Insurance Books will publish Knowledge Follows, a chapbook-length poem by David Perry, later this year. If the excerpt that appears in the first issue of Monkey Puzzle is any evidence, it already promises to be one of the best books of the new year.

At first glance, Knowledge Follows is a series of linked pieces, mostly (tho not entirely) in verse form. I wasn’t actually planning to read it, I was just thumbing through the issue, trying to get a sense of who & what were there, particularly given the unhelpful table of contents that lists contributors only by their first names, when I came across this:

Rome fell, Paris fell – that we can see

for ourselves: shoe trees, the original

rack, truncheons, pestles, magazines

everywhere reflection spreads

the rumor we were there – in the nave,

shooting up the cemetery, cracking

on the plain, running

from the unpredicted ellipse . . .

as if the universe were the ultimate

word-picture machine

with direct feeds to the head

Perry instantly lets the reader know that he’s in total control of his medium. The directness of address & level of detail invokes the genre of a top-notch page turner, even if the details are not what one might anticipate. Or, more accurately, precisely because the details were not what one might anticipate we are driven that much deeper into the text itself. By the third line, I was completely hooked.

The ensuing section extends this initial thread, but that’s the exception here, not the rule. Rather, Knowledge Follows ranges in several directions, while pulling out themes, particularly around communication, that become familiar because elements have appeared previously:

. . . as if children were understood

though neither heard nor seen. Eureka!

Who’s to argue with not only

communication but understanding?

Our lifelong self-experiment with perspective

found itself up against the wall.

As the section above, quoted in its entirety, suggests, Perry offers a wry, dry wit, but is ultimately more serious in his approach than we are used to from poets associated with the NY School’s Gen XXXIX.

Between these rather well-architected fragments & the question of the excerpt from the reader’s perspective, it’s impossible to know just how much of the total book is included in Monkey Puzzle. I can’t tell from the six pages here if this might be half of the eventual chapbook or if it, in fact, might simply be the first installment in something far larger – certainly Perry’s control in these sections indicates that he’s capable of it.

While there have been projects associated with the NY School that have entered into that intermediary book-length poem space, from Koch’s When the Sun Tries to Go On to Ashbery’s Three Poems & Flow Chart – a deeply underappreciated work – to longer projects from Bernadette Mayer, Anne Waldman, Paul Violi & even David Lehman, there never has been a longpoem from this aesthetic tendency – not in the sense of taking at least a decade to compose the poem. This taste of Perry’s work makes me hungry for someone to explore that possibility.

One clue here may the degree of finish in Perry’s sections or fragments. They are quite different than what, say, Rachel Blau DuPlessis has characterized as the “debris” that she incorporates into her own Drafts. The result is that each section of Knowledge Follows feels complete almost in the way of a lyric poem. One wonders how a truly long poem of infinitely digestible bits could be accomplished – there’s never really been anything quite like that. Zukofsky’s “A,” in which many of the individual sections approach that intermediate booklength poem range – is probably the best precedent for a work with such clearly defined segments, but there is a radical difference between even a short section like “A”-9 & a work that contains two or three such sections on every page. Imagine, if you will, Creeley’s Pieces stretched out to 1,000 pages. Would it work or would ennui eventually swallow up the project, regardless of how well written it was?

Another thing that is interesting here is that I come away with a strong sense of David Perry’s skill as a writer, but not one particularly of who he is as a person. He could 25 or he could be 55, at least based on these pages. All I really know about him is that he’s around the New York scene & Larry Fagin swears he could not be the same David Perry who studied poetry with Robert Kelly at Bard in the 1960s. Adventures in Poetry published an earlier volume, Range Finder. Based on this excerpt, I know already I have to read more.