POET

Ron Silliman (1946 - )

BIOGRAPHY

Ron Silliman is strongly associated with the West Coast "language poets," whose numbers include Robert Grenier, Kit Robinson, Carla Harryman, and Bob Perelman. In an article for Nation, essayist Hank Lazer discussed language poetry, defining it this way: "Following upon the most adventurous work of Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofsky, William Carlos Williams and Jack Spicer, language writing can be seen as an oppositional literary practice that questions many of the assumptions of mainstream poetry. Instead of considering poetry as a staging ground for the creation and expression of an 'authentic' voice and personality, language poetry arises out of an 'exploded self,' blurs genre boundaries ... and seeks actively collaborative relationships between reader and writer."

The political angle of language poetry was discussed by Keith Tuma in Chicago Review. "There is for some the desire to identify and distinguish from other poetry a specifically oppositional poetry," Tuma wrote. "Often this means overstating the cohesiveness of poetic orthodoxies and their difference from dominant ideologies." Noting that "many of the [language poets] claim to be oppositional," Tuma added that traditional scholarly works on these poets are still published; evidently, "it is still acceptable to equate experimental poetic modes with radical politics." Silliman's collection of critical essays, The New Sentence, said Tuma, demonstrates that the poet "is not unaware—he is sometimes even cynical about—the importance of self-promotion and group promotion in today's crowded poetry world." Defining "the new sentence" itself is the poet's focus on the space between sentences, which "highlights the artificial nature of sentences," according to James Sherry in an article posted on the About Ron Silliman Web page. "Emphasizing space or distance between sentences, extracts from the prose canon one formal issue, elevating it to the status of an icon. The pace and the period are equated."

Dictionary of Literary Biography essayist T. C. Marshall wrote of Silliman, "His frequently book-length poems mix high and low art, punning humor and lyric beauty. They generally employ familiar poetic techniques in unfamiliar combinations and use format on the page in a way that makes one think again about poetic form. In this way his books bring fresh attention to habitual ways of reading and constructing meaning." In 1974's Nix, Marshall continued, Silliman "quartered the pages of the book with crossed lines resembling those of a Cartesian-coordinate graph. In each of the four fields was printed a word, a few words, a part of a word, or parts of a couple of words. Each of these quarters could be read as its own minimal poem. For instance, 'tree sun' in the upper left quarter of the first page presented an image and a commentary on imagism and its relation to Ezra Pound's interest in Chinese written characters. Of course, a reader could see a variety of relations between these two words and their functions as nouns or possibly verbs. A reader of Pound, however, might recall the poet's interest in a Chinese written character that combined the characters for tree and sun to mean east or dawn. On that same page in Nox, one also finds 'tuna flesh,' 'logl,' and 'eggs or size.' The pun on 'exercise' in 'eggs or size' suggests a heavier pun on 'treason' in 'tree sun.'"

Silliman's Ketjak was published in 1974. "That was a key year for the author," noted Marshall, "as he brought his attention to bear on the sentence and the way it can be consciously used in writing. Ketjak began an ongoing project of investigating relations between poetic and prosaic strategies for assembling sense through various uses of sentence-and-paragraph or line-and-stanza formats.... Ketjak itself was an experiment with a prose poetry form made of expanding paragraphs. The basic rule for its composition was that the first paragraph would have one sentence, and the second paragraph would consist of that one sentence and another, and the third would be those two and two more, and so on. The repetitiveness of the form is relieved by Silliman's creation and insertion of new sentences that place the repeated sentences in new contexts."

In the 1980s, Silliman began what is known as "The Alphabet" series. Marshall explained, "Silliman plans 'The Alphabet' as one long book made of books, one for each letter of the alphabet, but he has not written or published the books in alphabetical order. Silliman has so far published in book form poems representing the letters A through P as well as T, W and X" in ABC, Demo to Ink, Jones, LIT, Manifest, (1990), N/O (1994), Paradise (1985), Toner (1992), What, and Xing. Marshall commented that ABC "presented the first three books, which are composed of reflections on how writing expresses the lived world. Their sentences vary in content and approach." He also noted that Silliman's engaging writing style makes "The Alphabet" series "a fascinating and celebrated collection of book-length poems." In 2000 the volume ® ("Circle R") joined the alphabet collection, presenting, in the words of R. D. Pohl in a Buffalo News article, "a remarkably focused and attentive sensibility fully alive and engaged by the ordinariness of its own experience, without striving after higher orders of meaning and consequence."

In his discussion of LIT, Lazer explained that "in spite of its careful constructions, LIT feels neither rigid nor constrained. Silliman's writing is fun to read: Its pleasure lies in the gradual unfolding of intricate forms and in the mix of puns, declarations, sounds and sights from our daily environment, the range of references from philosophy to baseball." Lazer continued, "As with the repetition and modulation of basic rhythm and melodies in the minimalist music of Philip Glass or Steve Reich, key words and sentences echo throughout LIT, providing a pleasing familiarity and recurrence."

Silliman once told Contemporary Authors: "I have, from the beginning, taken poetry to be the most intense relation possible between self and language (hence meaning-mind-world), but, coming from a basically traditional background, it has taken years to drop the pretenses of prevailing modes and admit it: form is passion, passion form. Given forms (whether the sonnet or the Pound-derived projectivist mode) disinterest me since they are usually ways of shoving the language in a work aside."

CAREER

Mecca Publications, San Francisco, CA, editorial assistant, 1972; Committee for Prisoner Humanity and Justice (CPHJ), San Rafael, CA, community organizer and public relations representative, 1972-76; Tenderloin Ethnographic Research Project, San Francisco, CA, project manager, 1977-78; Outreach, Central City Hospitality House, San Francisco, 1979-81. Coordinator of Committee of 2600 (a lobbying organization); chair of Bay Area Prison Coalition, 1973; member of steering committee of Sixth District Coalition; San Francisco State University, lecturer, 1981; University of California, San Diego, visiting lecturer, 1982; New College of California, San Francisco, writer-in-residence, 1982; California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, director of public relations and development, 1982-86, and poet in residence, 1983-90; executive director, Center for Social Research and Education, 1986-89; service marketing manager, ComputerLand Corp., 1989-94; service products marketing manager, Vanstar Corp., 1994—.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

POETRY

Moon in the Seventh House, Gunrunner Press (Milwaukee, WI), 1968.
Three Syntactic Fictions for Dennis Schmitz, Bloodbooks, 1969.
Crow, Ithaca House (Ithaca, NY), 1971.
Mohawk, Doones Press (Bowling Green, OH), 1973.
Nox, Burning Deck (Providence, RI), 1974.
Ketjak, THIS (San Francisco, CA), 1978.
Sitting Up, Standing, Taking Steps, Tuumba Press (Berkeley, CA), 1978.
(With others) Legend, Language/Segue (New York, NY), 1980.
Tjanting, Figures (Berkeley, CA), 1981.
Bart, Potes & Poets Press (Elmwood, CT), 1982.
ABC, Tuumba Press (Berkeley, CA), 1983.
Paradise, Burning Deck (Providence, RI), 1985.
The Age of Huts, Roof (New York, NY), 1986.
LIT, Potes & Poets Press (Elmwood, CT), 1987.
What, Figures (Great Barrington, MA), 1988.
Manifest, Zasterle Press (Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain), 1990.
(With others) Leningrad: American Writers in the Soviet Union, Mercury House (San Francisco, CA), 1991.
Toner, Potes & Poets Press (Elmwood, CT), 1992.
Demo to Ink, Chax Press (Tucson, AZ), 1992.
Jones, Generator Press (Mentor, OH), 1993.
N/O, Roof (New York, NY), 1994.
Xing, Meow Press (Buffalo, NY), 1996.
MultiPlex (includes two works by Karen Mac Cormack), Wild Honey Press (Wickly, Ireland), 1998.
® (pronounced "Circle R"), Drogue Press (New York, NY), 2000.

OTHER

(Editor) A Symposium on Clark Coolidge, 1978.
(Editor) In the American Tree: Language, Realism, Thought (poetry anthology), National Poetry Foundation, University of Maine at Orono (Orono, ME), 1986.
The New Sentence (criticism), Roof (New York, NY), 1987.
(Editor) Unfinished Business: Twenty Years of Socialist Review, Verso Press (London, England), 1991.

Also author of Beyond Prisons, a screenplay for KQED-Television, 1973. Contributor to numerous anthologies, including Postmodern American Poetry, Norton (New York, NY), 1994; Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry, Volume 2, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1998; and Anthology of Modern American Poetry, Oxford University Press, (Oxford, England), 2000. Contributor to more than fifty journals in Canada, England, Mexico, and the United States, including Arts in Society, Caterpillar, Chicago Review, Poetry, Rolling Stone, Southern Review, This, and Tri-Quarterly. Editor of Tottell's, 1970-81, and newsletter of the Committee for Prisoner Humanity and Justice; Socialist Review, executive editor, 1986-89, member of the editorial collective, 1986-91; Computer Land, Pleasanton, CA, managing editor, 1989—. Silliman's correspondence, notebooks, and manuscripts are part of the Archive for New Poetry, Mandeville Department of Special Collections, University of California at San Diego.