[1] Perelman started his teaching career in 1975 with appearances at Hobart College, Northeastern University, and Cambridge Adult Education.

"[6] One of the Perelman's poems, "China",[9] evoked discussion as a focal point on the merits of Language poetry[10] and received praise from Bruce Boone as being "problematically" beautiful.

[13] In 1985 Perelman edited the proceedings of a series of talks by poets from this movement, entitled, Writing/Talks,[14] which included contributions by Alan Davies, Carla Harryman, Barrett Watten, Lyn Hejinian, Robert Grenier, and others.

Steve Evans, a 1998 contributor to the Dictionary of Literary Biography,[1] wrote that Perelman had a significant role "in defining a formally adventurous, politically explicit poetic practice in the United States", using "a variety of forms, "from the conventional essay to the dramatic monologue, from the carefully measured units of verse to the giddily hybrid pleasures of all manner of counterfeiture".

In Evan's view, Perelman developed a poetry of "radical deconcealment" that searches for the "deep structure of social experience beyond ... postmodernity".

"[18] Andrew Klobucar described Perelman’s poetry as using "dream-work" poetic elements, which "become key factors in the ongoing interplay between symbolic frameworks, ideology and knowledge construction that informs his writing practice.

One set, stemming from his participation in the San Francisco avant-garde scene addressees "the spread of capitalist realism versus the withering of critical platforms, from the fading utopianism of the 60s, to the inability to sustain class or grass roots activism, to the dilution of the radicalism of desire by the near full invasion of commercialism into all human systems of affect.

With the other set, pertaining to his Philadelphia and university-based work, Perelman transitions to "creating mixed forms that can engage with writing in the long run, to find out how eras of poetry such as the classics and modernism might repeat and reinvent themselves.

[7] Perelman's 1994 book, The Trouble with Genius,[24] is a literary critique of his modernist forerunners, Pound, Joyce, Stein and Zukofsky.

Al Filreis suggests that the book is primarily about how to reconcile the populist dimension of their works with the lack of accessibility of their poetics, owing to arcane historical references and opaque styles of writing.

Filreis cites “History is not a sentence” to portray Perelman looking back "in order to remind himself that the present, both required and sufficient, is only right there in the writing".

[15] Steven Helming reported that Perelman spontaneously and wittily answers to the "surprises and quirks of difficult texts" of the authors studied, which discussion pairs Édouard Manet with Franz Kline, Ezra Pound with Theodor Adorno, Igor Stravinsky with John Dos Passos, Federico Fellini with Le Corbusier, and Vladimir Lenin with Dizzy Gillespie.

Middleton highlighted Perelman's concern that academic literary criticism marginalizes poetry in its "practices of theorising and curating literature".

I am very very far from being in love with normative, gatekeeping academic criticism; but pedagogy, repetition and circulation are very widespread structuring conditions against which to act—both as writer and as imaginer of receivers.