About BOB PERELMAN
He is an American poet, editor, translator, and critic, and Professor Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania since 1990
BOB PERELMAN was born in Youngstown, Ohio, in 1947. He is an American poet, editor, translator, and critic, and Professor Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania since 1990. A key figure of the avant-garde L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E group —known as the “Language Poets”—which emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the San Francisco Bay Area.
He has published around a dozen books of poetry, including Braille (1975), a.k.a. (1979), Primer (1981), Captive Audience (1988), and IFLIFE (2006). He is also the author of two influential works of literary criticism: The Trouble with Genius (1994) and The Marginalization of Poetry (1996); the latter, written in verse, outlines the basic formal and expressive principles of Language writing.
His poem “China,” included in Manual, became widely known after being cited by Frederic Jameson in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) as an example of fragmentary textual procedure, alongside authors such as John Cage and Samuel Beckett. Manual is Perelman’s first book to be translated into Spanish.
CHINA
We live on the third world from the sun. Number three. Nobody tells us what to do.
The people who taught us to count were being very kind.
It’s always time to leave.
If it rains, you either have your umbrella or you don’t.
The wind blows your hat off.
The sun rises also.
I’d rather the stars didn’t describe us to each other; I’d rather we do it for ourselves.
Run in front of your shadow.
A sister who points to the sky at least once a decade is a good sister.
The landscape is motorized.
The train takes you where it goes.
Bridges among water.
Folks straggling along vast stretches of concrete, heading into the plane.
Don’t forget what your hat and shoes will look like when you are nowhere to be found.
Coats in the window hung up on hooks; question marks where the heads would normally be.
Even the words floating in air make blue shadows.
If it tastes good we eat it.
The leaves are falling. Point things out.
Pick up the right things.
Hey guess what? What? I’ve learned how to talk. Great.
The person whose head was incomplete burst into tears.
As it fell, what could the doll do? Nothing.
Go to sleep.
You look great in shorts. And the flag looks great too.
Everyone enjoyed the explosions.
Time to wake up.
But better get used to dreams too.
translated by Drago Yurac