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Pavel Sterin

Writing Exercise #7

Intercultural Writing

1.22.11

DH: When and why did you begin writing?

RS: I began in fifth grade. My teacher that year, Vance Teague, had us write for an hour each week, every Wednesday morning. There were no rules, no genre limitations, just write. It very quickly became my favorite time at school.

DH: When did you first consider yourself a writer?

RS: When I was a teenager, about a couple of years before I seriously started to try to do the real stuff, as distinct from the kid writing projects I did in school.

            Ever opened a book of poetry and had absolutely no idea how to interact with or process the text because it was so far beyond your ken? Ever read a poem that felt like abstract algebraic theory? Welcome to Ron Silliman and the addictive joy of unlocking his text. This man is deep down the rabbit hole, falling into the category of language poet after becoming bored by, termed by Silliman himself, “The School of Quietude.” Silliman sees all his poetry as being part of the same poem, or lifework. His poems often involve circularity, mismatched logic, games, and general horseplay. Ketjack, for example, from his book The Age of Huts is a poem of approximately 100 pages that took over a decade to compose.

TAV: How have developments in Internet technology (especially email, blogs, sites like the Electronic Poetry Center, Modern American Poetry) affected your personal sense of a poetic community? Do you have a vision of further developments along these lines?

RS: The Internet is a communications technology, but so is the book. Both enable asynchronous communication – I write this now and you read it at a later date, maybe hours, maybe centuries. But the Internet also can be synchronous – instant messaging, for example. The book as an object is a one-to-one technology in its essence: one reader at a time & most often one author. Yet that can be altered somewhat – an anthology or a magazine, for that manner, is a many to one technology. And printing enables multiples, which can be shipped out to be sold in lots at every Wal-Mart in the world. So for a John Grisham, the idea of the book as a one to many technology may seem “ordinary” .The Internet can do every one of these kinds of combinations. And it’s still a very young technology in historic terms. The gap from the Gutenberg Bible to Tottel’s Miscellaney, the first anthology of poetry in English, was 103 years.. University rare book and manuscript libraries thus far have taken the position that hard copy is truth. They don’t want your collected letters on a platform that won’t exist in twenty years, in spite of the cost of page-by-page physical preservation, which is daunting.

        

Ron Silliman's fame and notoriety have grown considerably since

2002, due in large part to his popular and controversial blog: Silliman's Blog. Debuting on August 29, 2002 to little fanfare and without expectations of an audience, it is now arguably the most influential English-language blog on the web that is devoted to contemporary poetry and poetics. In early February 2007, Silliman's Blog had surpassed 1,000,000 hits.

SG: I suspect some readers have a difficult time placing your work within a tradition, fiction or poetry or journalism or prose poetry or whatever. What do you consider your work to be?

RS: I consider what I write to be prose poems but not fiction, partly for formal reasons and partly because I'm not interested in "making things up." And although most readers aren't familiar with it, there is a tradition of the prose poem, extending back 160 years to the work of Aloysius Bertrand, which is seldom incorporated into the teaching of creative writing in the academy. Creative prose is subsumed under the term fiction, with the result that works that don't fit the category are ignored. But subsuming prose under the term fiction is like subsuming all of what can occur in a text under the rubric of character, or narrative. For example, the work of Baudelaire in prose is extraordinarily interesting. He was the first person capable of using prose as a closed, stanzaic form. I often use Theodor Adomo's Minima Moralia to demonstrate how his essays, which may be only six or seven sentences long, use sentence length and prosody as elements clearly integral to his argumentation. Wittgenstein is another writer whose prose can be viewed from the same perspective. It's not an accident that a person who is an interesting stylist, like Derrida, can have a far greater impact than perhaps the weight of his ideas would suggest he should have, while equally useful thinkers who are not such compelling writers may be perceived as less important. By organizing our academic institutions around fiction rather than around prose, by subsuming all forms of prose into fiction instead of the other way around, a great deal of confusion has set in. At Berkeley, linguistics and rhetoric are departments apart from literature—compartmental aphasia.

            Canyons, paths


dug thru the snow
                       

Tunnels

The walls as high as

Shoulders

The weight of it

Heavier

When it begins to melt

& then, at sunset

still midafternoon

the temperature drops

wind over the ridge

so that by dawn

each surface

hardens into face

DH: Do you have a specific writing style? RS: I'm a straightforward realist.

DH: Is there a message in your work that you want readers to grasp?  It sounds silly to say "Be Here Now," but I think that's the message of all good writing.