Bob Perelman facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Bob Perelman
Perelman in 2008.
Born	(1947-12-02) December 2, 1947 (age 77) Youngstown, Ohio
Nationality	American
Alma mater	University of Michigan, Iowa Writers' Workshop. University of California at Berkeley
Occupation	Poet literary critic professor

Bob Perelman (born December 2, 1947) is an American poet, critic, editor, and teacher. He was one of the first members of the Language poets, a new and experimental writing group that started in the 1970s. He helped create a "bold and politically clear way of writing poetry in the United States." Perelman is now a retired professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.

Personal Life

Robert Lawrence Perelman was born in 1947. His father, Mark, was a businessman, and his mother, Evelyn, was a social worker. He has an older sister named Nancy.

He went to the Putney School in Vermont and graduated in 1964. At first, he studied music at the University of Rochester, hoping to become a concert pianist. But he decided music wasn't for him. He then changed his focus to classical literature. In 1966, he moved to the University of Michigan to continue his studies.

In 1969, he moved to Iowa to study poetry at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He earned a Master of Fine Arts degree there. Later, he returned to Michigan for another Master's degree in Greek and Latin. He also earned a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley.

In 1975, Perelman married Francie Shaw, an artist. They lived in several cities, including Cambridge, San Francisco, and Philadelphia, before returning to Berkeley, California. They have two sons, born in 1979 and 1983. Francie Shaw's artwork often appears in his books, and he dedicates his works to her.

Career

Perelman started teaching in 1975 at places like Hobart College and Northeastern University. In 1990, he began teaching at the University of Pennsylvania. He also taught at the University of Iowa and King's College, London. At the University of Pennsylvania, he taught many subjects, including "Sounding Poetry: Music and Literature" and "American Poetry."

Language Writing Movement

Around 1970, Perelman was part of a poetry group in San Francisco called "Language writing" or "Language poetry." This group didn't have a formal organization. Their poems were different from "normal" poetry that focused on a single person's feelings.

These poets were inspired by experimental writers like Gertrude Stein. They wanted to challenge the usual ways American poetry was written. Perelman said they were against the "still-dominant scenic monolog of the writing workshop." The group was known for its clear goals and many published works. They believed that the idea of the "self" as the main focus of writing was being questioned and explored in their work.

One of Perelman's poems, "China," caused a lot of discussion about Language poetry. Some critics praised it for being "beautiful" in a challenging way. Others used it to explain how Language poets used "fragmentation" in their art.

In 1985, Perelman edited a book called Writing/Talks. It contained talks by poets from this movement, including Alan Davies and Lyn Hejinian. The topics covered writing, politics, popular culture, language, and the human body.

Poetry

By 2014, Perelman had published over 15 books of poetry. Critics have written about his work in magazines like Jacket.

Steve Evans, a writer for the Dictionary of Literary Biography, said that Perelman played a big role in creating a "bold and politically clear way of writing poetry." He used many different forms, from essays to dramatic monologues. Evans felt that Perelman's poetry tried to uncover the "deep structure of social experience" in modern times.

In a 2002 Jacket magazine feature, other writers discussed Perelman's work. Alan Golding looked at how Perelman's poetry balanced new ideas with academic teaching. He saw Ezra Pound as an early influence on Perelman's interest in "poetic learning."

Lyn Hejinian wrote that Perelman's writings don't try to make everything fit into one big idea. Instead, his imagination explores things in a unique way, even doubting its own senses. She noted that Perelman examines how people use power through "persuasion, hypocrisy, deceit, and other powers of language." Andrew Klobucar described Perelman's poetry as using "dream-like" elements. These elements help connect ideas, beliefs, and knowledge in his writing. Kit Robinson said that Perelman's work often shows "the sense of the sentence as life in fractal" (meaning a complex pattern that repeats itself). Nada Gordon joked that even someone who doesn't like Language writing might say, "I don’t like language writing, except for Bob Perelman."

Joshua Schuster divided Perelman's poetry into two groups, linked to where he lived and his different writing environments (experimental vs. academic). One group, from his time in San Francisco, talks about how capitalism spreads and how it's hard to keep critical ideas alive. These poems often show the poet feeling helpless to change things. The other group, from his time in Philadelphia and at the university, shows Perelman creating new forms of writing. These forms explore how older poetry styles, like classics and modernism, can repeat and reinvent themselves.

Here's a small part from his poem The Marginalization of Poetry. It shows how Perelman combines history, literary analysis, and humor. He questions if what you're reading is even a poem, then hints, and finally says it is:

it's hard to think of any
poem where the word "marginalization" occurs.

It is being used here, but
this may or may not be

a poem: the couplets of six
word lines don't establish an audible

rhythm; perhaps they haven't, to use
the Calvinist mercantile metaphor, "earned" their

right to exist in their present
form—is this a line break

or am I simply chopping up
ineradicable prose? But to defend this

(poem) from its own attack, I'll
say that both the flush left

and irregular right margins constantly loom
as significant events, often interrupting what

I thought I was about to
write and making me write something

else entirely. Even though I'm going
back and rewriting, the problem still

reappears every six words. So this,
and every poem, is a marginal

work in a quite literal sense.

Selected Publications

Non-fiction

• (contributor) The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography. (Detroit, MI: Mode A/This Press, 2006 — ongoing). ISBN: 978-0-9790198-0-7

Other

• Play: The Alps (produced in San Francisco, 1980), published in Hills (Berkeley, CA), 1980.
• Poetry magazine: Hills, nos. 1–9, edited by Perelman (1973–1980).

See also

In Spanish: Bob Perelman para niños