Bob Perelman

Bob Perelman (born December 2, 1947) is an American poet, critic, editor, and teacher.

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.

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.

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.

Perelman is professor of English emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania.

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".

The exponents of the movement, following the lead of such avant-garde writers as Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky, engaged in "experimental modernism" and "avant-garde self-publishing" 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".

The group was cited as notable for "its sense of purpose, seriousness and demonstrable productivity".

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."

One of the Perelman's poems, "China", evoked discussion as a focal point on the merits of Language poetry and received praise from Bruce Boone as being "problematically" beautiful.

Frederic Jameson and George Hartley 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.

In 1975 Perelman married then Cambridge, Massachusetts artist, Francie Shaw, after a four-year relationship.

They made their home sequentially in Cambridge, Hills, Iowa, San Francisco Philadelphia, Pennsylvania—finally returning to Berkeley, California.

Perelman started his teaching career in 1975 with appearances at Hobart College, Northeastern University, and Cambridge Adult Education.

They have two sons, born in 1979 and 1983.

Shaw's artwork appears in many of his works and he has dedicated each one to her.

In 1985 Perelman edited the proceedings of a series of talks by poets from this movement, entitled, Writing/Talks, 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.

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.

Steve Evans, a 1998 contributor to the Dictionary of Literary Biography, 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".

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."

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."

Kit Robinson described the "sense of the sentence as life in fractal" as characteristic of Perelman's work.

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".

As of 2014, Perelman had published over 15 volumes of poetry.

The Dictionary of Literary Biography and Jacket magazine have compiled overviews of Perelman's body of work, Jacket with multiple contributors.