Abstract
This article works through an examination of Bob Perelman’s poems in relation to major Williamsian defining features of the poet, poetic language, and poetics, and asks: Is there a way to recover from a modernist past that has become enshrined and canonized? How to relate to the bewildering inventiveness, as it sometimes walks hand in hand with a stupefying dogmatism? Developing a form of poetic activism over a span of more than fifty years, Perelman has shown growing interest in Williams’s work, the poems and the essays, as possible matrixes for a poetic practice that encompasses the preoccupation with language, the intermedial awareness of the poem’s interactions with the visual, and the ethical commitment to a political and philosophical discourse on the human.