Modernist Hangover? William Carlos Williams as Bob Perelman’s Poetic Cure

Abstract

This article works through an examination of Bob Perelman’s poems in relation to major Williamsian defining features of the poet, poetic language, and poetics, and asks: Is there a way to recover from a modernist past that has become enshrined and canonized? How to relate to the bewildering inventiveness, as it sometimes walks hand in hand with a stupefying dogmatism? Developing a form of poetic activism over a span of more than fifty years, Perelman has shown growing interest in Williams’s work, the poems and the essays, as possible matrixes for a poetic practice that encompasses the preoccupation with language, the intermedial awareness of the poem’s interactions with the visual, and the ethical commitment to a political and philosophical discourse on the human.