Confession
By Bob Perelman
Aliens have inhabited my aesthetics for
decades. Really since the early 70s.
Before that I pretty much wrote
as myself, though young. But something
has happened to my memory, my
judgment: apparently, my will has been
affected. That old stuff, the fork
in my head, first home run,
Dad falling out of the car—
I remember the words, but I
can't get back there anymore. I
think they must be screening my
sensations. I'm sure my categories have
been messed with. I look at
the anthologies in the big chains
and campus bookstores, even the small
press opium dens, all those stanzas
against the white space—they just
look like the models in the
catalogs. The models have arms and
legs and a head, the poems
mostly don't, but other than that
it's hard—for me anyway—to
tell them apart. There's the sexy
underwear poem, the sturdy workboot poem
you could wear to a party
in a pinch, the little blaspheming
dress poem. There's variety, you say:
the button-down oxford with offrhymed cuffs.
The epic toga, showing some ancient
ankle, the behold! the world is
changed and finally I'm normal flowing
robe and shorts, the full nude,
the scatter—Yes, I suppose there's
variety, but the looks, those come
on and read me for the
inner you I've locked onto with
my cultural capital sensing device looks!
No thanks, Jay Peterman! No thanks,
"Ordinary Evening in New Haven"! I'm
just waiting for my return ticket
to have any meaning, for those
saucer-shaped clouds to lower! The authorities
deny any visitations—hardly a surprise.
And I myself deny them—think
about it. What could motivate a
group of egg-headed, tentacled, slimier-than-thou aestheticians
with techniquies far beyond ours to
visit earth, abduct naive poets, and
inculcate them with otherwordly forms that
are also, if you believe the
tabloids, salacious? And these abductions always
seem to take place in some
provincial setting: isn't that more than
slightly suspicious? Why don't they ever
reveal themselves hovering over some New
York publishing venue? It would be
nice to get some answers here—
we might learn something, about poetry
if nothing else, but I'm not
much help, since I'm an abductee,
at least in theory, though, like
I say, I don't remember much.
But this writing seems pretty normal:
complete sentences; semicolons; yada yada. I
seem to have lost my avant-garde
card in the laundry. They say
that's typical. Well, you'll just have
to use your judgment, earthlings! Judgment,
that's your job! Back to work!
As if you could leave! And
you thought gravity was a problem!
Copyright Credit: Bob Perelman, "Confession" from Ten to One: Selected Poems. Copyright © 1999 by Bob Perelman. Reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
Source: Ten to One: Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 1999)