Perril, Simon: Two Duets With Occasion

Shearsman Books, paperback

Publication Date: April 5, 2024

Publisher Marketing: Simon Perril's new collection gathers two discrete works. '45 Days in the Company of Robert Walser' turns to the Swiss modernist as guide to the inner workings of educational workplaces, and the lived experience of them. Alchemy, according to Jung, was a quest for individuation.

Inhabiting Walser's pioneering absurdist work exploring a school for servants, Perril finds alarming parallels between the transformative 'suffering' of metals in their journey to a higher state, and contemporary workplace rhetorics of self-development and transformation. 'Sun Deck Set Cogitation' collapses the boundaries between reading and writing by playing with two texts by anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. The first is a forensically detailed moment by moment account of a sunset written in 1935 while en route from Marseilles to Brazil; the second his account of a 1941 voyage escaping occupied France alongside fellow refugee André Breton. As Perril explains, 'I inhabited Lévi-Strauss's text like it was a ship's deck I was walking across or around.' The poet takes impetus from an early epiphany Lévi-Strauss had looking at the formal intricacy and structural play of dandelion seed heads that give rise to other forms. His poetic 'treatment' of the source texts scatter and recombine word-seeds in surprising combinations: blowing on a seed-head and spreading palimpsestic filaments.