On to Ontario
Saturday, March 10
At Gallery 101
301½ Bank Street
Ottawa
2:00 PM
Workshop on
blogging, poetry & new media
8:00 PM
Reading
(Doors open at 7:30 PM)
Tuesday, March 13
At the University of Windsor
CAW Centre Boardroom, 2nd Floor
Windsor
My reading from Bury Parish Church
Bury, Lancashire
April 30, 2011
(with thanks to Geof Huth & the Text Festival)
It was literally 40 years ago that I & the Selective Service came to an agreement that I should perform my alternative service obligation working – sans pay – for the Committee for Prisoner Humanity & Justice (CPHJ) in San Rafael. The Service had already turned down two of my previous suggestions – teaching at an alternative high school in Orinda, California, and working as a housing investigator for an urban housing non-profit, going to large realtors with the same credentials as a second investigator who differed from me only in being black & seeing who would be willing to rent to both us, and who would not. The Service’s rationale was that neither of the positions I suggested would require me to move from my home in North Oakland, and dislocation was one of the tests the Service threw at Conscientious Objectors since army inductees were obviously being dislocated in being shipped to Viet Nam.
The Service had also suggested a few ideas of its own: working in a nursing home in Gilroy, garlic capitol of America, and a hospital in Cleveland. I had agreed to both of those assignments, only to have the assignment lists overturned by court decisions because of other irregularities that were screwing with other Objectors. When I contacted CPHJ, they were wary but open to exploring the idea. They had already had at least one prior CO volunteer, and that person had not lasted long. Over the phone, I asked the executive director, Evelyn Schaaf, who they were – years in the anti-war movement had taught me that most political non-profits had an agenda, a frame of analysis, often what they would have characterized as a line to which they adhered. I wasn’t prepared for Evelyn’s response: “Two fat ladies,” she said, roaring with laughter at her own joke.
Today I turn 65. Gertrude Stein’s obit appeared in Time on the day I was born, as did a review of her book, Brewsie and Willie, which Random House was offering in hard back for $2. It was a Monday.
This is one of those bellwether birthdays, and it feels like that for me. Only one of my male ancestors ever lived to be older. I’ve already outlived my own father by 27 years, and with my mother’s passing in April, I’m now the eldest in my family. Last week I officially gave notice at Gartner: I will retire at the end of this year, having worked fulltime for 40 years, more than half of that in the computer industry.
In Lyn Hejinian’s talk on time in Gertrude Stein’s Lucy Church Amiably, she speaks of a nephew who works for a leveraged buyout firm in Europe. Asked if there are cultural differences that he has to negotiate between the different nations there, he responds that in Southern Europe, they think of 50 or 60 hours as a full workweek, the implication being…. But of course that is the work world in which I’ve labored now for decades – at a time when unemployment and under-employment are devastating problems, the 40-hour workweek is looked upon in many industries as a part-time commitment. Over the decades, I’ve generally worked a 50-hour week, although in the past five years or so that’s ratcheted up to around 70. This seems like a very good point to step off that merry-go-round.
Somehow during all this I’ve managed to raise a family and keep up with my commitments to poetry. This hasn’t always been easy, and in each of these realms I’ve had regrets that can be tracked precisely back to the physical limit of the number of hours in a day. My secret, to the degree that I’ve had one, is that I average maybe five hours of sleep a night, usually less. Aaron Shurin half-jokingly once told me it was unfair, that in the years since we’d attended UC Berkeley together, I’d had years more time in which to write, simply because he needed a normal night’s rest. It is true that I could not have made the choices I did over the years if I didn’t have those extra hours.
Clayton Eshleman pointed out to me not too long ago that he’s had three volumes of translation published this year -- Bernard Bador, Curdled Skulls (Black Widow Press); Aimé Césaire, Solar Throat Slashed (with A. James Arnold, Wesleyan U Press), & Bei Dao, Endure (with Lucas Klein, Black Widow Press). Clayton, who is 76, also continues to be as active as ever with his own poetry. Clayton, Jerome Rothenberg, John Ashbery, Keith & Rosmarie Waldrop, Ruth Stone, Jack Collom, the late Jackson Mac Low and especially the late Barbara Guest all strike me as excellent templates for what do next in my life. Seventeen of the 28 books listed on Guest’s page in Wikipedia were published after her 65th birthday, beginning with Fair Realism. Even though Guest was famous in the 1960s, thanks to her involvement with the first generation of the New York School, she didn’t published her first chapbook until she was 40, and her career as an author really took off during the last 20 years of her life, when she emerged as a writer of enormous influence, both as a poet and mentor.
With few exceptions, none of us know just how much time we are given and all the silly blather about living each day as if it were your last has a certain truth to it, one that becomes increasingly obvious as those days begin to dwindle. I would love to think that, like Guest, sixty percent of my writing career still lies ahead of me, but that feels like hubris or at least whistling whilst walking through a dark wood.
Still I have ten book projects of varying kinds in different stages of planning or execution, including co-editing collected poem volumes for both David Melnick & David Bromige. I hope to do more readings & travel, plus take advantage of writer’s residencies, something my work life has never really before permitted. I may even teach if & when the right opportunities pose themselves. It’s fun, frankly, to think that in ten or eleven years, when I am the age Clayton Eshleman is now, I might have three books out in one year. This is just the beginning.
One forgets just how thoroughly internalized the smell of fog can be, how entirely comforting, familiar. In spite of the rigors of travel – six different beds over a stretch of nine days – a return to one’s home town after a period of years triggers so many of the psyche’s pathways that it’s, if not rejuvenating, reorienting. And one’s “home town” has nothing to do with jurisdiction – mine stretches all over the Bay Area, from Bernal Heights in San Francisco, to Pleasanton & Alamo in the East Bay to Fourth Street in San Rafael. In Berkeley, the spate of larger buildings – not skyscrapers, exactly, but no longer just one or two storey structures – gives University a very different feel, while a string of “adult massage” parlors on San Pablo in Albany made me conscious that politics & policy had taken a turn there. Of the family homes I drove past while there, my great grandmother’s on Modoc in Berkeley appears to be better kept than the one on Neilson in Albany in which I grew up (way too many cars in that narrow driveway) or the one house in Berkeley, on Curtis, that I bought with my own money, its little front garden devolved into a jungle.
The trip constituted a loop of the region – from SFO to Sunnyvale for a day full of meetings & then the long drive up through Fremont & Oakland to get to Moe’s where I read to an all-star audience. Staying overnight in Albany, I met Richard Krech, the poet who first published me in 1965, at Mama’s Royal Café, then headed up to Sebastopol where I worked for two solid days with Cecelia Belle & Marcus Bennett going through the archives of David Bromige. We found at least 100 pages of material that we will need to be adding to the forthcoming Collected Poems. Then I headed back to Berkeley, where I caught ROVA’s concert at the University Art Museum. Great concert, great acoustics – the quartet spread out and used the entire building as a sound-box for their work. Finally, Saturday morning, I crossed over the Bay Bridge through San Francisco – my only time in the City – on the way back to SFO. It was exhausting, exhilarating, filled with sites & details that will take weeks, if not months, to process. Thanks to all who fed & sheltered me along the way!
Does the mailman read my blog? While I was gone, I received exactly one book and one magazine. Yesterday, 19 books showed up. I had not put a stop on my mail.
Also, before I left, I asked some questions about the nature of this blog, and got a good number of responses, the most important results of which seem to be the following. At least 80% of you want me to continue the blog, and maybe a dozen suggested that I should think about guest bloggers from time to time, an idea that I am in fact contemplating. There does seem to be a difference between who reads the blog and who reads my tweets, so switching from one to the other for links isn’t precisely a transparent process. I guess we’re going to be going with both/and rather than either/or for the foreseeable future.
Of the 20% who don’t think I need to continue, I could discern at least three subgroups: those who think I’ve “served my time,” those who think the blog format has run its course, plus those who think I’m an idiot or (my favorite) “in the way,” as tho the 1,300+ bloggers listed on my blog roll alone can’t speak their minds until someone shovels dirt over me. Good luck with that.
The day this pops up on the blog, I will be flying out to California, having just spent one day at home after having gotten back from the conference on The Alphabet at the University of Windsor in Ontario. After a day with a client in Silicon Valley, I’m giving a reading at Moe’s in Berkeley with Steven Farmer on Wednesday, then spending much of the next two days going through the archives of David Bromige, whose Collected Poems I’m co-editing with Bob Perelman & Jack Krick. Later in April, I will be participating in an event as part of the Grand Piano collective at Poets House in New York, then at month’s end traveling to Bury, Lancashire, for the Text Festival. This is an intensive a period given over to the public side of my writing as I’ve had in years, literally, and I expect to end up quite winded by the process. Not mention thoroughly in awe of the likes of Rae Armantrout or Charles Bernstein, for whom this much travel is pretty much business-as-usual.
What I rather doubt I will have done, tho, is to write more notes for this blog. I’ve been maintaining the blog for more than eight years and as I think about all the changes I want to be making over the rest of this year, most of which are predicated around my desire to have more time to write, it makes me realize that what was once the newest thing on the block has by now become normative, even predictable. Blogs continue to have their uses, but in web time nothing stands still as a form for ten years.
For example, having by now arrived at more than 1,300 followers on Twitter, might it not make just as much sense to forego the massive link dumps here for individual posts there? I have some questions about the efficacy of Twitter, but I have them about this format as well. When I posted my links list last week, it included over 300 links – but my file of potential links had grown to more than 500 that I simply never got to.
Likewise, having reached my maximum number of permitted Facebook Friends – I can only add somebody when somebody else unfriends me or quits Facebook altogether – I have had to set up a rudimentary “fan page.” Unless you are a close personal friend, it makes much more sense for you to “like” that page than to try & link to my clogged-out personal page. As I grow more comfortable with that format, I may figure out how to get tweets to automatically show up on the fan page rather than the personal one, etc.
What all this adds up is that I’m contemplating changes here – as elsewhere – and any ideas you might have as to what might work best, or even just better, would certainly be appreciated. The email address on the left is the best way to communicate.
The audience for my reading with Rae Armantrout on March 25. At the front table, L-R,
are Jeff Derksen, Steve McCaffery & Jed Rasula. At the table right behind them, also L-R,
are Chuck Korkegian, Antonio Rossini & Timothy Yu
TSA employee at the Detroit airport (viewing x-ray of a copy of The Alphabet in my luggage): I’m going to have to examine that big book in your suitcase.
Me: I wrote it myself.
TSA employee (looking at the book): Are you going to get it published?
¶
The Alphabet Symposium at the University of Windsor was a blast. It was a great gift, and was remarkably upbeat from beginning to end. There is no way to register just how deeply indebted I feel to its participants, especially to Louis Cabri who had, he said, never attempted anything on this scale before, but made everything flow smoothly.
In addition to seeing old friends – some of whom, like Jed Rasula & Asa Watten, I had not seen in years – and making several new ones, perhaps the most profound value I got from the conference was an opportunity to see the project in the hands of others. That came about even more in the interchanges between different people than in the papers themselves.
Barrett Watten & Jed Rasula were well-paired as keynote speakers, showing how you could approach the project from two completely different directions. Some talks were extraordinary: Timothy Yu did a close-reading of racial references in “Albany,” picking up on the link between them & the strained relationship I always had with my grandfather, that had me close to tears for its accuracy. Several of the graduate students from Windsor who presented showed themselves to be at least equal with their more experienced peers, or perhaps they showed the value of rigorous preparation combined with approaches that were fresh precisely because they weren’t situated into already existing literary discourses. Braydon Beaulieu, Jasmine Elliott & Ashley Girty offered some of the weekend’s best work. Steve McCaffery led off a final open-to-all-parties roundtable discussion on whatever threads people wanted to follow that led to a discussion of whether we had finally arrived, with flarf & conceptual writing, at a post-Language moment.
And the readings – Jeff Derksen, Steve McCaffery, Rae Armantrout, Watten & Carla Harryman – were consistently solid. I got goose bumps when Carla chose to read “For She,” the prose poem that provoked me into writing “The New Sentence” over 30 years ago. And Barrett Watten appears to have a lot of new work.
I do believe that most if not all of the papers will appear in a future issue of Rampike, a journal that always seems too lively to really be connected to a university, but does in fact have some relationship to the U of Windsor.
¶
The entire weekend had a this-can’t-be-happening feel to it. On the ride to the airport, the US border guard seemed dumbfounded when the retired police officer who was driving explained to him that in Canada retired cops don’t keep their service weapons, so that, no, he wasn’t packing heat. This delayed us only by about ten seconds. And the Detroit airport was so empty that even with that curious exchange with the TSA security screener I arrived at my gate so early that I realized an earlier flight to Philly was boarding just one gate over, and talked my way onto it without having to pay a change fee. Plus, on the ground in Philadelphia, I ran into Michael Hessel-Mial between flights on his way back to Atlanta, found my suitcase to be the second one popping out of the luggage holding system and was out of the Philadelphia airport even before I had been scheduled to take off.
A few words about what I’m up to, or not, these days. The first is that my reading scheduled for Moe’s Books in Berkeley on March 16 has had to be rescheduled for two weeks later, March 30. Business travel, which this has been scheduled on top of, has a tendency to dissolve & reconfigure at a moment’s notice, but I hope this one happens. I’m really psyched at the prospect of reading with Steven Farmer, whose work I’ve known & loved for nearly 30 years. Plus I’ve been a customer of Moe’s since even before its days as the Rambam (across the street where Shakespeare & Co. now sits, or did last I looked) in the mid-1960s, so it will really be old home week to be there.
This will take place just a couple of days after The Symposium on The Alphabet at the University of Windsor, across the river from Detroit, March 25 & 26. Speakers there will include, in order of appearance, Jed Rasula, Marianne Ølholm, Brian Jansen, Joshua Schuster, Christopher Kerr, Hilary Clark, Burt Kimmelman, Michael Hessel-Mial, Braydon Beaulieu, Elisabeth Joyce, Steve McCaffery, Rae Armantrout, Barrett Watten, Andrew Klobucar, Jeff Derksen, Pierre Beaumier, Jasmine Elliott, Timothy Yu, Brian Ang, Ashley Girty, Louis Cabri, & Carla Harryman. I will be reading & talking with Rae the first night, and with Barry & Carla the next. If I were doing this today, I would be reading not from The Alphabet per se, but from Universe and The Grand Piano. And, while I’m sure sitting through this will make me twitch, I’m hoping not to turn into Robert Duncan, with or without the vampire cape.
There will be a big event for The Grand Piano itself at Poets House in New York mid-April, plus I will be reading at the Text Festival in Bury, Lancashire at the end of April & hopefully somewhere in London the week after. More about these events later, tho I should note that I will be unveiling a sculpture at the Festival.
There are links to all of these on the sidebar to the left. I’ve also made some other changes to the sidebar of late, adding permanent links to the ever-changing calendar, recent links and the like, and to a series of links to recurrent themes further down the scrollbar. I have also subdivided the “Silliman Sites” listing on the scrollbar so as to break out links to my various editorial projects: The Clark Coolidge Symposium, The Dwelling Place, Realism, Tottel’s and In the American Tree. The newest of these is Realism, a feature I edited for Michael Cuddihy’s late, lamented Ironwood. Among the poets included are Bruce Andrews, Rae Armantrout, Steve Benson, Alan Bernheimer, Charles Bernstein, Clark Coolidge, Tina Darragh, Alan Davies, Jean Day, Ray Di Palma, Michael Gottlieb, Robert Grenier, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, P. Inman, Tom Mandel, Bob Perelman, Kit Robinson, Stephen Rodefer, Peter Seaton, James Sherry, Ron Silliman, Diana Ward, Barrett Watten, Hannah Weiner, & Kathleen Fraser.
I also have work included in the big new Northwestern University Press anthology, Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing, edited by Craig Dworkin & Kenneth Goldsmith. At nearly 600 pages, it’s very comprehensive, in the tradition of Jerry Rothenberg’s great collections. It has everyone from Tzara, Yeats & Aragon to a healthy selection of flarf. That doesn’t mean it’s perfect – Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, Jena Osman & Barrett Watten are absent, as are instances of Actualism from the 1970s, G.P. Skratz & Dave Morice, for example, or Darrell Gray writing as Philippe Mignon. Indeed, pseudonymic writing in general seems not to have been considered. Also missing are the Russian Conceptualists around Dmitri Prigov, and I think you could ask about mail art, vispo & Ian Hamilton Finlay. One can make the argument that conceptualism as an aesthetic force comes to writing fairly late in the game, entering for the most part as the result of contact with other disciplines, and the fact that this is really the first big book of same might be entered into evidence as Exhibit A. But this fact alone makes Against Expression a must-have collection & Dworkin & Goldsmith have set the bar high for any anthologizers who come later.
Several folks have noted that I haven’t written much of late here, which is certainly true. I have been busier than ever on my day job, a prospect that doesn’t show much likelihood of reversing any time soon. I’ve also been working on poetry that’s taken up some of this time. In fact, I applied for five academic positions thinking that might fit better with my writing life at this stage in the game. And while I’ve heard rumors that I would be teaching at this or that university next fall, I did not get a single interview. Only two of the five bothered to communicate with me personally about my applications. One told me that I had too much experience for the position they were seeking to fill. The other told me that I did not have enough.
Sometime in the next 24 hours this blog will welcome its 3 millionth visitor.
Each time it reaches another half million visits, I’ve used the occasion to say thank you. Writing the blog has taught me many things, some of which I anticipated, but more which I did not. I was right in my presumption that blogging – and the other forms of social networking that have risen in the eight years since I started down this path – offered poets a means of communicating with one another without the funneling process of the academy. But I had no clue just how much the scale of poetry – the absolute number of practicing poets – had changed since, say, the 1970s. Or how much that in itself was transforming poetry. The fundamental fissures between literary traditions – and the deeper social values they embody – have not gone away, but these have been overwhelmed by the onslaught of new ideas, new aesthetics, new combinations that people are coming up with daily.
This will change what it means to be a poet in every way imaginable. In my book The New Sentence, I contrast the situation of the 1980s with that of the years immediately following World War 2. In the late 1940s, the total number of titles published in the US in any given year was around 8,000. By all authors on all topics. By the early 1980s, that number had exploded to somewhat over 200,000. Today, however, that number stands at one million titles per year. And there are numerous studies showing that we are all reading less. The total US population has doubled since the end of the Second World War. Put another way, in the 1940s there were more than 9,300 adults for each title published. Today there are 150.
Our relationship to audiences, the expectations of readers, the definition of a career, indeed even of a book, these are all up for grabs. So are concepts like bookstore, publisher & copyright. The distribution system is in chaos. Barnes & Noble and Borders seem unlikely to survive long enough to celebrate their monopolization of the brick-&-mortar retail space as they in turn are driven from business by the rise of the internet. Even the great warehouse logistics at the heart of Amazon are themselves threatened by the rise of the e-book. Amazon’s offer to pay authors 70% of e-book royalties is, we should note, a deeply defensive gesture. What they are trying to prevent is watching the authors collect 100%.
But 100% of what exactly? That is the question. Followed quickly by how.
At 3:00 PM yesterday, we had a short (10 minutes max as far as thunder & lightning & rain were concerned), intense (the storm traveled at 55 MPH with wind gusts up to 70 MPH) thunderstorm that left 280,000 people, mostly in Chester & Delaware counties, without power. As of Friday morning, PECO promises to have our power back “within several days.”
Hard copy is truth.
I’ve said that before, but I was reminded of the harsh reality of that saying last Thursday night. While I was at an awards ceremony for one of my sons, the hard drive on my HP Pavilion decided to fail catastrophically. I thought we had gotten beyond ye olde blue screen of death, but such is not the case. Another old saying came to my mind later in the evening, as I was “enjoying” a text chat with somebody at HP support – there are only two kinds of hard drives, those that have failed & those that are going to fail.
I knew, immediately, that my own failure to create a set of boot disks was going to be a problem. As, it turned out, was the fact that my system had a one-year warranty and was now one-year and a few weeks old. Fortunately, I had purchased a two-year extension to the on-site support of the warranty. Not so fortunately, the database at HP support has not (yet) acknowledged that extension. But at one point in the process of attempting to restore the system, it did reformat the drive. Whatever file data was there is now pretty much toast.
So what did I lose?
Part of a links list that was originally intended to run today.
Part of a list of recently received books that was intended to run tomorrow.
The first paragraph of a review of Steve Carey’s Selected Poems that I have not yet written because I decided to wait until I finished my review of Chris McCreary’s Undone, which I have not yet written period. I’m still trying to make up my mind how much I should focus just on Undone or whether I should incorporate, by way of contrast, a review of Graham Foust’s A Mouth in California, so that I can make this more of a discussion of The New Precisionism. I still haven’t decided whether that is one note or two.
Maybe 200 lines intended for use in Feral Machines, which like Revelator, is to be a section of Universe. Some of these may be backed up on my wife’s PC upstairs, an old XP system that chugs along. That’s because some of it was written originally on a Palm Pilot (most of the rest on my cell phone), which didn’t sync up with Vista.
Some photos that I believe I still have on a flash drive on my camera.
A fair amount of downloaded music & spoken word audio that I can probably find again in one form or another. The most precious to me was the most recent ROVA CD, but I also own that hard copy. Hard copy is truth.
A bunch of PDF files of stuff I’m interested in reading. Some of this is no longer available, because it was only online for a brief period, such as the most recent e-book free-for-all from Poetry Super Highway. That really is gone for good.
Most everything else I either have on an external hard drive backup, which has everything from another old PC, or in one of two cloud storage programs that I use. Some of what I don’t have there – drafts of my old Grand Piano sections, for example – I can track down as attachments to emails to my co-authors.
But what a lot of work!
This is one of those moments when I remember that my habit of doing my first drafts almost always in longhand – Feral Machines is the one current exception, partly composed on an old Palm Pilot, partly on my cell phone – is about more than just always seeking to recapture the writing experience as I knew it first when I was ten years old (tho, to be frank, that is the important reason). Hard copy is truth, and so long as I have the physical notebook in which I’m working or in which I have worked, I’m golden.
I’m reminded of the devastation people suffer when their homes burn or are destroyed by flood, tornado, earthquake or some other disaster. I have been very fortunate in my life never to have suffered such a catastrophe. My half-sister Nancy lost her home when Hurricane Hugo plowed into Charleston back in 1989. Afterwards, she moved in with her boyfriend (now husband) & when she finally received her insurance settlement, she used it to buy a Winnebago that sits outside their home like a waiting brontosaurus. Everything that is personally important to her in the physical world is stored in that RV and anytime there is a hurricane warning, she & it are headed to the mountains.
I have somewhere between five & ten thousand books, a number that would have been higher if only the tiny size of the houses in the East Bay had not constrained my book buying habits before we moved to Chester County. Those and the notebooks of the works currently in progress are really pretty much the only material possessions I have that matter to me. It’s not that there aren’t other objects that have a personal meaning for me – for example, my grandparents’ wedding photo, the two photographs I have of my father (the only ones I have of him), the helmet my grandfather wore when he served in the army in Paris in 1917 & ’18 – but I understand that they’re objects, and that what really is meaningful to me are relationships, to my wife & sons, to my family & friends.
So I know that I need to do a better job of backing up my files going forward, but I’m not feeling the sense of loss & despair that hit me when I fried a hard drive just by flicking a circuit breaker in my old house in Berkeley sometime around 1989 or so. The net makes a difference, in that an ability to back stuff up to the cloud is a protection even if a tornado touches down over my house. Still, the idea that a library could be as a fragile as a hard drive gives me pause.
All of which is to say that life may be a little ragged here for a few days or weeks.
And to those whose links I had & have now lost, let me apologize in advance.
Θ
Also worth noting, while I’m at this. I’ve begun to use a Blogger tool that throws the remainder of a note onto a second page if its length suggests that Blogger will freak out & obliterate my other recent notes. It shows up on the lower left and looks like this:
Jacket 39’s feature on Moi!
Edited by John Tranter
Ron Silliman:
Poems from Crow
Manuel Brito:
Questioning the limits of language:
The New Sentence in Ron Silliman’s poetry and poetics
Jordan Davis:
What
Andrew Epstein:
“Pay More Attention”:
Silliman’s BART and Contemporary “Everyday Life Projects”
Andy Gricevich:
The Residual Work:
Tjanting and the Poetics of Experience
Ian Keenan:
No Content Left:
Silliman’s Transit
T. C. Marshall:
From Practice, to Reading
Lytle Shaw:
The Labor of Repetition:
Silliman’s “Quips” and the Politics of Intertextuality
Dale Smith:
Close Readers
William Watkin:
Projective Recursion:
The Structure of Ron Silliman’s Tjanting
Timothy Yu:
Ron Silliman and the Ethnicization of the Avant-Garde
RON SILLIMAN 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.
