Bob Perelman

Read poems by this poet

Bob Perelman, a key figure in the Language poetry movement, was born in 1947 and earned his MA in classics from the University of Michigan, an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. 

Perelman has published more than fifteen volumes of poetry, most recently Ten to One: Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 1999); The Future of Memory (Roof Books, 1998); Captive Audience (Figures, 1988); and his debut, Braille (Ithaca House, 1975). His work in literary criticism focuses on poetry and Modernism. Those books are The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History (Princeton University Press, 1996) and The Trouble with Genius: Reading Pound, Joyce, Stein, and Zukofsky (University of California Press, 1994). He has also edited Writing/Talks (Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), a collection of discussions by poets.

Perelman is professor emeritus in the English department at the University of Pennsylvania, where he has been teaching since 1990.