WE 4

Chih-Chung Tsai

LTWR113 – Rivera-Garza

1/25/11

Writing Exercise #4 Reviewing – 3 pages

Poetry follows no regulation on what should be said, but more importantly, on how it should be said. Ron Silliman is a pioneer in pursuing the

                                                Critical art

Of breaking form. but

                                Is it truly

 subversive?

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Ron Silliman is a prolific poet and critic, one of the original group of San Francisco language poets.

“[Language poetry's] attempt is the spelling out of all the defor­ma­tions of lan­guage which result from the repress­ing mech­a­nism of the com­mod­ity fetish.”)

                Amazon.com review of Ron Silliman’s book: Mr. Silliman seems to be in the company of Ashbery and Clark Coolidge when it comes to making higher sense out of apparent nonsense. And 900 pages' worth
Very highly recommended for anyone who doesn't feel that poetry (or in this case, prose poetry) has to "make sense.’

Like others, he takes Simic’s state­ments about aes­thetic theory as proof of his incor­ri­gi­ble philis­tin­ism; like others, he avails him­self lib­er­ally of some cheap ad hominems: “Simic him­self isn’t intel­lec­tu­ally capa­ble of fol­low­ing a seri­ous dis­cus­sion of the arts.”

If “language writing” means anything, it means writing which does focus the reader onto the level of the sentence and below, as well as those units above. Heretofore, this has been accomplished by the deliberate exclusion of certain elements of signification, such as reference and syntax.

An interview question for Ron Silliman: 4. Comment on this passage from Why Poetry Criticism Sucks, an article by Kristin Prevallet in the April 2000 issue of Jacket magazine: “It is very difficult to write poetry criticism and not have poets feel personally maimed [...]. For some reason poetry criticism does not advance the formal, intellectual, or contextual parameters of poetry. It always gets confused with the personal.”
Part of the scandal of translation is that it breaks down static model-thinking about literature (for example Ron Silliman’s quietism-vs-past-avant binary, or Steve Burt’s various models, or “American Hybrid”), undoing the illusion of mastery that come with these models and forcing us to wade through the plague grounds (to again steal a metaphor from Joyelle).

Another interesting (though perhaps extraneous) thought here is that Silliman’s idea of writing is completely based on the “fluency,” as I have often noted, a very nationalistic model: good writers have “good ears” (good writing is inborn) and Ron is opposed to translations by immigrants or people whose first language isn’t English (they don’t have good ears). A basically xenophobic idea of literature. I think it’s interesting because Parland’s poetry is entirely opposed to such xenophobic ideas of literature. He was an immigrant and he learned Swedish only after he’d learned Russian, German and Finnish. In order to feel OK with Parland, Sillliman argues that Parland became a “master” of the Swedish language. Even if I believed in “mastery” of language, this is patently not true, as Parland’s language is a bit stilted.

 From the article “The invisibility of the translator”: Of course there is a paradox in Ron’s review: his aim is to isolate me from the text, but in the process, he makes the translator not invisible at all. In a typical example of a review of a translated book, the translator may at best be mentioned. Here, because Ron seems so anxious about my status as translator, the whole piece is haunted by my negative presence. I am strangely over-visible in my invisibility.

Silliman’s sentences reinforce the idea that good poems begin when we have finished reading them, but also that the language of the poem, when divorced from conventional referentiality (associated with capitalist culture), sensitizes the reader to the making of meaning in the absence of the signified: “Do and made are not voices. The language is never genuine choices.” Just as one might adopt an accent after months in a foreign region, one’s ability to generate cohesive sentences without effort is challenged by reading this work.

A formal study of Ron Silliman’s work: While many contemporary critics have examined Silliman's overall formal constructs, this study focuses on sentence construction--especially on the poet's manipulation of grammar and syntax, his unique punctuation and spelling, and his reliance on indexing--in a number of The Alphabet 's early poems. These subversive formal practices constitute the textual practice of parataxis, which Silliman implicitly describes in his critical work The New Sentence as the underlying formal logic of "new sentence" poetry. I argue that Silliman's employment of parataxis creates spaces from which readers may uncover and describe multiple narratives. These narratives reflect and expand Silliman's concern with social issues.

                                                                                                                What does it mean to be subversive?