Bob Perelman's «Jan 1» reads like the start of a logical proof that keeps losing its way. Four times the poem says "given" (the brain, the skeletal structure, the cool brain, "this conservative"), as if a conclusion were being built from solid premises. The conclusion, when it arrives in the last two lines, is a verdict on the thing doing the reasoning: "This industrious thing / can't be trusted." The poem is about a mind at the start of a new year, full of plans and hope, and about how little that mind can be relied on to keep them.
The title sets the scene as a fresh start, and the opening image fits. The brain is "an industrious / essay just beginning physically / un-inked and hopeful," a blank page waiting for writing. "Essay" is a good word to choose, because it also means an attempt, and an attempt is exactly what a New Year's resolution is. The skeleton enters the argument with the same dry, scientific tone. At this point the body seems a tidy piece of equipment.
The second stanza breaks that tidiness. The heartbeat becomes an animal or a gambler, and the verbs pile up: "rolling over and away," "galloping off ahead," "gambling and running back to wait." The heart runs ahead of the speaker, then the speaker waits for it to come back. The line "galloping off ahead of the heartbeat" even has a quickening, hoofbeat rhythm. Then comes a small human detail: "Jim's I think drinking his heartbeat." The "I think" is a nice touch of uncertainty, and the image suggests a hungover morning after a night of celebration, though the poem never says so. The phrase "always mentioning purple everybody's heartbeat" is deliberately slippery. Its grammar won't settle, so purple could be a bruise, a mood or just a stray association. The poem lets the mind wander and doesn't tidy up after it.
In the third stanza the brain turns "cool," "riffing / through the smoke to the clear sky-writing." Riffing is a musician's word for improvising, so the brain is now jazz as well as essay. The sky-writing is an image of language written on air. It is huge and public, but it also fades and has to be redone, which is why the next stanza speaks of the "conservative / forming and reforming of the letters." The sentence breaks across the stanza, so the word "conservative" hangs at the end of a line before we know what it describes. Conservative here suggests something that keeps repeating the same old shapes, as resolutions do each January. The letters get remade over and over, and nothing new is said.
What the letters spell is a single quoted line: "boys will you burn the leaves?" It is an ordinary, almost rural, chore-like question, and it seems oddly out of place in January. It also links back to the "smoke" in the previous stanza, so the sky-writing and the leaf fire blur together. We are not told who asks or who answers. That seems to be the point: after all the grand talk of brains and skeletons, the mind produces a small, half-heard scrap of speech.
Structurally, the poem is four quatrains with no rhyme and almost no punctuation apart from the quotation marks and question mark. That freedom is part of its meaning, since nothing stops the thoughts from sliding into one another. Yet the poem is carefully balanced. The "industrious" brain appears in the first stanza and again in the last, and the word changes sides. At the start it is hopeful and at the end it is suspect, and "essay" has shrunk to the blunt, almost contemptuous "thing."
The poem matters because it shows a mind watching itself and reaching an uncomfortable conclusion. We usually treat thinking as the reliable part of us, but here the brain is as restless as the galloping heart. By setting out the language of proof ("given... and given...") and then letting it dissolve into drinking, purple and burning leaves, Perelman makes the reader feel how easily reasoning drifts. The final distrust sounds like a joke, but it has real force. It is the voice of someone who has just made big plans and doubts, quite sensibly, that they will survive the day.