreis suggests that the book is primarily about how to reconcile the populist dimension of their works with the lack of accessibility of their poetics, owing to arcane historical references and opaque styles of writing. He suggests that Perelman has overcome this contradiction in his own writing, despite his efforts to maintain the high standard of his antecedents. Filreis cites “History is not a sentence” to portray Perelman looking back "in order to remind himself that the present, both required and sufficient, is only right there in the writing". He cites the poem “Movie", which describes a tessellation of history, including Nixon, Vietnam, Nicaragua, the Revolution of 1848, the Bastille, through the Reagan era, including the Iran-Contra saga of Oliver North. [15] Steven Helming reported that Perelman spontaneously and wittily answers to the "surprises and quirks of difficult texts" of the authors studied, which discussion pairs Édouard Manet with Franz Kline, Ezra Pound with Theodor Adorno, Igor Stravinsky with John Dos Passos, Federico Fellini with Le Corbusier, and Vladimir Lenin with Dizzy Gillespie. Perelman demonstrates how literary criticism is akin to a paper/rock/scissors game, i.e. "poet beats critic"/"critic finds flaws in theoretical writing"/"theory subsumes any specific writing." In doing so, Perelman brings fresh perspective to criticism of Modernist writing, according to Helming. [25]
Perelman explained of his 1996 versified critique and guide to the Language poetry movement, The Marginalization of Poetry, [8] that he was addressing academics, poets, and those unfamiliar with Language writing and that he "wanted to write criticism that was poetry and poetry that was criticism". [26] Ron Silliman wrote that the book uses the tools of Language writing to portray that very subject and demonstrates that Language writers "do not, and never intended to, 'say the same thing'". [23] Filreis admired Perelman's historiography in the verse, but suggested (along with Silliman [23] ) that Perelman’s move from avant-garde culture to academia had affected his perspective on the history of Language writing with this book. [15] Peter Middleton supported this thesis with the observation the book was published by a major academic press, Princeton University Press in part to gain tenure as a professor, rather than one of the small, alternative presses of his earlier works. Middleton highlighted Perelman's concern that academic literary criticism marginalizes poetry in its "practices of theorising and curating literature". [27] Perelman responded to the issue of whether he was somehow compromised by his move into an academic environment, when he wrote: [26]
Where did our passion for poetry come from? The page? Created by purely visual epiphany in a kind of unpedagogic, virgin birth? I am very very far from being in love with normative, gatekeeping academic criticism; but pedagogy, repetition and circulation are very widespread structuring conditions against which to act—both as writer and as imaginer of receivers. We all started somewhere well behind the starting line.
Imagism was a movement in early-20th-century poetry that favored precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. It is considered to be the first organized modernist literary movement in the English language. Imagism has been termed "a succession of creative moments" rather than a continuous or sustained period of development. The French academic René Taupin remarked that "it is more accurate to consider Imagism not as a doctrine, nor even as a poetic school, but as the association of a few poets who were for a certain time in agreement on a small number of important principles".
Modernist poetry in English started in the early years of the 20th century with the appearance of the Imagists. Like other modernists, Imagist poets wrote in reaction to the perceived excesses of Victorian poetry, and its emphasis on traditional formalism and ornate diction.
Louis Zukofsky was an American poet. He was the primary instigator and theorist of the so-called "Objectivist" poets, a short lived collective of poets who after several decades of obscurity would reemerge around 1960 and become a significant influence on subsequent generations of poets in America and abroad.
The Objectivist poets were a loose-knit group of second-generation Modernists who emerged in the 1930s. They were mainly American and were influenced by, among others, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. The basic tenets of objectivist poetics as defined by Louis Zukofsky were to treat the poem as an object, and to emphasize sincerity, intelligence, and the poet's ability to look clearly at the world. While the name of the group is similar to Ayn Rand's school of philosophy, the two movements are not affiliated.
Lorine Faith Niedecker was an American poet. Her poetry is known for its spareness, its focus on the natural landscapes of Wisconsin and the Upper Midwest, its philosophical materialism, its mise-en-page experimentation, and its surrealism. She is regarded as a major figure in the history of American regional poetry, the Objectivist poetic movement, and the mid-20th-century American poetic avant-garde.
The Language poets are an avant-garde group or tendency in United States poetry that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The poets included: Bernadette Mayer, Leslie Scalapino, Stephen Rodefer, Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten, Lyn Hejinian, Tom Mandel, Bob Perelman, Rae Armantrout, Alan Davies, Carla Harryman, Clark Coolidge, Hannah Weiner, Susan Howe, James Sherry, and Tina Darragh.
Lyn Hejinian was an American poet, essayist, translator, and publisher. She is often associated with the Language poets and is known for her landmark work My Life, as well as her book of essays, The Language of Inquiry.
Rae Armantrout is an American poet generally associated with the Language poets. She has published more than two dozen books, including poetry and prose.
American poetry refers to the poetry of the United States. It arose first as efforts by American colonists to add their voices to English poetry in the 17th century, well before the constitutional unification of the Thirteen Colonies. Most of the early colonists' work was similar to contemporary English models of poetic form, diction, and theme. However, in the 19th century, an American idiom began to emerge. By the later part of that century, poets like Walt Whitman were winning an enthusiastic audience abroad and had joined the English-language avant-garde.
Ron Silliman is an American poet. He has written and edited over 30 books, and has had his poetry and criticism translated into 12 languages. He is often associated with language poetry. Between 1979 and 2004, Silliman wrote a single poem, The Alphabet. He has now begun writing a new poem, Universe, the first section of which appears to be called Revelator.
Marjorie Perloff was an Austrian-born American poetry scholar and critic, known for her study of avant-garde poetry.
Barrett Watten is an American poet, editor, and educator often associated with the Language poets. He is a professor of English at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan where he has taught modernism and cultural studies. Other areas of research include postmodern culture and American literature; poetics; literary and cultural theory; visual studies; the avant-garde; and digital literature.
Michael Davidson is an American poet.
Rachel Blau DuPlessis is an American poet and essayist, known as a feminist critic and scholar with a special interest in modernist and contemporary poetry. Her work has been widely anthologized.
David Melnick (1938–2022) was a gay avant-garde American poet. He was born in Illinois and grew up in Los Angeles, California. He attended the University of Chicago and University of California, Berkeley.
Michael Heller, is an American poet, essayist and critic. Among his many books are Exigent Futures, In The Builded Place, Wordflow and Living Root: A Memoir. He wrote the libretto for the opera, Benjamin, based on the life of Walter Benjamin. He is recipient of awards including the NEH Poet/Scholar grant, New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship (NYFA), National Endowment for the Humanities award, and The Fund for Poetry.
Al Filreis is the Kelly Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, Faculty Director of the Kelly Writers House, and Director of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. With Charles Bernstein, he founded PennSound in 2003; PennSound is a large archive of recordings of poets reading their own poetry. Filreis is also publisher of Jacket2 magazine and host of a monthly podcast series called "PoemTalk", a collaboration with the Poetry Foundation. Among his books are Stevens and the Actual World, Modernism from Right to Left, and Counter-revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945-1960.
PennSound is a poetry website and online archive that hosts free and downloadable recordings of poets reading their own work. The website offers over 1500 full-length and single-poem recordings, the largest collection of poetry sound-files on the internet, all of which are available free for download. PennSound is codirected by Al Filreis and Charles Bernstein. It is a project of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania.
Erica Hunt is an American poet, essayist, teacher, and organizer from New York City. She is often associated with the group of Language poets from her days living in San Francisco in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but her work is also considered central to the avant garde black aesthetic developing after the Civil Rights Movement and Black Arts Movement. Through the 1990s and 2000s, Hunt worked with several non-profits that encourage black philanthropy for black communities and causes. From 1999 to 2010, she was executive director of the 21st Century Foundation located in Harlem. Currently, she is writing and teaching at Wesleyan University.