Inseminating the Elephant Book

In 2017, I worked at Monroe County library, As I was shelving in the poetry section, I had the urge to seek out contemporary poets. Filed under the number "811.54", I discovered Perillo's collection of poems, "Inseminating the Elephant". An author who was acknowledged as a "Pulitzer Prize Finalist" on the front cover. Principally, I'm rooting for the underdog, but something drew me to this one. The title evoked an image in my mind that I am still erasing out, but the cover art struck me as a minimalist, drip painting adaptation by Pat Steir. After I clocked out, I checked it out for borrowing, situated myself near a window in one of the "quiet rooms", and began to analyze her stylings with undisturbed observation.

Her pleasant verbosity and highly entertaining musings from poems such as "Found Object" (the opening stanza being, "someone left this white T-shirt / like a hangman's hood on the new parking meter / the magic marks upon its back say: I QUIT METH 4-EVER") gripped my attention being raised in surrounding counties that share the commonality of methamphetamine usage and distribution, it was easy to visualize the very scene which Perillo described. The drug references weren't the only factors that reminded me of my own stomping grounds; the almighty underdog called St. Joseph County. Others included Perillo's relatable remarks, such as "the dreams of death as a mere phenomenon of weather", an excerpt from "Number One". Living so close to the Great Lakes, the weather is always capricious, affecting our emotional states as we trudge through a light rainfall, a "white out" of snow, or the occasional sunlight beaming through cloud coverage in the midriff of December, all within the span of the month itself. Perillo and I have an affinity in this way, as we were both conditioned to the Midwest for some time (Perillo taught at the Southern Illinois University). She wrote in a manner of fragility, with an occasional wit interwoven between the lines, keeping her readers engaged in all-around entertaining content that can correlate to "flyover territory" thematics, the sloppy act of "making it through", and expressing physical hindrances and the language of prevailing alongside them.

The tone throughout "Inseminating the Elephant" shifts around like an anxious bird, awaiting another cold draft, flying as quick as a flash from branch to branch, at the pace of a thought. There are darker connotations bodied in confessional lines such as "Goodbye kisses ' once I had so many of you, but now I note ' your numbers growing slim." This is from her poem, "Martha", which was named after the very last surviving passenger pigeon before it passed away at the Cincinnati Zoological Garden in 1914, marking the species entirely extinct. However, the poem I clung to with the most relatability was undoubtedly "Sylvia Plath's Hair". I also worked at the Lilly Library in Bloomington, Indiana for roughly two years. My position entailed cataloging decades, and even centuries old, rare collections of literature. The library also kept invaluable objects belonging to deceased writers that were preserved in "the vault", which only less than a handful of workers have access to. In it contained an encased lock of Sylvia Plath's hair. In Perillo's poem, she muses on how Plath's hair evokes a graphic sense of mortality, remembering how she once owned a yellow, paper mache horse that was placed on the dining room table of her childhood home. In this surf through her memory, Perillo came to terms with how most things we have material possession of, or generally how living species become deceased and the only proof of their time spent on the planet is either located in the mind, or a physical remnant kept in some ceremoniously-guarded keepsake. In regards to her self-crafted horse, she reflected with the hard-hitting stanza, "Now it must fertilize a flower bed in some suburban subdivision ' erected over the detoxified county dump. ' Where rot the archives of the childhoods that we see our therapists either to remember or to forget." Perillo went on to mention the explosive reactions that women specifically have after thoroughly gazing the archives of Plath, and how one of the most endeared and sophisticated writers within the century seems eerily tangle with the blonde strand that is handled with "white gloves" and "poked at with an eraser as if it might explode."

Another aspect to take note of is Perillo's extensive vocabulary; throughout her poems, there are words I highlighted to better understand the context, such as "priggishness", "multitudinous", "bedraggled", along with several others. It keeps the reader intrigued, as they are not only learning about Perillo's style, but also being educated on the "flare" that enhances the quality of poetry crafting. As another self-proclaimed logophile, "Inseminating the Elephant" challenged my abilities as a reader and as an aesthete in the field of art. Wanting to know more about her personal aspirations and influences, I researched Perillo and found a thoroughly telling interview between her and Kevin Larimer, the editor in chief of Poets & Writers, Incorporated. He inquired about her reaction after she discovered that "Inseminating the Elephant" had won a literary award, which was her first full-length publication as a poet without much material in her own archive. Her response was charmingly visceral: "I have always had a lot of shame attached to publication. I was affected by the movement toward confessional poetry, and I was also very taken by women poets such as Sharon Olds, who seemingly wrote from their lives and wrote sort of hard-edged things. And I wanted to out-hard-edge the hard edge. That was my intent." (Perillo, 2009)

Personally responding to the aforementioned statement by Perillo, I believe that she successfully overpowered the "hard edge" element of poetics, which I perceive to be the most cutthroat documentations of human experience. Raw, unadulterated, and looking directly into the wide-eyed truths of living. I believe Perillo would have agreed. The element of sensuality hoists Perillo's writing hand, as it is scattered all throughout "Inseminating the Elephant". In her poem, "Incubus", she wrote as if she were in a drugged-out haze, ringing out with unmasked naturality, by writing "Two times, he'd snipped my kitchen with the scissors of his hips ' while he directed stories from the rehab clinic toward us ' ladies in our panty hose, ' our fingers sliding up and down our wine glass stems." In her final poem, "Trade Surplus", she wrote of an outlandishly hilarious experience about attempting to hitch a ride from a truck driver delivering sex toys.

There is a seriousness in Perillo's tone, one that can be simultaneously flirtatious with comedic elements, but always, wholly involved in her own "full moon", well-rounded perceptions with life in full-swing. This is how her material remains timeless among the contemporaries of our time, even following her death in October, 2016. "Avoidance Behavior" effortlessly converges a post-apocalyptic mindset with the acceptance of the finality of all things. The poetic manta being that we should "move toward the smell of sweat and scalp ' when the giant meteor comes at last". I would like to believe that, all along, she was spiritually prepared to embrace the end: "rather be immersed ' I'd leave you all behind ' to skinny-dip in the darkness at the end ' touched by nothing but a spring-fed lake."