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Showing posts with label <b>Nick Piombino</b>. <a href="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/">Show all posts</a>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Wednesday, April 21, 2010</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center'><a href="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2742/4508092396_a03feb56e3_o.jpg"><span style='color:windowtext;text-decoration:none;text-underline:none'><img border="0" height="292" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh4.googleusercontent.com/proxy/k-yoAx0N1T1K_yxY_FX7Lsg4LH48Bbe7g2lVn7gmJ10u_QrjlWz2C44N1856pybktgI_3zbO5KuN7hEX85oZVzDIFyl1BWTp6ZN0c6PBNu_SPFg%3Ds0-d" width="388"></span></a><br> <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;line-height: 115%'>Nick Piombino, Toni Simon</span></i><span style='color:#0D0D0D; mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242'><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint: 242'>Looking at the 400 (exactly) aphorisms collected in Nick Piombino&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/9781933382487/contradicta-aphorisms.aspx"><span style='color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242'>Contradicta: Aphorims</span></a>, </i>a collaboration with painter &amp; collagiste Toni Simon, you might think that since aphorisms are by their nature quite short &#8211; I think the longest one here runs to all of four sentences &#8211; that this will be the literary equivalent of Skittles, something sweet that you can gobble by the handful &amp; run through pretty quickly.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal>You would be exactly wrong.</p>

<p class=MsoNormal>If, in fact, there is an appropriate analog for this little book (6&#8221; high, 4&#188;&#8221; wide, 167 pages thick, with no more than 4 aphorisms per page &amp; that much only 33 times), it&#8217;s not Skittles but ironwood, the carved objects of which invariably weigh several times what you anticipate. This may look like a terrific book to slot into one&#8217;s back pocket, to read on the bus or subway, snacking on it as you go about your day. But the truth is it&#8217;s heavy. It&#8217;s actually difficult to go through more than two or three of these paired aphorisms at a time. You find yourself wanting to think or dream about them. Or the argue about others, sometimes within the same pair.</p>

<p class=MsoNormal>Now pairs are an issue. This is not a book of 400 aphorisms, but rather of 200 paired aphorisms, each pair divided by an asterisk, the white space of the page often haunted (absolutely the right word) by Simon&#8217;s post-surreal collages that &#8211; just like the text &#8211; appear so simple until you actually absorb them (the torso of a man emerging from the shell of a mollusk with pages to sell). </p>

<p class=MsoNormal>Aphorisms are, by their nature, inherently deeper than they first seem. Paired aphorisms pose an entire world in their tension. The book&#8217;s title, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Contradicta, </i>suggests that there will be a logical structure here: </p>

<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center'>A<br> <br> *<br> <br> -<span style='text-transform:uppercase'>A<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal>But that is relatively seldom the case. In the process of reading through this book, which took just about two months cover to cover, I came to think of that asterisk at the center as being more like a gear. I could imagine an ideal (interactive?) version of these texts in which the two sections of each pair would vary where they appear, as if they were moments on a clockface. The first aphorism might appear straightforward, the literary equivalent of 12 o&#8217;clock. For example:</p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:1.0in;margin-bottom:10.0pt; margin-left:1.0in'>The pleasure in viewing the belongings of the great masters derives from the inability to believe that they did things in the same way and places that everyone else does.</p>

<p class=MsoNormal>But where precisely should one situate its pair?</p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:1.0in;margin-bottom:10.0pt; margin-left:1.0in'>My father never spoke so now I won&#8217;t stop listening.</p>

<p class=MsoNormal>Six o&#8217;clock that is not. Seven thirty? Eleven? I could entertain those relations of the second to the first much more readily. In this sense, I think <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Contradicta </i>is actually misnamed. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Abdicta </i>feels more to the point. Or even <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Polydicta, </i>tho I tend to think poly- invariably is a cop-out, at least as a prefix in theory.</p>

<p class=MsoNormal>This example also raises a lot of the other issues that makes this book anything but light. I&#8217;m not at all certain that I concur with Piombino&#8217;s proposition in this first paragraph. It might be true in some of the houses of the &#8220;masters&#8221; that I&#8217;ve visited over the years (Goethe, George Washington), but it is profoundly not true with others. Thomas Jefferson did not even sleep the way other men did, let alone dine,write, think or even use his Bible. To step into Monticello is to walk into the imagination of someone who never did anything just because that was how it was done. Which is why, frankly, his ownership &amp; sexual use of slaves is not something that can be passed over with a &#8220;he was no different than other men of his time &amp; state&#8221; defense. </p>

<p class=MsoNormal>My relationship to that second aphorism is even more complicated. My father was gone after I was two. My grandfather &#8211; a very different role &#8211; was himself very close to the description Piombino offers of his father. But that was at least partly a reaction to the fact that my grandmother was never silent&#185;, and in her psychotic episodes, not in the slightest ordinary with what issued forth verbally. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style: normal'>That </i>is why I can&#8217;t stop listening, but also I would never think to use the auxiliary <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>won&#8217;t. </i>There is nothing voluntary in the process, at least for me.</p>

<p class=MsoNormal>These are the sorts of engagements / arguments I find myself having with virtually all of the paired aphorisms here, which explains why perhaps this little book proves the antithesis of easy reading. Not every pair, nor every aphorism, sparks such a personal(ized) debate for me, which is to be expected when you have 400 of everything (think of Grenier&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Sentences, </i>or the thousands of Eigner poems, to pick two examples). Further, I think the aphorism itself is a problematic format for our time. One of the two (yet another pair!) epigrams at the head of this text is one from Karl Kraus&#8217; 1909 <i style='mso-bidi-font-style: normal'>Dicta and Contradicta, </i>to wit:</p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:1.0in;margin-bottom:10.0pt; margin-left:1.0in'>The philosopher thinks from eternity into the moment; the poem from the moment into eternity.</p>

<p class=MsoNormal>At one level, this is not much more than Williams&#8217; &#8220;No ideas but in things,&#8221; aligning poetry with specificity. At another, it is all about categories. Indeed, its argument is that philosophy lies in categories as such. Specificity is but an instance when looked at from that end of the telescope. And while it is true that there are poets (Robert Duncan, William Blake, Walt Whitman, even Ginsberg) for whom these sublime (divine) groupings are as (or more) real as any piece of belly-button lint, there is likewise that other side of the dance, Williams, the Objectivists, Creeley &amp; Olson at their best, for whom such aggregate thinking invariably falsifies. It is what Williams despised most about Eliot. For a lot of writers of my generation &#8211; and I&#8217;m one of them &#8211; arguing about generalities comes across as muddy or even sentimental. That&#8217;s a risk Piombino knowingly tackles head-on. He&#8217;s not, to my mind, uniformly successful when he does, but it&#8217;s never for erring on the side of caution.</p>

<p class=MsoNormal><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Contradicta: Aphorisms </i>is a complicated, exhausting, often maddening book, one that is hard to &#8220;just read&#8221; but almost impossible to put down. Even if you feel you&#8217;re watching Nick Piombino sky diving without a parachute, you never doubt that he knows exactly what he&#8217;s doing.</p>

<p class=MsoNormal><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:8.0pt;line-height:115%'>&#185; 42 years of working in a paper recycling plant &#8211; there is a highrise condo there now &#8211; in Emeryville also robbed my grandfather of much of his hearing as well. The truth about the real world is that<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>  </span>such circumstances seldom have single causes. One problem with aphorisms is that they tend to edit these out.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Monday, March 03, 2003</span></h2>

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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;"><a href="http://www.slought.org/">Slought</a> is a sizeable storefront gallery in
an abandoned bank, complete with vault, at the southwest corner of the </span><st1:place><st1:placetype><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">University</span></st1:placetype><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;"> of </span><st1:placename><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">Pennsylvania</span></st1:placename></st1:place><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;"> campus, right about the point where
university-sponsored development comes face-to-face with the low-income
African-American community that is its neighbor. Were it not for the brand-new
movie multiplex and natural foods market on steroids on the same block, one
might be inclined to view Slought itself as a form of gentrification*. Compared
with these new neighbors, however, Slought seems as frail &amp; endangered as
any of the older businesses or residences in the vicinity.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">Not coincidentally, Slought
is also the brainchild of Aaron Levy, one of the most energetic art impresarios
I&#8217;ve come across in decades. Slought has taken on one of the most ambitious
programs of exhibitions and performances of any space in </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">America</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;"> &#8211; it doesn&#8217;t seem to have occurred to
Levy that this stuff is supposed to be difficult. Ten years from now, several
of the larger &amp; older cultural institutions in </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">Philadelphia</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;"> are going to be wondering just how a
20-something kid managed to trump all their endowments &amp; professional
expertise. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">Last Friday, for example,
Slought brought together 12 of the hottest younger poets in North America for a
reading, the first half of an event dedicated to something ambiguously titled <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Social Mark Poetry Symposium</i>. They
came from the Bay Area (David <span class="SpellE">Buuck</span>), </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">Minnesota</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;"> (Mark Nowak), </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">Calgary</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;"> (</span><st1:personname><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">Louis Cabri</span></st1:personname><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">), DC (Jules <span class="SpellE">Boykoff</span>,
<span class="SpellE">Kaia</span> Sand), </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">New York</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;"> (Jeff Derksen, Kristin Prevallet,
Rodrigo Toscano, Carol Mirakove, </span><st1:personname><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">Laura</span></st1:personname><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;"> <span class="SpellE">Elrick</span>, and Alan Gilbert) and even </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">Philadelphia</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;"> (Josh Schuster). It was one of those
events where, twenty years from now, you will know 200 people who claim to have
attended. But I&#8217;m here to tell you that there were just fifty in actual
attendance on Friday &amp; 12 of them were the poets. It was, as a result, a
relatively intimate gathering of some of the best minds of a generation that is
just now hitting its stride. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">Of course, the best minds
isn&#8217;t always identical to the best work &amp; more than a few of the poets
involved read works that seemed to me a fair distance short of the finest
things I&#8217;ve seen in theirs in print. While some poets were, in fact, riveting &#8211;
an especially awesome feat in a setting where each reader had only ten minutes
within which to work &#8211; particularly Toscano, Derksen and Sand (the &#8220;bracket
readers,&#8221; the first two &amp; the last one), several others chose texts that
were timely, or social, primarily by virtue of being recent anti-war tomes.
This reached a strange apotheosis during the second half of the reading when
two poets, Kristin Prevallet &amp; Jules Boycoff, both read pieces that
subjected <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/09/20020912-1.html">the same
speech</a> by His W-ness to the U.N. to something very close to the same
literary procedure, one associated with Kevin <span class="SpellE">Nealon&#8217;s</span>
old &#8220;subliminal man&#8221; routines from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Saturday
Night Live. </i>In each instance, the appropriated material is interrupted by a
disquieting word or phrase that reveals the surface text to be essentially
hypocritical. Where <span class="SpellE">Nealon&#8217;s</span> routines offered entire
running commentaries on the surface text, both Prevallet &amp; Boycoff used the
device more bluntly, essentially inserting a single percussive term that
gradually expanded through reiteration to overwhelm the surface text. For
Prevallet, the term was &#8220;oil,&#8221; a word that she can pronounce with a remarkable
number of different emphases and enunciations; For Boycoff, the word was &#8220;</span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">Iraq</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">.&#8221; <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">Boycoff, who went after
Prevallet, gets points in my book for having the chutzpah to read his piece
after hearing hers, knowing for instance that her work had gone for &#8211; quite
successfully &#8211; flashy performative aspects that his own quieter version did not
exploit. I was especially glad that he did, because Boycoff raised the very
questions of a &#8220;social mark&#8221; to the level of manifest content in a way that had
been heretofore absent in the reading. It is one thing for all of these poets to
believe that King George is quite mad, but what does it mean <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">as poetic practice? </i>By demonstrating how
two very different poets from different cities had arrived at virtually the
same strategy of response &#8211; though in practice, the two works sounded fairly different
&#8211; Boycoff &amp; Prevallet brought the limitations of this strategy right to the
fore.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">Several of these are among
the problematics of any group reading: the performative drowns out the
contemplative; flash obliterates the subtle; agreement overwhelms ambiguity.
It&#8217;s a context in which one is better off being humorous than insightful. In
not trying to outdo <span class="SpellE">Prevallet&#8217;s</span> literally combat-boot
stomping rendition, Boycoff put all those issues out for everyone in the
audience to see. In a sense, this tendered the question more fully than other,
relatively quiet readings by, say, <span class="SpellE">Buuck</span> or Gilbert. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">I&#8217;m afraid that we&#8217;ve all
been to readings in which one of the <span class="GramE">readers</span> attempts
to &#8220;Mau Mau&#8221; the rest, as we used to say in the 1970s, but this was not an
example of that. Prevallet had merely written a rousing poem &amp; given it a
reading appropriate to that spirit, not so terribly dissimilar in tone to Allen
Ginsberg&#8217;s famous antiwar chant, &#8220;<span class="SpellE">Hūm</span> Bomb.&#8221; In
a sense, Prevallet had recognized most fully the impossibility of presenting a
full-featured distinctive reading in ten minutes &amp; figured out a way around
that. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">Yet it is worth remembering, <span class="SpellE">asI</span> wouldn&#8217;t have without <span class="SpellE">Boycoff&#8217;s</span>
reading, that &#8220;<span class="SpellE">Hūm</span> Bomb,&#8221; even though it is a
wonderful set piece, isn&#8217;t Ginsberg&#8217;s great anti-war poem, &#8220;<a href="http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/ginsberg/sutra.htm">Wichita
Vortex Sutra, Part II</a>&#8221; is. &#8220;Vortex&#8221; has layers of compassion, insight,
ambiguity &amp; nuance that were seldom equaled in the 20<sup>th</sup>
century&#8217;s long contemplation of humankind&#8217;s collective self-abuse, and really
transcends Ginsberg&#8217;s usual stance (present even here) as public satirist.
Think, for example, how the phrase &#8220;bad guess&#8221; reverberates through &#8220;Vortex,&#8221;
which approaches of question of the American holocaust in </span><st1:place><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">Indochina</span></st1:place><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;"> not as a discussion focused on horror,
but on language:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Use the words<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span class="GramE">language</span>, language<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>&#8220;A
bad guess&#8221; . . .</span><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">The war is language<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span class="GramE">language</span> abused<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span class="GramE">for</span> Advertisement<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="GramE"><span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">like</span></span><span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> magic power on the planet . . . <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 6;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Language<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">O longhaired magician
come home take care of your dumb helper<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span class="GramE">before</span> the
radiation deluge floods your livingroom,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 5;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span class="GramE">your</span> magic <span class="SpellE">errandboy&#8217;s</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 6;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span class="GramE">just</span> made a bad
guess again<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 5;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span class="GramE">that&#8217;s</span> lasted a whole decade.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">The image of McNamara as the
beleaguered Mickey Mouse in the &#8220;Sorcerer&#8217;s Apprentice&#8221; section of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Fantasia</i> highlights one other feature of
Ginsberg&#8217;s great poem, dictated into a tape recorder while tooling around </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">Wichita</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;"> in a VW minibus, that has been absent in
virtually all of the antiwar texts that I&#8217;ve read or heard to date related to
Iraq: a fundamental empathy for the very human beings who are ordering what we
might well believe to be atrocities. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">Like its cousin ambiguity,
empathy is something that is exceptionally difficult to communicate in any function
of life, let alone a poem. It is absolutely not possible in a </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">tex</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">t that seeks agreement, or which seeks to
demonize anyone. It was the problem of agreement that hung most heavily over <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Social Mark </i>on Friday &#8211; poets who
had no difficulty agreeing with one another, but who seemed unable to
articulate a vision of the critical in their own work that might move beyond a
simple consensus. Further, the articulation of that very agreement seemed to me
to make it harder to hear the quieter texts &#8211; thus Derksen&#8217;s punctuation of his
reading with the names of nations &amp; numbers (&#8220;Angola 97,&#8221; &#8220;</span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">Algeria</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;"> 84&#8221;) or Cabri&#8217;s own reiteration of &#8220;the
A4 was renamed the V2&#8221; or </span><st1:personname><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">Laura</span></st1:personname><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;"> <span class="SpellE">Elrick&#8217;s</span> image of &#8220;oil barons groping&#8221;
or Carol Mirakove reading from Mike Davis&#8217; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">City
of Quartz, </i>made it just that much more difficult to find the center of Alan
Gilbert&#8217;s comments on time, or to understand why David <span class="SpellE">Buuck&#8217;s</span>
use of stuttering &amp; gagging noises in his own reading was so aggressively
anti-performative, almost the antithesis of Toscano&#8217;s scat variants, or why
Nowak&#8217;s aesthetics of historic documentation focuses on the <span class="SpellE">Wobbly&#8217;s</span>
role in the Minnesota mines. Or, for that matter, how to balance the
well-polished finish of Sand&#8217;s texts in the context of Mirakove reading from
handwritten <span class="SpellE">manuscripts,deep</span> green ink in a
spiral-bound notebook. Or why Josh Schuster&#8217;s short prose pieces seem so
determined to push the idea of the Kafka-<span class="SpellE">esque</span> so
much further than it has gone before. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">In his excellent <a href="http://nickpiombino.blogspot.com/2003_03_02_nickpiombino_archive.html#89989643">weblog</a>
on Sunday, </span><st1:personname><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">Nick
 Piombino</span></st1:personname><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">
writes, give or take a typo, &#8220;There is nothing to compare with the pleasure of
allowing poems to meet me halfway.&#8221; Piombino is referring I think to the
process of writing, but the same rings true for the process of reading.
Signaling for agreement instantly collapses the process into one of having no
such room for maneuver, even when, in fact, one does agree. If nothing else,
it&#8217;s almost always the weakest move <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">tactically</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Again, let me make Ginsberg the example. As
good as &#8220;<span class="SpellE">Hūm</span> Bomb&#8221; might be, there is virtually
no room for the reader inside the </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">tex</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">t. You &#8220;get it,&#8221; more or less instantly,
or you don&#8217;t &#8211; and woe unto the reader who doesn&#8217;t agree with the poem of
concurrence! <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">&#8220;<a href="http://homepage.mac.com/thorntonstreiff/ginswich.html#Section%206">Wichita
Vortex Sutra</a>&#8221; is a more complex experience, with lots of places inside the
text for readers to move around, even to disagree without necessarily falling
out of the reading experience. This text particularly has stuck in my head this
weekend because of a <a href="http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/entertainment/books/5293975.htm">review</a>
in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Philadelphia Inquirer</i> of a new
book of critical prose by Robert Pinsky, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://pup.princeton.edu/titles/7329.html">Democracy, Culture and the
Voice of Poetry</a>, </i>by <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Inquirer </i>book
critic Carlin Romano. Without defending Pinsky&#8217;s position &#8211; which I generally
tend to think as hopelessly self-contradictory &#8211; it&#8217;s amusing to see him being
attacked essentially from the right by Romano. But when Romano writes<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">What does it say about American poetry today - whatever the
insider stock valuations of Frank Bidart, Jorie Graham, Yusef Komunyakaa, or
anyone else - that there's not a single line of contemporary American poetry
important enough for Americans to know and hold in common?</span><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">Romano demonstrates not only
his lack of grounding in cultural history**, but specifically forgets that one
poem &#8211; and it wasn&#8217;t <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Howl </i>or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kaddish</i> &#8211; transformed Allen Ginsberg
from being, to Romano&#8217;s world, which is that essentially of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">People</i> magazine, a cultural curiosity of
the 1950s into the most popular poet of his generation. The poem that moved
Ginsberg from the larva stage of Beat satirist into something akin to an oracle
in the 1960s was &#8220;Wichita Vortex Sutra,&#8221; read over &amp; over at protest
demonstration after Be-In after rally. Although Ginsberg read it less often
after the mid-1970s, it was almost certainly the most widely consumed poem &#8211;
especially aurally &#8211; to have been written in my lifetime. If a single poem can
be said to have had an impact on the course of the Vietnam War, it was
Ginsberg&#8217;s great juxtaposition of apocalypse in </span><st1:place><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">Indochina</span></st1:place><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">, <a href="http://homepage.mac.com/thorntonstreiff/PhotoAlbum2.html">small town life</a>
in </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">Kansas</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;"> &amp; bureaucratic gridlock in </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">Washington</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">. If you understood the poem, supporting
the continued slaughter of innocents, theirs &amp; ours alike, was simply
unimaginable. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">Ж<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Ж<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Ж<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">I was unhappy not to be able
to attend the second half of the event at Slought, a panel discussion the
following afternoon, albeit with the same ten-minutes-per-poet constraint,
because the evening left me with a lot of ideas &amp; even more questions. Certainly,
the selection &#8211; made, I take, principally by Cabri &#8211; of poets wasn&#8217;t intended
only to identify younger writers with politics (Jennifer Moxley, </span><st1:personname><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">Lytle Shaw</span></st1:personname><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">, Brian Kim Stefans, </span><st1:personname><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">Kevin Davies</span></st1:personname><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">, Juliana Spahr &amp; Jenna Osman all
would have been present if that were the case) and it was interesting to note
that two of the poets included were part of the famous <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Apex of the M</i> editorial staff, and that one, Toscano, shows up on
Stefans&#8217; mysterious list of &#8220;<a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2003_02_01_ronsilliman_archive.html%2389832651">Creep
poets</a>.&#8221; I would like to have heard them take up the question of the social
and to see if they made greater use of the critical </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">tex</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">ts that are, at least for the present,
included on the Slought website for the occasion than they did the poetry
posted. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">The question of the social
itself is one that I think haunts us now as poets for good reason. And I don&#8217;t
think that we have anything like the time that existed in the sixties to mount
a challenge to what is occurring on the world scene today. So I want to thank
the poets of Slought for having raised the question, and especially Jules
Boycoff &amp; the quieter poets on that agenda for having given it depth.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">* Bank
building preservation is a recognized mode of gentrification in </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">Philadelphia</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">. Two of the city&#8217;s most
expensive downtown hotels, the <a href="http://www.architectureweek.com/2000/0705/design_4-2.html">Ritz Carlton</a>
and Loews, are situated in former bank headquarters facilities. Loews still
illuminates the giant <a href="http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/PSFS_Building.html">PSFS</a> neon
sign &#8211; the first neon sign in the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">U.S.</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;"> &#8211; standing for the long
defunct Philadelphia Saving Fund Society. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">** Nowhere in
our K-12 educational system is the actual <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">difficulty</i>
of reading &amp; writing taught for what it is, as a direct source of pleasure,
so what a shock to discover that there is not a popular movement to appreciate
such a thing, nor what a surprise that poets who compromise what they attempt
as writers in the mistaken name of &#8220;communication&#8221; merely find themselves
muddled in the middle. If ever there were to be such a thing as a popular
poetry, it would not occur through poets retreating to a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">trobar lieu </i>that disappeared several centuries ago &amp; has no
social reason for returning, but only through a readership that is truly
literate, that is to say, prepared to appreciate <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">trobar clus. </i>And when book critics &amp; poets laureate don&#8217;t get
it, you can be sure there is a long way to go. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Wednesday, February 19, 2003</span></h2>

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<tt><span style="font-family: Arial; mso-ansi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">&#8220;Free association in poetry facilitates connection
with others.&#8221; So says </span></tt><st1:personname><tt><span style="font-family: Arial; mso-ansi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Nick Piombino</span></tt></st1:personname><tt><span style="font-family: Arial; mso-ansi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">.
Do Poindexter &amp; Ashcroft know about this?<o:p></o:p></span></tt></div>
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<tt><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">Dear Ron, <o:p></o:p></span></tt></div>
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<tt><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">Mrs. Freud, it is said, objected to Sigmund's practice of
psychoanalysis and considered it a form of "pornography." A more
contemporary form of repugnance &#8211; by, say an "innovative" poetry
writer &#8211; to a psychoanalytic approach finds objections perhaps more to its
confessional aspects or focus on the self. In a discussion I had about
psychoanalysis with a poet recently she said "Who wouldn't enjoy going to
someone just to hear <span class="GramE">yourself</span> talking about
yourself?" The interest on the part of poets in psychoanalysis and related
careers appears to be growing. Kimberly Lyons, Joel Lewis and Kim <span class="SpellE">Rosenfield</span> are psychotherapists and John Godfrey is a
nurse. There are many others. More than one poet has asked me about the
suitability of social work and psychotherapy as careers for a poet and my quick
answer is that I feel that it is a very good combination. These professions,
like teaching, get you out there working with other people employing language
and ideas in a direct fashion which I find helpful in addressing some of the
emotional pitfalls of being a poet. But, unlike teaching, you actually have
less time to think and worry about whether anyone reads or understands what you
are writing or anybody else is writing. <o:p></o:p></span></tt></div>
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<tt><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">What excited me about the poetry centered around such
poets as Clark Coolidge, Bernadette Mayer, Ted Berrigan, Frank <span class="SpellE">Kuenstler</span>, Joseph Ceravolo, John Ashbery, John Cage, Alice
Notley, David Shapiro, Hannah Weiner, Armand Schwerner, Vito Acconci, and
Jackson Mac Low, all of whom I read avidly in the 60's, I found also and more
in the circle of poets including you publishing in </span></tt><st1:personname><tt><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">Barrett Watten</span></tt></st1:personname><tt><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">'s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">This</i> magazine back in the 70's and a little bit later in the 70's <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">L=A=N=G=U=G=E </i>here. This had everything
to do not so much with completely getting away from the personal or
confessional in writing but from getting away from doing it in a boring, corny
or unproductive way. The central technique Freud advocated in experimenting
with the unconscious had to do with free association. Confessional writing per
se is not free association but is autobiography which is not at all the same
thing. </span></tt><st1:personname><tt><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">Barrett Watten</span></tt></st1:personname><tt><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;"> discusses this in a way that
incorporates the associational process itself which may be challenging to some
readers but is the most valuable way to discuss this issue, in his book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Total Syntax</i> (Southern Illinois, 1985).
The typical academic gloss on L=A=N=G=U=G=E writing puts the spotlight on its
contribution to social and political philosophy which is apropos, but there is
another side that has to do with its origins in German romantic poetics like
Novalis and Schlegel, Russian Formalism, psychoanalysis, Dada and surrealism
all of which Watten addresses in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Total
Syntax</i> and elsewhere. In the debate between Andre Breton and Freud, Freud
was wrong and probably knew it. Freud was a control freak when it came to his world
wide movement, as leaders often are, until they learn it is not that easy or
perhaps even possible. Like Breton and others he had his secret committees,
etc. <o:p></o:p></span></tt></div>
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<tt><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">American writing and American politics have been running
away from European influences since the ink was drying on the Declaration of
Independence. It's this very fleeing that brings on the later relentless
obsession we saw, for example, in the 70's and 80's with the work of Derrida
and his cohorts. The more academics embrace a philosophical approach the more
American poets in the field feel the need to define themselves in contrast to
it. Nobody wants to leave school and talk about the same things they did in
classes, with the exception of nerdy types who are so immersed in texts they
don't feel any need or desire to escape them. This does not characterize your
average American poet who is plagued by rock dreams. The first reading I ever
gave was with Patti Smith, but I was told when I went to the center for
translation in </span></tt><st1:city><st1:place><tt><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">Marseilles</span></tt></st1:place></st1:city><tt><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;"> not long ago that all she did
when she got there was "talk about Rimbaud, Rimbaud, <span class="GramE">Rimbaud</span>."
Not at all to disparage Patti whose contribution to the growing anti-war
movement makes her one clear possible replacement for the role the late Allen
Ginsberg formerly played. But listening to Ann Lauterbach speaking on WNYC
today with Sam Hamill and Andre Gregory it is very clear that Ann L has a lot
of strong ideas to contribute in this discussion as well. <o:p></o:p></span></tt></div>
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<tt><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">The so-called "language" poets had the curious quality
of actually being interested in writing about language. Where confessional
poets put the focus on being understood or understanding themselves, L=A poets
wanted the culture to be understood or to understand itself. But they weren't
adverse, in places, to any one technique or set of techniques in achieving that
goal. L=A writers often employed and still employ <span class="SpellE">defamliarization</span>
techniques. This term, from Russian Formalism, encompasses covertly the idea of
getting away from over-focusing on family. When I was judging a couple of
poetry awards a few years ago I read hundreds and hundreds of manuscripts. It
got to a point when I would intone aloud, "mother, sister, father,
brother" and <span class="GramE">toss</span> the manuscript into the reject
box. Americans &#8211; specifically psychotherapists, for that matter &#8211; are obsessed
with talking about family to the point of nausea. This contributes indirectly
to some of the destructive forms of xenophobia we are witnessing throughout our
country today. Language poets get vilified for resisting this. L=A poets and
L=A writing may have been unconsciously bringing poetry closer to music, the
universal language of art. The issue is not only about proactively associating
with language to become free, but with proactively associating with all kinds
of other people to become free, even people who don't happen to live in the
USA! Working together closely on so many issues, as well as encouraging each
other not only by agreeing with each other but by energetically disagreeing
with each other these innovative poets helped move the poetry community towards
a new paradigm for poetic group formation, as opposed to poetic style. The core
group is still working together closely almost 30 years later. Is there a
precedent for this in American poetics culture? This has upset countless
writers and has energized countless writers as well. <o:p></o:p></span></tt></div>
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<tt><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">Free association encourages conscious and unconscious
collaboration. L=A poets work as if they were each making music comparable to
the sounds of an individual instrument in an orchestra instead of trying to be
the whole orchestra. This may be why some readers find it hard to understand
how to track the voicing in L=A poetry. The reader has to imagine and supply
some of the associations and therefore some of the undertones and overtones.
These are often only suggested by consciously or unconsciously associating
related texts (which are often the only effective way to interpret complex
films, a similar process far more familiar to most people). Free association
can be "played" alone but very comfortably can be practiced in overt
or covert fashion with any number of other writers. This is one of the reasons
why so many American writers employ these techniques so comfortably now, and
why the numbers keep growing. As in psychoanalysis, free association in poetry
facilitates connection with others by emphasizing shared communicational
dynamics including avowing the limitations of language, the surfacing of which
might be curtailed, paradoxically, by over-focusing on the specific personal
details of one's daily or past life. In the work of other L=A poets what is
emphasized is the universal quality of such everyday details, as in much of
your own work, Ron. The very term free association has the latent meaning of
associating freely with other people. One of the primary goals of
psychoanalysis is to enable the analysand to understand the unconscious pull
towards interpreting current experience from the point of view of the
powerfully deterministic transferential dynamics latent in their early family
experiences. This is why one has to work so hard to surface and remember these
experiences in psychoanalysis &#8211; so these memories will not be so latent in
everything we think, say, feel and do. Freud said that "neurotics suffer
from reminiscences." So does inept poetry! <o:p></o:p></span></tt></div>
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<tt><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">International group formation, philosophy, experimenting
with language &#8211; sounds too French for me &#8211; thinks your average American poet or
reader. But maybe this is about to change &#8211; as an outgrowth of many factors,
including desk top publishing, the internet &#8211; and a world wide antiwar movement
emerging at lightning speed.<o:p></o:p></span></tt></div>
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<tt><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">With affection,<o:p></o:p></span></tt></div>
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<tt><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">Nick<o:p></o:p></span></tt></div>
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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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