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FACE VALUE

by Bob Perelman

Virtual reality is a computer-generated environment that seems real butisn't; Virtual Reality, the book, makes clear that the experience predates the technology. These brilliant and often hilarious poems expose the rotten scaffolding of the ideologically generated "private" world,and reconnect its elegances to their social and intellectual consequences."It's / 1991-at least it was, once / upon a time-and communism is / dead,leaving capitalism, the word, the // movie, the whole ball of idiomatic /wax, with nowhere to go, nothing // to mean. The free world belongs / ina language museum now, along / with free love and free verse."

Most poets define poetry by creating it. Bob Perelman creates it by defining it, and is thus one step ahead of all the poets under the sun,one step closer to colliding with Zeno's vanishing point, to mergingcoyote with road runner, to winning the hand.
- John Ashbery

Perelman's new collection is sharp-eyed ironic investigation of poetic language in the global information net of the 1990's. "To write the histories with / any accuracy is to write backwards, / true to the falsity of experience." Among several stunning long works in Virtual Reality, "The Marginalization of Poetry" explores some points of contact between criticism and its "abject object," poetry. Underneath the sideways moments here where odd distinctions are emblems. Perelman’s memories and desires may be quotations converted to running gags,irrational sense-experience, sometimes uncommon nervousness: most often luminous.
- Susan Howe

There are no complete thoughts. There are, however, comprehensive ones,the mind panoramically scanning a present where each detail exposes a struggle, contradictions, compromises, all glazed over in the latest colors. No one expresses these thoughts more richly or more acutely than Bob Perelman, whose work never lets the reader forget the difficulty within each decision even as it celebrates the possibility of decision making as the essence of ethical action. With a wit whose ancestry includes Catullus and Pope as well as Berrigan and Frank O'Hara, Perelman has emerged as our most sharply edged political poet.
- Ron Silliman

There was no refamiliarizing . . . . / We could almost see / our handsseizing towers, chains, dealerships, / the structures that drew the maps,/ but there was no time to / read them, only to react . . .
These lines from the title poem of Virtual Reality give us precisely the feel of living inside the "global information net" which is late twentieth-century America. In a series of stunning and various poems, Bob Perelman provides us with the story of our everyday lives. This is poetry as social text, a lyric at once deeply personal and yet directed outward,as a form of political critique. Virtual Reality won't let us get away with anything: it forces us to See It New.
- Marjorie Perloff