Life keeps hurtling forward, bursting forth. It’s spring in California, the jasmine’s come in and the streaky roses. It’s been raining hard all morning; just now it stopped abruptly. Lyn writes in My Life, “she observed that detail minutely, as if it were botanical. As if words could unite an ardent intellect with the external material world.” This is Lyn, vitally observing, drawing it all into relation, the mind and the world, botanical, passionate. Making words hold life, making words as life. “Such that art is inseparable from the search for reality,” she writes.
Feature: Bob Perelman, edited by Kristen Gallagher
300 printed pages, in Jacket 39
I wanted to do this special feature for Jacket on the work of Bob Perelman because I noticed a dearth of writing available on the internet about his work. There is a fair amount written about Language Poetry in general, and more if you have access to the search engines JSTOR, Project Muse, etc., or if you know how to search recent dissertations. But even then, I was surprised to find fewer essays focusing on Perelman alone than I had hoped for.[...] So I decided to edit a collection, and a special issue of Jacket seemed the obvious choice. I knew their editors liked this kind of work and, rather than edit a book, I chose the format of easily accessed online materials to best serve the largest audience. Books take forever and not many people buy them anymore. I wanted people to have access to this as soon as possible and for free. — Kristen Gallagher, from her Introduction
[»»] Kristen Gallagher: Introduction
[»»] Bob Perelman: Biographical Note
[»»] Rae Armantrout: Bob Perelman’s Grammatology
[»»] Charles Bernstein: The Importance of Being Bob
[»»] Louis Cabri: Poems
[»»] Al Filreis: The President of This Sentence: Bob Perelman’s History
[»»] Kristen Gallagher: Teaching Bob Perelman’s “The Story of My Life”