Most poems about feeling try to explain it. Bob Perelman's «Self Taught» does something odder. It lays its feelings out the way a beginner lays out vocabulary, in a heap and half-understood, then reshuffles the same words to see what they might mean. There is no named speaker, no scene, no event to point to. What we get is a mind rehearsing a small stock of images (red eyes, trees, a drain, a doorway). The central idea seems to be that learning to speak about your own pain is clumsy, repetitive and never quite finished.
The first lines set the terms. "My own feelings" leads into "raw guarded dictionary all thumbs," a phrase that jams together things that shouldn't fit. Raw and guarded pull in opposite directions, exposed yet protected. A dictionary is meant to be orderly and public, but this one is private and "all thumbs," fumbling like hands that can't do fine work. The title becomes literal: the speaker is building a language for their inner life without a teacher, using a clumsy tool. Then the scale lurches. A "backfire enormous" goes "into little red retinas / all aglow," a huge blast squeezed through the small opening of the eye. The glow might be warmth, sunset or the afterimage of a flash, and the poem doesn't choose. "Etcetera trees orchards" is especially telling, since "etcetera" is what we say when we can't be bothered to finish a list, so even the natural world arrives worn out and abbreviated. Next, "tremendous horror down the drain" sits beside "the usual each and every day," as though catastrophe and household plumbing share a pipe.
The second half is where the title's logic pays off, because almost everything in it is borrowed from the first. "Enormous" and "red" return, "all trees aglow" is "etcetera trees orchards" squashed down, and "horror down the drain" repeats outright. Small substitutions still change the meaning. "Guarded," once attached to the dictionary, now describes the drain, as if the speaker's wariness has leaked into the place where horror goes. "My own enormous red fuck" echoes the earlier "my own feelings," so the obscenity reads as the rawest thing the speaker owns. When it returns in "all trees aglow fuck horror down," it can be heard as a curse aimed at horror or as a blurt that interrupts the sentence. The poem leaves both readings open. The middle lines add a further oddity: "looking backwards and selling / december to may." Judging by the wording, memory is being turned into a commodity, with half a year of time offered for sale.
The form supports all this. There is no punctuation, no capital letters and no regular meter, only short lines of a few words. The line breaks do the work of punctuation, and they make phrases wobble: "selling" hangs for a moment without an object before "december to may" arrives. The poem has no main verb at all, only "looking," "selling" and "to leave," so nothing is allowed to happen and we stay suspended in the repeating loop. Rhyme is almost absent, which makes the one real echo easy to hear. "Every day" and "to may" chime across two lines, tying the daily grind to the sweep of the calendar. The closing "doorway" picks up the same long-a sound.
That echo helps the ending land. "To finally leave / through the doorway" is the plainest language in the poem, with no red, no glow and no enormous anything. After all the shuffling, the way out is simply an exit, and "finally" admits how long it took. The poem never says whether this means leaving a room, a memory or a way of talking, and it doesn't need to.
What makes the poem significant is that it performs its title instead of describing it. It shows what it is like to assemble a language from limited, borrowed and awkward parts, and it asks the reader to be self-taught too, working out the connections without a gloss. It is a difficult poem, but an honest one about difficulty. The feelings are raw, the dictionary is guarded, and the poem doesn't pretend otherwise.