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The Future of Memory
Poetry. Bob Perelman is one of our wittiest poets, but his new book, THE FUTURE OF MEMORY, is as scary as it is funny. It presents the poem itself as doomed human subject in time. The poet is both emblem of Western subjectivity and the very figure of the fool -Rae Armantrout. The absence of theory pulses in my neck, / at least I've thought so, / sitting on the edge of the bed, pulling off my socks. / Break the life-mask of empiricism and, underneath, prophecies / become visible: the death of the past, swaddled in / old jargons of self-expression, those other bodies (Chapter Four). To read this book is to give language a second chance, and second life -Susan Stewart. Active in the Bay Area poetry scene during the 70's and 80's, Bob Perelman moved to Philadelphia in 1990, where he teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.
- GenresPoetry
115 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 1998
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March 18, 2014
[This review was written for a class, which is why it might sound a bit strange. Suffice to say this is amazinggg.]
Bob Perelman loves a good paradox, a fact that is immediately obvious from the title of this collection. The title also indicates the volume’s continuous engagement with problems of temporality and memory as mediated through language. There are some radical experiments with form—see for example “Symmetry of Past and Future” and the section titled “A Piece of Paper” in the poem “Writing in Real Time”—but for the most part, the book gets much of its power from its conventional appearance, with a majority of the poems written in couplets and using plain, everyday language. Even though the subjects of the poems vary greatly, there is a sustained focus on revisionism, of the past and also, somewhat nonsensically, of the present and the future.
“The Manchurian Candidate: A Remake” appears on the surface to be exactly what its title suggests. Perelman’s preoccupation with the effects of the passage of time makes the notion of a remake seem like a perfect object of mediation. The poem develops shot by shot with “directions” for the camera, and also includes some passages of dialogue. While it mentions by name some of the actors and characters of the original movie, the poem shifts violently between different registers and alludes to details that seem completely irrelevant (e.g. Joyce’s Ulysses).
The next poem in the volume, “The Iliad, Continued,” jumps back in time a couple thousand years. It features two stanzas running down the page next to each other, “underlined” by a summary of the events in one section of The Iliad. In the two stanzas, the speaker muses about the significance of leaving the Trojan War. This meditation leads the poem to yoke together the Styx and the Ohio rivers, and then the flow and currents of rivers are linked to lines about the nature of storytelling. Despite the wide historical gulf that separates the two aforementioned poems, both show Perelman’s interest in taking the stuff of the past and revitalizing it through linguistic innovation. Aside from this thematic concern that links the pair, there is also a bit of an associative logic operating in the transition from one to the other, with the reference to Ulysses in the first poem. Much of the book moves like this, barely grabbing onto the next rung of the monkey bars before swinging forward at top speed.
Perelman is not afraid of bombarding the reader with long, multipart poems, but he also understands how to time these giants, both in terms of the poem’s content and also within the context of the book as a whole, so that they don’t feel tedious or excessive. Take for example the 6-part “Fake Dreams.” Each part is dated, starting from January and going all the way to December. The six distinct dates give the illusion of linear time, but by the last section of the poem, they are no longer in chronological order. Other than the fact that all of lines are paired in couplets, there is not much continuity throughout the six parts besides a sense of the surreal. Time is suspended in these six “dreams,” as are logical progression and causality. The speaker has lunch with the Pope in New York, then converses with Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and Marianne Moore in an “avant-garde army”; Robert Lowell asks in a wild mishmash of names, “Can you write better than Sid/Kunitz, Bob Berryman?”
For a collection that is so concerned with temporality, it seems fitting to look closely at the first and last poems to see how they set up this thematic scheme. The title of the first poem in the collection, “Confession,” ironically alludes to the tradition of confessional poetry, the tropes of which are almost immediately subverted. “Aliens have inhabited my aesthetics for/decades. Really since the early 70s,” Perelman cheekily proclaims, the “really” adding an extra punch of false sincerity. (I say “Perelman” instead of “the speaker” because of the ostensibly confessional nature of the poem, though it is clear that this is an invented Perelman, one who speaks in alien tongues.) And thus, we open up on an admission of guilt, as the poem continues on to express the anxieties of a poet who is confused by the uniformity he sees around him in the world of poetry, worrying that the aliens are “screening” his sensations (12-13).
Part of this worry comes from the perception that his memory is failing him—“I remember the words, but I/can’t get back there anymore” (11-12). The “there” dangles unexplained, and it suggests that an attempt to grasp what is “there” in the past is a futile act, that the simple act of recalling events—“that old stuff” (7)—does not mean as much as we may want it to. The typical confessional poem draws on memory, transformed by the present mentality of the poet and/or speaker, as a crucial device for getting to the root of some important emotional truth; Perelman mimics this move, but does so in a way so as to undermine the underlying assumption about the value and accuracy of looking back for established truth and looking around in the present for guidance of where to go next. As the first poem in the book, it sets the tone for the poems that follow; specifically, its interrogations of memory and clearly distinguishable causality allow us to read the rest of the book with a scrambled sense of temporality.
The last poem in the novel, “The Masque of Rhyme,” is a bit of a doozy. Like “Confession,” it comments on the state of poetry in Perelman’s time. The opening lines— “Adding my pee to the sea/of rhyme, it’s time I admit sameness/is a bit of a hoax”—initially seems to suggest the reader’s dissatisfaction with the conventions of traditional poetry (one of which is rhyme). However, the simplistic pee/sea rhyme indicates a kind of lightheartedness that is at odds with serious complaint. A similar sentiment appears later on, in the lines “The thought-track wakes and thinks:/novelty again, the same old novelty.” This time, the cynical paradox in “the same old novelty” suggests a more fundamental problem with poetry—that which gives the appearance of innovation is actually just a retooling of something old.
This fear/lament is tempered somewhat by the speaker’s ambiguous attitude towards narratives of the past. The line “It’s Thursday, history’s late as usual” ventriloquizes a conception of history as a stable, unchanging entity made up of dramatic events strung together by a clear causal thread. “History” never happens on Thursdays, or for that matter, any other day of the week, even though it must have. “History” is always late because nothing exciting seems to happen in the moment. Thus the fear over lack of novelty expressed in the earlier passages could be an illusion—there is still the hope that the present moment can be redeemed in the future.
Bob Perelman loves a good paradox, a fact that is immediately obvious from the title of this collection. The title also indicates the volume’s continuous engagement with problems of temporality and memory as mediated through language. There are some radical experiments with form—see for example “Symmetry of Past and Future” and the section titled “A Piece of Paper” in the poem “Writing in Real Time”—but for the most part, the book gets much of its power from its conventional appearance, with a majority of the poems written in couplets and using plain, everyday language. Even though the subjects of the poems vary greatly, there is a sustained focus on revisionism, of the past and also, somewhat nonsensically, of the present and the future.
“The Manchurian Candidate: A Remake” appears on the surface to be exactly what its title suggests. Perelman’s preoccupation with the effects of the passage of time makes the notion of a remake seem like a perfect object of mediation. The poem develops shot by shot with “directions” for the camera, and also includes some passages of dialogue. While it mentions by name some of the actors and characters of the original movie, the poem shifts violently between different registers and alludes to details that seem completely irrelevant (e.g. Joyce’s Ulysses).
The next poem in the volume, “The Iliad, Continued,” jumps back in time a couple thousand years. It features two stanzas running down the page next to each other, “underlined” by a summary of the events in one section of The Iliad. In the two stanzas, the speaker muses about the significance of leaving the Trojan War. This meditation leads the poem to yoke together the Styx and the Ohio rivers, and then the flow and currents of rivers are linked to lines about the nature of storytelling. Despite the wide historical gulf that separates the two aforementioned poems, both show Perelman’s interest in taking the stuff of the past and revitalizing it through linguistic innovation. Aside from this thematic concern that links the pair, there is also a bit of an associative logic operating in the transition from one to the other, with the reference to Ulysses in the first poem. Much of the book moves like this, barely grabbing onto the next rung of the monkey bars before swinging forward at top speed.
Perelman is not afraid of bombarding the reader with long, multipart poems, but he also understands how to time these giants, both in terms of the poem’s content and also within the context of the book as a whole, so that they don’t feel tedious or excessive. Take for example the 6-part “Fake Dreams.” Each part is dated, starting from January and going all the way to December. The six distinct dates give the illusion of linear time, but by the last section of the poem, they are no longer in chronological order. Other than the fact that all of lines are paired in couplets, there is not much continuity throughout the six parts besides a sense of the surreal. Time is suspended in these six “dreams,” as are logical progression and causality. The speaker has lunch with the Pope in New York, then converses with Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and Marianne Moore in an “avant-garde army”; Robert Lowell asks in a wild mishmash of names, “Can you write better than Sid/Kunitz, Bob Berryman?”
For a collection that is so concerned with temporality, it seems fitting to look closely at the first and last poems to see how they set up this thematic scheme. The title of the first poem in the collection, “Confession,” ironically alludes to the tradition of confessional poetry, the tropes of which are almost immediately subverted. “Aliens have inhabited my aesthetics for/decades. Really since the early 70s,” Perelman cheekily proclaims, the “really” adding an extra punch of false sincerity. (I say “Perelman” instead of “the speaker” because of the ostensibly confessional nature of the poem, though it is clear that this is an invented Perelman, one who speaks in alien tongues.) And thus, we open up on an admission of guilt, as the poem continues on to express the anxieties of a poet who is confused by the uniformity he sees around him in the world of poetry, worrying that the aliens are “screening” his sensations (12-13).
Part of this worry comes from the perception that his memory is failing him—“I remember the words, but I/can’t get back there anymore” (11-12). The “there” dangles unexplained, and it suggests that an attempt to grasp what is “there” in the past is a futile act, that the simple act of recalling events—“that old stuff” (7)—does not mean as much as we may want it to. The typical confessional poem draws on memory, transformed by the present mentality of the poet and/or speaker, as a crucial device for getting to the root of some important emotional truth; Perelman mimics this move, but does so in a way so as to undermine the underlying assumption about the value and accuracy of looking back for established truth and looking around in the present for guidance of where to go next. As the first poem in the book, it sets the tone for the poems that follow; specifically, its interrogations of memory and clearly distinguishable causality allow us to read the rest of the book with a scrambled sense of temporality.
The last poem in the novel, “The Masque of Rhyme,” is a bit of a doozy. Like “Confession,” it comments on the state of poetry in Perelman’s time. The opening lines— “Adding my pee to the sea/of rhyme, it’s time I admit sameness/is a bit of a hoax”—initially seems to suggest the reader’s dissatisfaction with the conventions of traditional poetry (one of which is rhyme). However, the simplistic pee/sea rhyme indicates a kind of lightheartedness that is at odds with serious complaint. A similar sentiment appears later on, in the lines “The thought-track wakes and thinks:/novelty again, the same old novelty.” This time, the cynical paradox in “the same old novelty” suggests a more fundamental problem with poetry—that which gives the appearance of innovation is actually just a retooling of something old.
This fear/lament is tempered somewhat by the speaker’s ambiguous attitude towards narratives of the past. The line “It’s Thursday, history’s late as usual” ventriloquizes a conception of history as a stable, unchanging entity made up of dramatic events strung together by a clear causal thread. “History” never happens on Thursdays, or for that matter, any other day of the week, even though it must have. “History” is always late because nothing exciting seems to happen in the moment. Thus the fear over lack of novelty expressed in the earlier passages could be an illusion—there is still the hope that the present moment can be redeemed in the future.
February 13, 2019
Perelman's voice works through a kind of humor here along content that feels often philosophical - language and writing and of course memory. There's a kind of Perelmanian aside--if we can call it that--where the author employees transition phrases like "that is," effectively extending lines to sometimes absurd and humorous lengths; this works best, especially, in his exceptional couplets. "CONFESSION" is a perfect example, and really a classic poem: "the inside story of LANGUAGE writing," as Perelman himself has said. Some of the typographic experimentation found later in the book did feel a bit dated, though.
April 17, 2012
This is inspiring!
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews