"Time to Translate Modernism into a Contemporary Idiom": Pedagogy, Poetics, and Bob Perelman's Pound

Central to the work of avant-garde U.S. American poets from Ezra Pound to the present have been continuing conflicts between didacticism and coterie exclusiveness, and over the poet's relationship to pedagogical institutions. Within the contemporary poet Bob Perelman's ongoing consideration of the relationship between the avant-garde and pedagogy in all its forms, including but not limited to the academic, Pound has been a constant presence. This essay examines how some of the terms and categories surrounding the idea of "pedagogy"—teaching, learning, reading, knowledge, authority, the new—manifest themselves in Perelman's response to an influential predecessor such as Pound, particularly in poems from his latest book, Iflife. Pound is the precursor point at which all these concerns meet and from which they emanate, the central site for a contemporary avant-gardist's exploration of—and perhaps anxiety about—the nature of poetic learning and poetic knowledge, and for the relationship of that knowledge to poetics and to institutions.