Inseminating the Elephant is a Risky Business

Lucia Perillo's New Book of Poetry Has Its Ups and Downs

Sep 1, 2009

In her sixth poetry collection, Inseminating the Elephant, Lucia Perillo's quirky, humorous style is dazzling, but all too familiar.

Throughout the 1970s and ‘80s, the American poet James Tate’s work, which often bears more of a resemblance to the comic prose of Woody Allen than to the poems of Wallace Stevens or Elizabeth Bishop or any of the great poets of the 20th century, was an anomaly. These days, however, a case could be made that Tate is the most influential voice of the last 20 years. Shadows of his signature odd twists of logic and restless wanderings over the borders of sense show up in a number of young American poets’ books. Case in point: Lucia Perillo’s latest effort, her sixth collection, Inseminating the Elephant.

And You Thought Poetry Was Boring…

The good news: Perillo is awfully good at this brand of poetry. Take the first stanza of “January/Macy’s/The Bra Event” (yes, folks, that’s the title): “Word of it comes whispered by a slippery thin section/of the paper, where the models pantomime tete-a-tetes/despite the absence of their blouses.” It’s difficult not to be charmed by the rush of sensuous motion, surprising language, and strange humor of these lines. And as the poem goes on, Perillo’s aim to entertain the reader conjures up the pleasant image of a wise child proudly pouring forth examples of the fruits of her natural intelligence and imagination.

Sometimes, Perillo begins a poem in a straightforward manner, as in the first sentence of “For the First Crow with West Nile Virus to Arrive in Our State”: “For a long time you lay tipped on your side like a bicycle/but now your pedaling has stopped.” But rest assured that there’s very little that’s straightforward about the rest of the poem. Perillo leaps from idea to idea like a mad scientist with nothing to prove, as if exhorting those who believe that poetry is out to teach us boring lessons about life to free their minds, just have fun, and see what wisps of enlightenment flow their way.

Critique of Unpure Reason

The bad news about Perillo’s book and about the house that Tate built, so to speak, is that it also conjures up the unpleasant image of a petulant child whining that poetry is so boring, and the sense that poets of Perillo and Tate’s ilk are trying so hard to come to the rescue that it’s overbearing. And there’s a much more serious problem on top of all that.

The restlessness displayed in Inseminating the Elephant, the quirky connections, the enormously surprising shifts in tone and image and language, the out-of-nowhere stabs at humor, amount to something akin to anti-intellectualism. Perillo’s language games often come across as just that: games. It’s not quite as if she’s abandoned any hope of making sense out of life. It’s more like she’s mistakenly convinced that the highly individual “sense” that she’s making is a new, invaluable way of grasping the world.

The copyright of the article Inseminating the Elephant is a Risky Business in American Poetry is owned by Douglas Nordfors. Permission to republish Inseminating the Elephant is a Risky Business in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.