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<a href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/'>
Silliman's Blog
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<p class='description'><span>A weblog focused on contemporary poetry and poetics.</span></p>
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Showing posts with label <b>Interviews</b>. <a href="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/">Show all posts</a>
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<div class='status-msg-hidden'>Showing posts with label <b>Interviews</b>. <a href="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/">Show all posts</a></div>
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          <div class="date-outer">
        
<h2 class='date-header'><span>Thursday, November 21, 2002</span></h2>

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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Carl Boon&#8217;s sixth question
feels more complex to me and, as it also addresses the question of blogging per
se, I&#8217;m going to just focus on this inquiry for today.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">6.&nbsp; Your recent project is a web log, or "blog," that
chronicles daily and in great, tedious detail the goings-on of the avant-garde
writing community in and around </i><st1:city><st1:place><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Philadelphia</i></st1:place></st1:city><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">. Your daily entries, often a thousand words or more, are filled with
analysis, links, schedules for readings in the community, and miscellaneous
poetry talk. Can you talk about this project? How do you see its role, its
importance? Does it fill some need in the poetry community? How long will you
maintain it? <o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">I&#8217;ve been thinking
critically &#8211; even obsessively &#8211; about poetry since I was a kid. After <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The New Sentence, </i>I continued writing
criticism pretty regularly until our twins were born in 1992. That first year
or two with twins is pretty intense &amp; there was hardly a moment in which
one might have a complete thought, let alone have the time to write it down. My
goal was to not stop writing poetry and I felt successful just to have
accomplished that.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">But, as my kids have grown
older, I&#8217;ve gotten back to thinking about writing &amp; publishing critically.
First, it&#8217;s excellent discipline. The process forces you to read more
intelligently. Second, all critical writing is a form of organizing, even when
the writer doesn&#8217;t realize that. My problem was/is that I saw few contexts that
struck me as useful in sharing this writing. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">There has been a real
falling off in critical thinking since the 1970s when various talk series in
particular got a lot of people up and speaking intelligently about writing,
their own &amp; that of others. Part of it no doubt is the fault of writers in
my own age cohort, me included. The poetry wars of the late 1970s were hardly
an attractive proposition for younger poets, but in part that is precisely why
the various provocateurs started them.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">And part of the problem of
course is the continuing near-monopoly on critical writing by institutions in &amp;
around the academy. To be of any value at all, critical thinking about poetry
needs to be directed to poets. In the academy, poets are at best eavesdroppers.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">But there has also been a
depoliticization of younger people generally &amp; that has impacted poets.
Some of it has to do with the lack of tangible alternatives to unfettered
capital following the collapse of the old Stalinist bloc &#8211; although for decades
it has been difficult to find any western Marxist who would defend the
so-called &#8220;actually existing socialist countries,&#8221; in large part because state
control over capital is not socialism. In the West, there has been no primary
shared point of agreement as to the goals of the left since the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">U.S.</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-family: Arial;"> exited </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Vietnam</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-family: Arial;"> in 1974. That&#8217;s a long time for groups to go without
much sense of cohesion. The antiglobalism movement is not one thing, but many,
&amp; many of them contradictory.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;
</span>Identarian tendencies were a logical extension of the civil rights
movements of the 1950s &amp; early &#8216;60s, but they have inescapably fed into
this demobilization by isolating the very people they seek to empower. You see
the long-term result in a lot of writing these days that is simultaneously
politically correct <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">and</i>
depoliticized, a politics really of cynicism and disgust. So this also becomes
an incentive not to organize, not to write critically. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">On top of all this, I had a
personal reason for thinking about starting my blog. Since this past spring, my
wife has been struggling with a chronic disease called Reflex Sympathetic
Dystrophy, a neurological syndrome that is both painful &amp; nasty. The
condition has been hard on her and put an enormous strain on everyone in the
family. It was in that context that I felt my sitting around thinking about
poetry, but not actively <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">doing anything
about it</i> beyond the simple production of my own poem, was really lazy &amp;
inexcusable.* <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">So I decided to try a
process in which I would just write something critically pretty much daily and find
some means of putting it out there where poets might see it. It&#8217;s really as
simple as that. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Because my nephew Daniel has
had a <a href="http://danielsilliman.blogspot.com/">blog</a> for some time, as
now do both his mother &amp; sister, I had some familiarity with the form and <span class="GramE">its</span> potential. So while my family was having something of a
disastrous vacation this summer on an island off </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Nova Scotia</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial;"> &#8211; not a good place to be if your meds aren&#8217;t working
&#8211; I mulled over the idea of how I might start a blog that simply focused on one
thing: poetry as I experience it. I began it three days after our return to </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Pennsylvania</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial;">. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">I&#8217;ve been pleased with the
response it has gotten so far &#8211; I&#8217;m getting an average of over 60 hits per day,
over 100 three or four times each week &#8211; and the response, with a few notable
exceptions, has been positive. Right now, it is sort of the flavor of the month
with a certain strain of younger writer, but that will certainly pass. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Marjorie Perloff pointed out
to me, right at the beginning of the blog, that a major limitation of the form
is its scale. These are really short notes, mostly sketched out early in the
morning, then fiddled with over the remainder of the day before being launched.
In this sense, the blog is closer to, say, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">L=A=N=U=A=G=E
</i>as a project than, say, either <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Poetics
Journal </i>or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Chain. </i>Though I guess
it&#8217;s worth noting that it has added up to more than 150 pages in less than
three </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">mont</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial;">hs.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">As to how the blog will
develop or how long I may maintain the site is really something I can&#8217;t tell.
I&#8217;m learning as I go along &amp; it&#8217;s still fun, not a sense of obligation at
all. I don&#8217;t see it continuing on indefinitely any more than I would a poem. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">But what would in fact be
even better would be to see a number of other blogs on the same general subject
that would take off &amp; do their own thing and carry the conversation ever so
much further out into the universe. Right now the ones I read most constantly
&amp; closely are those of <a href="http://jonathanmayhew.blogspot.com/">Jonathan
Mayhew</a>, <a href="http://www.arras.net/weblog/">Brian Kim Stefans</a> &amp; <a href="http://www.laurable.com/log/index.html">Laurable</a>. May a thousand
blogs bloom!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">* My wife
has noted that I began writing as a ten year old because of the difficulties of
growing up in a dysfunctional household. That the stress of her illness should
lead to my blogging strikes her as profoundly parallel behavior.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Posted by
<span class='fn' itemprop='author' itemscope='itemscope' itemtype='http://schema.org/Person'>
<span itemprop='name'>Ron</span>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Wednesday, November 20, 2002</span></h2>

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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Doing research for his
dissertation, Carl Boon sent me a series of 15 questions. It&#8217;s going to take me
a couple of days to get through them all, but it occurred to me that this
really was an interview &amp; Carl consented to the idea of posting them here.
Here are the first five questions:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">1.&nbsp; My thesis is that your poems describe explicitly and
consistently what I call the "clash zone," the space where technology
meets nature, where, in Heidegger's terms, "World" meets
"Earth." To what extent are you conscious in your work of addressing
environmental concerns, the environmental crisis? For example, a passage from </i><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Jones</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> reads, "Diamonds cut into the walk where once trees were planted,
harbor only rubbish, and here a great burst of yellow-headed weeds through the
cracks in the walks" (24). Seemingly "things" replace nature.
This happens in many of your poems. Would you discuss this phenomenon? <o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">I don&#8217;t think of myself as a
naturalist or even as especially ecologically minded. I do however try to be
conscious of how I live in the world. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I grew up in what I would
characterize as an urban suburb. By the end of the 2<sup>nd</sup> World War,
the ring of towns along the north side of Oakland: Emeryville, Berkeley, Albany,
El Cerrito, Richmond had, at least in the flatlands where I lived, largely
filled in any open space that might have existed when my mother &#8211; who&#8217;s not
quite 20 years my senior &#8211; was growing up in the same house. The family across
the street had a chicken coop in their backyard, but no chickens. I used to
hear of cows grazing along Gilman right where the BART tracks come up out of
the earth into an elevated system now, but there was no evidence of it during
my lifetime. But when I got to know some of the &#8220;rich kids&#8221; who lived in the </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Berkeley</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;"> hills &#8211; they were all the children of UC Berkeley
faculty, mostly psych department faculty &#8211; I could see how the infill of new
housing was transforming even their privileged world. That faux forest effect
of affluent suburbs &#8211; exactly the kind of space in which I now live &#8211; was
rapidly being replaced.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">And although Berkeley has
one of the great nature areas in Tilden Park further up in those hills, no more
than three miles from my house, we never went there when I was a kid. My
grandfather&#8217;s idea of spending time outdoors was going to watch trains along
the tracks off Albany Hill, or maybe driving out by the airport to watch
airplanes take off. So nature in that sense was always <span class="GramE">Other</span>.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Yet </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">San Francisco</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;"> across the Bay was clearly a far more urban
environment than the one in which I grew up. Kids lived in apartment buildings
(which I did also, but only during the last year or two of my teen years),
there was no space whatsoever between houses. When I had a friend, George
Murphy, who moved to the City when we were ten, I never saw him again. I tried
to imagine what it would be like to grow up in that environment, but I
couldn&#8217;t. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Now for reasons that are
much more social than natural, I&#8217;m somewhat obsessed with documenting &#8220;the
invisible&#8221; in our lives. If there&#8217;s an enduring theme in my work, that&#8217;s it.
And in urban environment especially, nature is one of those dimensions that
recedes. One tends to forget that sparrows are great urban foragers, or how
weeds fit into the ecological chain, but they&#8217;re there. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Jones </span></i><span style="font-family: Arial;">is a
work in which each sentence describes the ground &#8211; one sentence per day for a
year, to be exact. </span><st1:street><st1:address><span style="font-family: Arial;">Jones Street</span></st1:address></st1:street><span style="font-family: Arial;">, from which I derive the title, is &#8211; or was in the late 1970s, early
1980s, when I worked in the Tenderloin &#8211; the most déclassé street in </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">San Francisco</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">. It was where the transvestite prostitutes worked,
for example, and it had unquestionably the worst residential hotels. So that&#8217;s
what invoked by that title, but in practice, I wrote about whatever bit of
ground I found myself in. A few times, such as once in </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">New York</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial;"> while staying with James Sherry, I remember running
downstairs at one point to his street, Bowery off </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Houston</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">, in order to be able to write something. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">That piece is a companion to
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Skies </i>(one of a few such pairings
that occur in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Alphabet</i>) in which
the same kind of discipline was turned toward the sky &#8211; a sentence per day for
a year. I discovered as I wrote that piece, which is &#8220;earlier&#8221; than <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Jones </i>chronologically, that often what I
described was the horizon, the border of the earth (usually civilization quote
unquote) and the sky itself. Looking at the sky will tell you a lot about the
world that abuts it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">In fact, one of the great
attractions of Hawai&#8217;i for me is not that it is the lush tropical habitat of
the travel ads, but that as a series of lava rocks jutting out of the ocean,
everything there has arrived by transit, all the vegetation, for example,
coming as seeds in the stomach of birds. <span class="GramE">Which is why the
ecosystem there is so volatile.</span> The most common bird one decade might
well have receded twenty years later. It was apparently the bulbul in the
1950s, but when I was there in the 1980s it had become the mynah. So the idea
that natural is in any sense &#8220;timeless&#8221; or ahistorical is one of those myths
that we impose on the world.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">2.&nbsp; I argue repeatedly in this project that technology, as one of
the most powerful weapons of capitalist global ideology, is nefarious. First of
all, do you agree? If so, do you think technology can be "saved"? Can
it be useful as a tool to ease worldwide oppression? <span class="GramE">If so,
how?</span> Or will it continue to be a part of globalization ideology? <o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Technology predates
capitalism &amp; might outlast it as well. Capitalism is much more a consequence
of technology than the other way around. One could say, in fact, that
capitalism arose precisely because it enabled technology to become
&#8220;self-motivated,&#8221; to progress faster. Disruptive innovation, the process by
which one technology replaces another, literally doesn&#8217;t happen in socialist
societies. It&#8217;s clearly never in the interest of the people who would be
displaced. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">If you read the most
passionate love-letter that capitalist innovation ever received, the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Communist Manifesto</i>, a document written
before electricity had been fully productized, it becomes evident that even as
the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Manifesto</i> revels in the process
by which capital tears down whatever it has just created, the form of
organization it envisions to combat this problem is predicated first on
industrialism, with its concentration of workers into debased and demeaning and
dangerous manual labor, and second on the idea that capital, as all-powerful as
it might seem, is and will continue to be relatively immobile. The first was a
remarkable recognition of a process that would not reach its apotheosis for
half a century. The second was a phenomenon that would not change really until
after the Second World War. But both conditions would eventually be
transcended, leaving movements created by workers in the untenable position of
attempting to fight the last war while entirely vulnerable to the one that is
going on today.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Capital&#8217;s first defense has
always been capital flight, whenever it becomes clear that modest (or not so
modest) forms of tyranny will not quell the troublesome workforce. Marx&#8217;s
presumption that international organization is anywhere on the horizon or
remotely possible is itself predicated upon an implicit racist presumption that
the white world is what counts and that the pre-capitalist Third World is not
really an option for capital. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">History however shows that
capital flight and the rapid evolution of technology beyond the epoch of
industrial organization both strengthened capital and proceeded to divide
workers in new ways that they have yet to imagine themselves beyond. Indeed, it
has been just capital&#8217;s willingness to go anywhere for a profit that has
provoked the eruption of premodernist resistance by Muslim fundamentalists.
Fundamentalism of all types can almost always be traced back to the reaction of
premodern peoples to the intrusion of capital.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">3.&nbsp; Your series of volumes which comprise </i><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">The Alphabet<i> </i></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is my primary textual inquiry here. So, a
couple of specific questions about </i>The Alphabet<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">:<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">a) Repetition. I couldn't help but notice, as I was reading </i><st1:place><span class="GramE"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Paradise</span></span></st1:place><span class="GramE"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">, that</i></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> many of the sentences in that book appeared
elsewhere. Would you talk about how you see repetition as important to your
project? You are certainly conscious of repeating images in several books (the
plum tree, the parrot, etc.). Why do you do this, besides the obvious thing we
tell freshmen, <span class="GramE">that</span> a repeated theme or image must be
an important one?<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">It&#8217;s interesting that you
should ask that in the context of </span><st1:place><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Paradise</span></i></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">, where it seems mostly incidental, since it is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ketjak </i>and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tjanting</i> where the device appears as a relatively strict formal
element. In each instance, repetition serves multiple purposes. Perhaps what I
am most attracted to is the push-pull effect of two of these purposes: at one
level, repetition ties a text of otherwise diverse materials together. It
enables memory to create a matrix of thematic materials that impacts not only
the reiterated elements but also many aspects of other sentences or phrases
that now get thrown into a kind of spotlight. On another level it does this
also rhythmically. In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ketjak </i>in
particular, that was the element I was most interested in. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">But if it functions to bind
a text together, strict repetition also calls up the impossibility of
experiencing any written work synchronically. When I write &#8220;This <span class="SpellE">this</span> <span class="SpellE">this</span> <span class="SpellE">this</span>,&#8221;
there is a beginning, middle and end. Individual words function differently
even when they&#8217;re the same word. Stein of course makes great hay out of this
aspect of repetition. It really disrupts the idea of before and after, and of
progression. So on the one hand, reiteration ties the text together while on
the other, it accentuates the separateness of individual elements. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">b) Would you discuss
your favorite volumes of </i><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">The
Alphabet</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">, and why they are so?<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">This would be like
discussing my favorite children. On any given day, I am apt to answer the
question of which ones are my favorites with entirely different texts. I have
had such an intense &amp; uniquely personal experience with each that the idea
of comparing it with another &#8211; which from my perspective would simply reduce it
to writing &#8211; isn&#8217;t really possible. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">So whenever I do tend to
think of this question, which is only when other people think to pose it, I do
so in terms that completely extraneous to the texts. I really like certain book
covers &#8211; like the painting by John Moore that Geoff Young used for the cover
when he published <span class="GramE"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">What</i></span>.
The neighborhood in which my mother still lives is visible down in the
flatlands of that painting. That, or the typesetting that Charles Alexander did
for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Demo to Ink</i> or that there was a
hardback edition of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Paradise</i> or the
wonderful image that Bill Luoma produced for the cover of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">&#174;</i>, is what I think about when someone poses this question. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">4.&nbsp; Is the
"new sentence," as you described and defined it in your essay of the
same name, still a relevant way of describing your poetic method? Do you still
adhere to that method to create poems? Have you deviated greatly from it? Would
you like to update or expand, in some way, your discussion in that essay?<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I wrote &#8220;The New Sentence&#8221;
at a very specific moment in time &#8211; 1977 &#8211; when the turn toward forms of longer
prose was just starting to be visible among the poets of </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">San Francisco</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">. I had written <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ketjak</i>
three years earlier and had completed (or was very near to doing so) the other
poems that make up <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Age of Huts</i>,
and was just starting <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tjanting</i>. What
I wanted to do in that talk was two things &#8211; first to situate what I saw being
written in the mid-1970s into a broader historical framework, second to
identify a device that struck me as turning up in various modes in the work of
a lot of different writers. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The new sentence was/is any
sentence placed into a text so as to minimize any cognitive mapping back to the
previous sentence, as well as to limit mapping going forward. It might have
been more properly termed the new space, insofar as it is in that gap between
sentences &#8211; a location in the field of writing for which we still lack a decent
term &#8211; that the new sentence&#8217;s functionality appears. But as this device turns
the reader&#8217;s attention to the immanence of the sentence at hand, whatever it
might be, I settled on that broader category for my noun. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I still use the device quite
a bit &#8211; it&#8217;s sort of the default option for me &#8211; although I never was
completely under its sway even back in the late 1970s. It&#8217;s one possibility
amid a rich palette that any writer has at his or her disposal. But I think its
moment as a social phenomenon, when it was being tested and tried by all manner
of writers more or less simultaneously, had passed even by the time that talk
made it into print.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">5.&nbsp; How would you advise dealing with those in the mainstream
academy (poets, professors, and critics), who continue to be downright hostile
to the concerns of those who fall under the umbrella of "Language
poetry"?<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">While I&#8217;m afraid I have a
bad habit of tweaking their noses in print, my interest in both pre- and
anti-modernists is more anthropological than literary. If they had any sense of
history, let alone literary history, they would understand the implications of
their own roles better. But if they did, they would have to change their lives.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Now, having said that, I
should note that there are any number of conservative writers whose work I
genuinely like and read with enthusiasm: Bob Hass, Annie Finch, Jack Gilbert,
Paul Muldoon, Daisy Fried, Wendell Berry, <span class="GramE">Alan</span> Dugan.
I&#8217;ve given readings with several of these poets in the past and no doubt will
do so again in the future. I think that it is completely possible to write such
poetry from a position of integrity with considerable intelligence and skill.
It may even more difficult to do so, given that the social conditions for such
poetry disappeared roughly the moment the South seceded from the </span><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Union</span></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b>October</b><br /><br />Madrid<br />with Charles Bernstein & Susan Bee<br /><br />Barcelona<br /><div><br /><br />Saragossa?<br /><br /><b>November</b><br /><br />Rome?<div><br /></div><div><br /></div></div>
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<li><a href='http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/1544'>Academy of American Poets</a></li>
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<a href="http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10742.php">I: The Age of Huts<br /><br /></a>             <a href="http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10742.php"><img src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh6.googleusercontent.com/proxy/u_VsYLU9NS_tJXOrl6A4RM1Dne7QkuSslpBc0StgKSXXoIDStYoXqSwDo2tuxST00QD3ynVJH4yjAhcEzTWyM0F_RriCRx9yZdyygceY2wm-%3Ds0-d" /></a><br /><br /><br />II: Tjanting<br /><br /><a href="https://www.saltpublishing.com/products/tjanting-9781876857196"><img src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh4.googleusercontent.com/proxy/efy1lIcVIKeKSdy_WUDIxV8WLN0OJmA3f7enQ2XDwxwt7Bh5ssfQQAkW_o4oG6FqrB1RGf7CX-Rw-VQ4u36RIuwSsCMxWjjHFDP4c7CbW2d_%3Ds0-d" /></a><br /><br /><br /><a href="http://www.uapress.ua.edu/product/Alphabet,1897.aspx">III: The Alphabet<br /><br /></a><a href="http://www.uapress.ua.edu/product/Alphabet,1897.aspx"><img id="ctl00_MainContent_ProductInfo1_ctl00_PrimaryImage_PrimaryImage" onclick="javascript:window.open(&#39;http://www.uapress.ua.edu//images/temp/212-1897-Product_LargeToMediumImage.jpeg&#39;, 1, &#39;resizable=1, width=500, height=700&#39;)" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/OnaMjXm2h6XxneM04RgHx1Bkf2Wi9UE3a8c3o0NDvW5wXo7BK3MaM5VP9YfbEIpHYxAstTorwhNW4lhhkNuua5bDX7Ogr2UgZ1NMDDjeh-0bNnuo-WH-9pGHIR6lv-4-_UDHVNe36xB6%3Ds0-d" style="border: 1px solid Gray;" /></a><br /><div><br /></div><div>IV. from Universe</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>
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<h2 class='title'>Other Books in Print</h2>
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">MEMOIRS &amp; COLLABORATIONS</span><br /><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Leningrad-American-Writers-Soviet-Union/dp/1562790056">Leningrad</a><br /><a href="http://www.thegrandpiano.org/">The Grand Piano</a><br /><a href="https://www.saltpublishing.com/products/under-albany-9781844710515">Under Albany</a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">CRITICISM</span><br /><a href="http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/0937804207/the-new-sentence.aspx">The New Sentence</a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">ANTHOLOGY</span><br /><a href="https://secure.touchnet.com/C22921_ustores/web/classic/product_detail.jsp?PRODUCTID=327&SINGLESTORE=true">In The American Tree</a><br /><br /><br /><br />
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<br /><img alt="" src="file%3A///Users/Lynn/Desktop/silliman2a.jpg" / /><img alt="" src="file%3A///Users/Lynn/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/moz-screenshot.png" / /><span style="color: #990000; font-weight: bold;">RON SILLIMAN</span> has written and edited 40 books, and had his poetry and criticism translated into 16 languages. Silliman was a 2012 Kelly Writers House Fellow, the 2010 recipient of the Levinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation, a 2003 Literary Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2002 Fellow of the Pennsylvania Arts Council, and a 1998 Pew Fellow in the Arts. Silliman has a plaque in the walk dedicated to poetry in his home town of Berkeley and a sculpture in the Transit Center of Bury, Lancaster, a part of the Irwell Sculpture Trail. He lives in Chester County, Pennsylvania and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />(c) 2002-2019 by Ron Silliman.
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