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.

The World in Time and Space arrived in the mailbox yesterday and it’s a big fat wonderful collection of essays & interviews about contemporary poetry, or more exactly, poetry from the New Americans of the 1950s to the present. My first thumb-through (which took a couple of hours) tells me that there is a lot in here to make me think, learn, laugh, cringe & want to argue. Ed Foster & Joe Donahue have done a first-rate job in putting together a volume on poetry that matters. The list of contributors and their pieces will tell you why:

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Bruce Andrews, Making Social Sense: Poetics & the Political Imaginary

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Edward Foster, An Interview with Gustaf Sobin

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Michael Baughn, Olson's Buffalo

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>David Landrey, Robert Creeley's and Joel Oppenheimer's Changing Visions

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Leonard Schwartz, Robert Duncan and His Inheritors

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Norman Finkelstein, cc: Jack Spicer

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>John Olson, The Haunted Stanzas of John Ashbery

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>David Clippinger, Poetry and Philosophy at Once: Encounters between William Bronk and Postmodern Poetry

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>W. Scott Howard, 'The Brevities': Formal Mourning, Transgression, & Postmodern American Elegies

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Mark Scroggins, Z-Sited Path: Late Zukofsky and His Tradition

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Burt Kimmelman, Objectivist Poetics since 1970

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Jeanne Heuving, The Violence of Negation or 'Love's Infolding'

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Peter Bushyeager, Staying Up All Night: The New York School of Poetry, 1970-1983

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Stephen Paul Miller, Ted Berrigan's Legacy: Sparrow, Eileen Myles, and Bob Holman

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Thomas Fink, Between / After Language Poetry and the New York School

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>David Clippinger, Between Silence and the Margins: Poetry and its Presses

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Linda Russo, 'F' Word in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: An Account of Women-Edited Small Presses and Journals

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Standard Schaefer, Impossible City: A History of Literary Publishing in L.A. Susan Vanderborg, "If This Were the Place to Begin": Little Magazines and the Early Language Poetry Scene

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Susan M. Schultz, Language Writing

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Marjorie Perloff, After Language Poetry: Innovation and Its Theoretical Discontents

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Daniel Barbiero, Reflections on Lyric Before, During, and After Language

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Christopher Beach, "Events Were Not Lacking": David Antin's Talk Poems, Lyn Hejinian's My Life, and the Poetics of Cultural Memory

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Andrew Joron, Neo-Surrealism; or, The Sun at Night

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Dan Featherston, On Visionary Poetics, Robert Kelly, and Clayton Eshleman

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Peter O'Leary, American Poetry & Gnosticism

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Michel Delville, The Marginal Arts: Experimental Poetry and the Possibilities of Prose

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Stephen-Paul Martin, Media / Countermedia: Visual Writing & Networks of Resistance

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Mary Margaret Sloan, Of Experience To Experiment: Women's Innovative Writing, 1965 - 1995

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Edward Foster, An Interview with Alice Notley

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Aldon Lynn Nielsen, "This Ain't No Disco"

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Kathryne V Lindberg Cleaver, Newton and Davis, re: Reading of Panther Lyrics

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Brian Kim Stefans, "Remote Parsee": An Alternative Grammar of Asian North-American Poetry

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Brent Hayes Edwards, The Race for Space: Sun Ra's Poetry

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Julie Schmid, Spreading the Word: A History of the Poetry Slam

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Steve Evans, The American Avant-Garde after 1989: Notes Toward a History

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Loss Pequeño Glazier, Poets | Digital | Poetics

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Alan Golding, New, Newer, and Newest American Poetries

Talisman House has done a tremendous job of promoting American poetry in recent years: Primary Trouble: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, in 1996; An Anthology of New (American) Poets in 1998; and Mary Margaret Sloan’s monumental Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women, also in 1998. In 2000, Talisman House published Crossing Centuries: The New Generation in Russian Poetry. All are “must-have” volumes for any halfway decent collection of contemporary poetry. These are available through Small Press Distribution.

In his statement for Michael Lally’s 1976 anthology, None of the Above, the late Jim Gustafson admonished, “Suggest that one strives to read something more than the books that come in the mail.” It’s not bad advice, but doesn’t account for the unexpected delights that once in a rare while do turn up. Joseph Massey’s Minima St. (Range Press, 2002) is just such a treat.

In actuality, Minima St. (a self-published limited edition chapbook with a press run of just 50 copies) wasn’t a total surprise. Rae Armantrout, who had received the book in her mail ahead of me, had written to say that I would like the work. The poems are, as the title wryly implies, minimalist:

            Awakened
by the ticking

not the alarm.

Such close attention to detail demands both precision and a sense of balance – the stanza break prior to the last line is the poem’s most important moment. As a whole, Minima St. manages both values well. I vacillate between a preference for poems like the one above, which focus on an individual element, and other pieces that are less completely descriptive, where the text pushes the reader some to make the connections:

            Gulls –

collapsed
song

weighs
sun.

The off-rhyme pulls together the imponderables: how songs might collapse, the weight of sun, what any of this has to do with gulls.

Minima St. fits into a long tradition of self-published first books mailed out to potentially sympathetic readers that can be traced back at least far as Whitman’s initial edition of Leaves of Grass. In its use of short forms, hard-edged lines, commitment to precision, and especially its fondness for the strategically placed em dash, the most obvious predecessor to Massey’s volume might be George Oppen’s Discrete Series.

Interested readers might be able to obtain copies by emailing rangemag@aol.com.