Knowledge Follows, Insurance Editions 2003. Click image to download or browser-load PDF (8.1 MB)
Published in 2003 by Kostas Anagnopolous’ Insurance Editions, Knowledge Follows was one of three chapbooks featured in the first set of Insurance Editions; the other two were Carol Samotovicz’s Reticular Popups and Kostas’ own Daydream.
Marc Kuykendal letterpressed the covers for the first batch of Insurance Editions, and Diane Shaw of goodesign designed the cover and interior and set the type (AIGA Design Archives replicates the colophon here along with images of all three first-run chapbooks).
I put Knowledge Follows together in the wake of both a 2001 trip to Chiapas, Mexico and 9/11, which took place while I was in Mexico on several months’ hiatus from life in Brooklyn.
Noah Eli Gordon wrote in his “Considering Chapbooks” column for Jacket:
Part peripatetic, subtle, yet quite cerebral, complexity, part humorous, and anecdote-laden travelogue, part meditation on place, simultaneously of the text and the empirical world, David Perry’s Knowledge Follows is an all together dynamic assemblage of precisely deployed, lineated stanzas, interspersed with bits of narrative prose. Loosely documenting a trip to Chiapas (in Mexico), though in the more Objectivist sense of specificity of focus, Perry’s dexterous and attentive writing renders time itself an almost palpable entity.…
And Ron Silliman wrote the following after the first sections of Knowledge Follows appeared in the short-lived Seattle magazine Monkey Puzzle (Kreg Hasegawa and Daniel Comiskey, eds.):
Perry instantly lets the reader know that he’s in total control of his medium. The directness of address & level of detail invokes the genre of a top-notch page turner, even if the details are not what one might anticipate. Or, more accurately, precisely because the details were not what one might anticipate we are driven that much deeper into the text itself. By the third line, I was completely hooked.
He wrote more, too, in the context of his interest in what he calls the “longpoem,” a category that would also include New Years and the unpublished The Lost Notebook (a chunk of which was published in the Tinfish “long poems” issue).
Excerpts of the poem appear at:
- Subtext: New Writing from Seattle and Beyond
- Mosses from an Old Manse Peter Culley also pulls nice passages from Samatovizc’s Reticular Popups and Anagnopolous’ Daydream. I can’t help noting here that if my grandfather had kept his Greek-Macedonian name, Pericles Chopas, instead of Americanizing to John C. Perry, we three would have had a really sweet set of Old Europe handles to hang our hats on.
Insurance Editions 2003 chapbooks (AIGA Design Archives)