Ron Silliman

Conceived in 1976 and published in 1980, LEGEND exemplifies the political and linguistic commitments of then-nascent Language writing. Coauthored by Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Ray DiPalma, Steve McCaffery, and Ron Silliman, the work was composed on typewriters and developed through the mail. The twenty-six poems of the volume bring together every possible permutation of collaborative authorship in one-, two-, three-, and five-author combinations, revealing the evolution of distinctive styles against and in conversation with others. Along with a complete reproduction of the original text, LEGEND: The Complete Facsimile in Context includes a critical introduction by editors Matthew Hofer and Michael Golston, a generous selection of material from the authors' correspondence, and a new collaborative piece by the authors. This book will be an essential resource to students and scholars in twentieth-century poetry and poetics.

The second part to be published from Silliman's huge new work-in-progress, Universe,Northern Soul is a book-length poem of observation and reminiscence, a kaleidoscope of impressions occasioned by visits to the north-west of England, home to the music scene of the title.

Itsenäisen klassikon aseman saavuttanut, yksinomaan kysymyslauseista koostuva Auringolaskun roinaa (Sunset Debris, 1986) on johdatus amerikkalaisen kielirunouden legendan tuotantoon. Runoilija Aki Salmelan suomentama teos julkaistaan Ron Sillimanin Suomen vierailuun (Runokuu, Helsingin Juhlaviikot 2014) liittyen.

Revelator is the opening poem in a major sequence entitled Universe. It's the jumping off point for a work that, were Ron Silliman to live long enough, would take him three centuries to complete. We are hopeful. Universe is a poem of globalization and post-global poetics (which Silliman feels is an important reason for publishing this key section outside of the USA). At its core, it addresses the problem that there are only two global systems: the biosphere and capital, while every response to these global systems is invariably local. The first appearance of Revelator in a journal won Poetry's Levinson prize, previously given to poets such as Robert Creeley, Theodore Roethke, Geoffrey Hill, John Ashbery, Robert Duncan, Basil Bunting, William Carlos Williams, Dylan Thomas, Hart Crane, Robert Frost, and Wallace Stevens.

The Alphabet is a remarkable and notorious literary achievement, decades in the making, one continually debated, discussed, and imitated since fragments of it first appeared in the 1970s. Consisting of twenty-six smaller books, one for each letter of the alphabet, it employs language in ways that are startling and innovative. Over the course of the three decades during which it has appeared - in journals, magazines, and as stand-alone volumes - its influence has been wide-ranging, both on practicing poets and on critics who have had to contend with the way it has changed the direction of American poetry. Ron Silliman, a founder of the language poetry movement in the 1960s and one of its most dedicated and acclaimed practitioners, has deployed in ""The Alphabet"" the full range of formal and linguistic experiments for which he is known.""The Alphabet"" is a work of American ethnography, a cultural collage of artifacts, moments, episodes, and voices - historical and private - that capture the dizzying evolution of America's social, cultural, and literary consciousness.

Between the Age of Innocence and the Age of Experience comes The Age of Huts. This book brings together for the first time all of the poems in Ron Silliman's Age of Huts cycle, including Ketjak, Sunset Debris, The Chinese Notebook, and 2197, as well as two key satellite texts, Sitting Up, Standing, Taking Steps, and BART. Each poem offers a radically different approach toward using language to explore the world. One of the founding works of Language Poetry, The Age of Huts is about everything, more or less literally, as each sentence, even each phrase, embarks on its own narrative, linking together to form a large polyphonic investigation of contemporary life. From Ketjak, one of the first poems to employ 'the new sentence,' to 2197, a serial work that scrambles the vocabulary and grammar of its sentences, "The Age of Huts" questions everything we have known about poetry in order to see the world anew.

Small Press Traffic “Book of the Year 2004”. This memoir provides an exquisitely rich exploration of the relation of context to reference, subtext to meaning, back story to presented experience, and composition to poetics. All of Silliman’s work unravels and reforms in this exemplary and exhilarating act of attention, recollection, and reflection.

Space heater. Writing gathers around the pigeons. This line leads to Uranus. Nun census. Silver fork upon a chipped blue plate. I saw sleeping bag, pillows in the Buick's back. The companionship of refrigerator's hum. This is beginning I again began not. Salt shaker tall as coffee's mug. Dented Opel's orange fender. Gray dawn. On the rain falls Spain mainly in the brain. Smudges forming fingertips on the back door's windows. X-ray reads gold-leaf sign on the glass. First sound of roommates beginning to stir. Grey into yellow comes sky to the room. Each page, once tree, soon shall be ash. Leather chipping, flaking off the tattered jacket. A woman who wears sweat pants. Detestimonialist. Don't sneeze on cat. Predictable boots worn by Frye people. Potholders old and dark. Ridges by bridges. Knife blade streaked with butter. That bus coming back this way. Rough surface of cat's tongue. Pin koans. Clutter of seeds, oils, spices atop the side board. Uganda Liquors. Pedestrians scamper across in the sun. Stake each sentence out. Call this 5 Corners. Knot this knot. Ball bounced into the panda plant. Cups fill the cupboard. Aliens from other planets are perfectly visible. Tamal is a half-name in the place of the name. The squeak of faucets. I was on the road discovered. Ash "tray." Yellow caterpillar tractor. Ashtray fills up. Waking is in each instant I am. Across, then down and across. Her tone to him through long years of rough intimacy was at once tender and gruff. Begin each letter at the top. Not this. Pit bull's spittle as it snarls. I saw a burgundy filling the clear vial at needle's end, my blood. Liquid detergent. Ing the trap bears ed. Roach holder made of a matchbook. She never lookd this way, whose face I sought a glimpse of. Free write each day. My fingers counted between nine and eleven. Any symbol is a contrary seen in a positive light. A specific shape, complex amd nameable, to each cloud. Sky pilot. Factory filld with sunrise. Scraping paper, leaving tracks. Forklift to timeclock of montage and cut. Call this tracing. 3 wooden rainwarpd chairs in the (back) yard. Fence is a verb. Scratch that. Each word in Max 3 meant polis. In the mind mines gape. Tell that to the Possum. Words tried to imagine. Coffee ground spilld on the stove top. Bare nap rugs on the cat. Mouth open, take a deep breath, say Ah. On the far gray bay side haze hued the hill. Rush of footsteps upstairs. Bathetic. In a middle that is not yet the middle. The mock coolness of the air-conditiond underground. Hours alter colors of the page. Grease sizzles, spitting on the stove top. Words vary. Swam past sand sharks. An idea of land's end. Pale luncher. An eternal groove around record's center. 4-tunneld city and 7 its hills. Owl light. Impaired eyes, desert rocks are attributed evenly throughout the pain. Red water. We saw on the sea sails. Stoppage makes the line. Translicity elects the voice. Cowabonga. But you dependent for what comes thru. Call it dogface. Know all blame, same difference. Doors "ajar." I glimpse the machinery of the modern dentist thru windows. Pills on my Tarot. Shade throws the light lamp. Pacific Palisades. Write between light green lines. Beer in waxed cups. Noon's rise mooning. Someone must make awnings. On the bus home from work, squinting at a thick printout. On a bus in dawn heavy fog, on my way to meet Taggart. Smouldering sienna. One ideogram, meaning lunch, middle or China. The familiar smell suddenly of balsawood and Testor's in a hospital corridor. My nose, seen as a waterfall. Disfeel an ease. Cary Grant on the face of George Washington. Or the faces of watchers through a window at sunset, their skin blue by the dim light of the telly. Once on the bus, took his shoes off. Detains, denotes detonation. His eyes enlarged by his glasses.

Bernstein is correct: in order to understand the discourse represented by these books, we must indeed learn to read and count differently. . . . Every essay [is] participating in the "symposium of the whole." {Together] they are the product of the most serious attempt in recent years to construct a poetic "community" in the margins of the old mainstream/avant-garde cultural topographies. — Paul Mann