Talk:Bob Perelman/sandbox

Material on individual poetry collections for future expansion
As of 2014, Perelman had published over 15 volumes of poetry. Several of these are discussed below.

Braille
According to Evans, Perelman's first book Braille, published in 1975, is a series of "improvisations" inspired by William Carlos Williams, was published in 1975 and contains "thirty prose pieces of one, two, or three short paragraphs and the thirty-one poems in some kind of stanzaic or open-field form"s. Evans suggests that the title of this work expresses "tactility in language", but also evokes musicality from ordinary language with "messy exuberance and a dazzlingly precise feel for syntactical variations keep the words always a step ahead of the reader's expectation", an attribute that he extends to succeeding works by Perelman. Writing about one of the book's poems, India, Evans describes how the title word expands one character at a time, the typography of which presages the equal signs in the journal, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, starting with:' "First, there is the i-n-d-i-a, which should cohere fairly stably by now, but adding the n makes for a whole set of erosions, indecencies, and unmistakable clues that the namers had imagined themselves in the wrong hemisphere. Then the a, which violates the inexact i-n-d-i-a-n by forming the inexact a-n-a, cousin to the even more tired r-a-m-a, as in f-o-o-d-o-r-a-m-a. The a-n-a implies a leveling of consciousness over a wide area."

7 Works
Evans writes that 7 Works introduces more techniques of "mimicry, citation, and other techniques for embedding source material in the poetic text" that become part of his poetic repertory. According to Evans, the first work, "Essay on Style", uses paragraph-length units with a "musical structure" that form a "kaleidoscopic content" in a manner that engenders "...proto-Freudian articulation of incestuous longings."

a.k.a
Perelman's 1979 work, a.k.a, has seventeen pages with 34 prose paragraphs contain sentences that are "short, crisp, quasi-declarative," according to Evans. and they seemed at the time of their publication to illustrate a whole new way of approaching prose poetry, one that would build from while transforming the path broken by Gertrude Stein and Williams. Ron Silliman used excerpts from this work in his September 1979 "New Sentence" talk on the language-centered movement. This critique of Perelman's reportedly influenced how others have interpreted his work. Hejinian also cites the opening paragraph of a.k.a. to highlight its "dreamy" qualities that, for her, arise from the "resonant relationship between the moment to moment (or word to word) unfolding of the particulars in ... the whole that they ultimately comprise."

Primer
Evans describes Perelman's 1981 book, Primer, breaking from "collage-based prose and nonstanzaic poetry of 7 Works" to the "exclusive use of stanza forms." For Evans, the title evokes several meanings: a pedagogical work, a gray base coat of paint, and the material used to initiate an explosion. Important poems include: "My One Voice," "Trainee," "Room," "China," and "History." In writing about this collection, Al Philreis senses that Perelman addresses the "slowness of acquiring knowledge" and puts forward such notions as "the modernist notion of entering history naked" and "the conception of a poem that it can move the heavy box." He quotes Perelman that “political theory can explain everything but history.”

To the Reader
Perelman's 1984 book, To the Reader, uses stanza forms to evoke "images of refugees, terrorists, illegal aliens, military operations, death squads, interrogations, hostages, Nazi eugenics, nuclear weapons and 'strategic materials,' the Pentagon . . ., Grenada, Southeast Asia, Central America, and such domestic sightings as Toys R Us, 'sex manuals, Christmas decorations,' and second mortgages." according to Evans. Evans cites Benjamin Friedlander as condensing the books thesis "that war, commerce, and patriarchy are the products of a furiously misspent sexuality." In this book Evans finds the "social urgency of a dissident broadcaster temporarily in control of the airwaves. He suggests that "one finds the elements of scathing critique, theatrical asides, ... frenzied self-references, and an overall commitment to giving social fact oratorical form" in this work. Nada Gordon, writing on To the Reader, expresses interest in the fact that Perelman renders what is ethical through speech-based, author-centered verse, a reversal of the ethos of the Language poets.

Face Value
In the opening poem, “The Story of My Life”, in his 1988 book, Face Value, Perelman turns his readers into a “committee of my words” to "argue out the matter of taste" for a world in flux and a war suggested by a “mushroom-like military sump-pump,” according to Al Filreis, who infers that the author is searching for "poetry’s social or pedagogical impact." Kristen Gallagher finds this same poem to show us "how identity is constructed by social and economic forces...." It becomes a "nebulous category, an idea that enters the mind through a series of through societal graphs, mechanisms that reproduce the ideology of the individual over the collective, from the languages of the [media], to 'the president’s language' and that of the free market." Neil Roberts agrees that "Story of My Life" addresses the inherent tension between the freedom of the individual and the democratic collective needs of the society at large.

The First World
A reviewer of Perelman's 1986 book, The First World, Michael Davidson suggested that its title refers both to "the political economies of capitalist institutions" and to "our Edenic childhood....before the body became a fetish object of drives and fixations." The work contains many references to "body", modified in various manners, as "motifs to weave together the poems in the book, uniting them thematically into a complex whole." Evans reports that Perelman recasts art historian and philosopher, Ernest Fenollosa and philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, as graffiti writers, who stage "stealthy battles for public utterance in urinals."

The Future of Memory
Klobucar reports that Perelman’s 1998 collection, The Future of Memory, continues a tradition form the late 19th century continued to explore how formal constraints might aesthetically enhance meaning, through such devices as, "vocabulary, sentence mechanics, visual representation, etc." He cites Stephan Mallarmé, Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofsky, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams as forerunners of Language school aesthetics. Filreis found this to be most perspicacious understanding of the end of the first Cold War (the early 1960s) I have yet read in any genre. This work presents an analysis-in-verse that convincingly links crazy characterizations of anticommunist conspiracies to a generationally earlier history of the rise and later demise of the modernist revolution.

Iflife
Rae Armantrout writes of Pereleman's 2009 book, Iflife, that it addresses the "bad dads of poetic history," especially Ezra Pound. Here he uses tenses as a force to be reckoned with, as they represent timewhere "the long march to the Present still looms before a grammatical Sisyphus. Other bad dads include "Oedipus Rex" and Dick Cheney (in "Against Shock and Awe," which speaks of an involuntary choice" to live in Cheney’s mind). The poem "Autobiography by Aphorism" talks about a father, trying to explain castration to his son, who wants him "to sit still for a second, not squirm, not plug your ears… ” She sees this as the past (in the form of history or the father, threatening the present and present tense with castration, while promising the future and future tense a good outcome, if it behaves.

In his paper, “The New and its Reproductive Practices,” and talks about "orthopraxy," which reproduces the truth of a sacred experience, to “orthodoxy,” which attempts to convey such a truth through ritual.