ron silliman's alphabet

233 Pages·2007·0.7 MB·English

PARATAXIS AND POSSIBILITY: RON SILLIMAN’S ALPHABET

A dissertation presented to
the faculty of
the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University

In partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree
Doctor of Philosophy

Carl J. Boon
June 2007
© 2007

Carl J. Boon

All Rights Reserved
This dissertation entitled
PARATAXIS AND POSSIBILITY: RON SILLIMAN’S ALPHABET

by
CARL J. BOON

has been approved for
the Department of English
and the College of Arts and Sciences by

George Hartley
Associate Professor of English

Benjamin M. Ogles
Dean, College of Arts and Sciences
Abstract

BOON, CARL J., Ph.D., June 2007, English

PARATAXIS AND POSSIBILITY: RON SILLIMAN’S ALPHABET (233 pp.)

Director of Dissertation: George Hartley

This study argues that Ron Silliman’s Alphabet, an intricate series of book-length
poems published during the last three decades, forces readers to analyze connections
between form and content. 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.
The analytical movement in this study reflects its title: I document the formal
innovations in the poems that constitute parataxis and open spaces for narratives, and
then reach conclusions regarding the works’ suggested critiques of certain social and
political practices in late-twentieth-century America. The poet, whose activism is well
documented, implicitly asks readers to assume an active role in illustrating those
critiques. The poems covered in this study—Albany, Blue, Carbon, Demo, Engines,
Force, Garfield, Hidden, Ink, Jones, Lit, Manifest, Non, and ®—suggest critiques in
several areas where the effects of these practices have been particularly damaging: the
environment, technology and new media, academia and publishing, and education and
politics. More fundamentally, these poems interrogate the use of language itself;
language, after all, motors the social and political practices to which Silliman’s work
responds. As the study’s final chapter argues, Silliman’s work is important—and fosters
democracy—because it can create the conditions through which active readers can
become active, questioning citizens. In responding to his poems, readers are given the
platform to articulate social and political narratives. Their articulation comprises a central
component of democracy.

Approved:
George Hartley
Associate Professor of English
6
Table of Contents

Page

ABSTRACT...................................................................................................................................................4
CHAPTER 1: PARATAXIS AND METHOD: ABC AND OTHER BEGINNINGS...............................7
PARATAXIS AND THE NEW SENTENCE.........................................................................................................7
PARATAXIS AND ABC................................................................................................................................24
CHAPTER 2: A TRADEMARK STYLE: DEMO, MANIFEST, AND ®..............................................42
FROM PEANUT BUTTER TO RESISTANCE: PUNCTUATION IN DEMO............................................................46
MANIFEST: A CACOPHONY OF STYLES.......................................................................................................55
®: REDUCIBLE TO A SLOGAN....................................................................................................................62
CHAPTER 3: JONES: INSISTING ON WHAT’S PRESENT...............................................................71
CHAPTER 4: XING: NEGOTIATING INTERSECTION.....................................................................82
THE BRAIDED FIGURE...............................................................................................................................86
CHAPTER 5: LANGUAGE AND VIOLENCE: ENGINES, FORCE, AND GARFIELD..................100
“SCUDS IN THE NIGHT”: VIOLENCE AND AMBIGUITY IN ENGINES............................................................103
NEWS AND NOISE: THE DOUBLE-EDGED CRITIQUE OF FORCE................................................................113
VERSUS AND VIOLENCE: GARFIELD’S RECIPE OF OPPOSITIONS...............................................................123
CHAPTER 6: FORMAL CONCEALMENTS: HIDDEN AND PARADISE.......................................133
“BOTH EYES BLACKENED”: SOCIAL CONDITIONING IN HIDDEN...............................................................137
“THE PENULTIMATE VIOLENCE IS TO / FUCK WITH MY TIME”: WORK IN PARADISE..................................151
CHAPTER 7: ACADEMIC CONVENTIONS: INK AND LIT.............................................................163
MORE SURFACES AND SCARS: INK’S CRITIQUE OF PUBLISHING..............................................................172
“SO MANY LITTLE RESILIENCIES”: THE FORMAL (DIS)CONTINUITIES OF LIT...........................................181
CHAPTER 8: PARATAXIS AND RESISTANCE: NON......................................................................194
FORM AND RESISTANCE..........................................................................................................................194
THE NEGATIVE ENERGY OF NON.............................................................................................................196
THE “PLOT OF THIS SONG”: DEMOCRACY AND CONCLUSION...................................................................221
REFERENCES..........................................................................................................................................228
APPENDIX................................................................................................................................................232
7
Chapter 1: Parataxis and Method: ABC and Other
Beginnings

Parataxis and the New Sentence

Albany, the one-hundred-sentence-long poem that begins Ron Silliman’s extended
creative project, The Alphabet, is a hesitant beginning. Sometime in the late 1970s,
Silliman, a Washington-born poet, critic, social activist and leader, and, recently, tireless
blogger, conceived of what would flower into twenty-five years’ worth of creative output.
He planned to write a poem for every letter of the alphabet. His first volume, published
by a small press called Tuumba1 in October 1983, was titled ABC. It contains the first
three poems of his endeavor: Albany, Blue, and Carbon. Since then, Silliman has
completed The Alphabet, and is at work on a new series of poems titled Universe.2
Underlying many of the poems of The Alphabet, especially the ones to be
presented in this study, is Silliman’s formal mode of organization: the “new sentence.”
Prior to an examination of Silliman’s new sentence applications in Albany and the works
that follow, it is important to establish a working outline of Silliman’s new sentence and
its theoretical and historical foundations. The formal construct is designed to renew and
reframe a poetic practice that has its roots in the work of Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound.
Traditional sentences in literature are usually referential and adhere to traditional

1 Tuumba, founded by Lyn Hejinian, was just one of many small presses that helped
define the phenomenon of Language poetry at its inception. Many of these presses were,
in fact, established by women.

2 According to his entry on Wikipedia, “Silliman sees his poetry as being part of a single
poem or lifework, which he calls Ketjak. Ketjak is also the name of the first poem of The
Age of Huts. If and when completed, the entire work will consist of The Age of Huts
(1974-1980), Tjanting (1979-1981), The Alphabet (1979-2004), and Universe (2005- ).”
8
grammar rules. They cannot be what grammarians call “fragments,” nor can they contain
dangling modifiers or participles. A new sentence, on the other hand, can be a mere
utterance, a fragment, a group of words stitched together arbitrarily, or a series of
verbless images linked only by commas and dashes. In my subsequent analyses of
Silliman’s work, when I use the word “sentence” to refer to his compositional building
blocks (whether they be what are traditionally called fragments or grammatically
“correct” sentences), it is the new sentence to which I am referring. This definition,
however, is strictly formal. Beyond form, it is important to discuss the reading practices
that new sentences promote. Because, for instance, they can be fragments or single
words, there exist implied links between and among them, and these links should direct
our focus. To put it another way, traditional sentences contain coherent fields and
narratives that can be easily understood, particularly when such sentences are linked into
paragraphs. Some new sentences, because they may lack most components of traditional
grammar (subject-verb-object), neither contain nor convey an easily understood
referential field. For readers to construct fields of reference, they must construct links
between new sentences. These links help readers establish points of narrative coherency
that may be applied to the entire work. While readers and critics of all texts perform this
work to some extent, depending on the narrative coherence of the text at hand, readers of
Silliman are asked to engage consistently and intensely in constructions of narratives.
Like many experimental literary phenomena, the new sentence resists easy
definition. Different writers apply tenets of the new sentence to their works differently.
Lyn Hejinian, Steve Benson, and Rae Armantrout—writers with diverse formal
sensitivities—apply elements of the compositional mode in ways that further their overall
9
poetic goals. Along with Silliman, these writers—and many more—have been called
“Language poets,” another easy signifier for the wide group of experimental writers from
Silliman’s generation (he was born in 1946). While this group is diverse in the
particularities of their poetics and politics, they tend to share two beliefs: that the concept
of the poetic line should be questioned and that writing and criticism should be viewed
through the lens of political work. While it is impossible for me in this study to outline
the formal modes of every writer who at one time or another has been called a Language
poet, a few additional commonalities can be found among them. Many began to gain
critical attention in the 1980s, a period in American literary history when writers and
critics began in different ways to turn away from the dominant poetic and political
expectations established by various groups of writers under the New Critical umbrella.
This poetry retained some radical principles from early-twentieth-century poets
(especially Stein, Pound, and William Carlos Williams), but incorporated them in ways
that would not alienate readers. The New Criticism basically subsumed and appropriated
innovation as it continued to dominate American poetry through the balance of the
century, especially in textbooks and anthologies.3 Aided and inspired by the radical
reformulations of the poetic line conducted by Stein and Pound and later carried on in the
work of mid-century poets like Allen Ginsberg and Charles Olson (and others collected
in Donald Allen’s 1960 anthology, The New American Poetry), Language poets, in large
part, began questioning the easy consolidation of forms and techniques that fell under the

3 Alan Golding’s From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry explores the New
Criticism’s dominance in pedagogy and publishing during the twentieth century.
10
New Critical umbrella. In “Contexts,” a brief introductory note to The New Sentence,
Silliman complicates the history a bit further:
My first critical writing came at a time when such activity was invariably
associated with the academy or with that specific verse tradition which
began with Pound and continued into the sixties with the work of Charles
Olson and Robert Creeley. These later writers stood warily midway
between the New Critics, whose positivist bias led toward an empiricist
claim to transcendent (and trans-historical) truth, and other sectors of
“New American” poetry whose anti-intellectualism was formed in part in
opposition to the likes of [Cleanth] Brooks and [Austin] Warren [who
were major theoretical proponents of New Criticism]. (3)

In addition to the influence of these poets from the Black Mountain School, he also notes
the influence of the Projectionists (this is from an interview with Gary Sullivan):
I was indeed completely under the spell of the Projectivists for several
years, roughly 1966 through ’70, and it was an extraordinarily useful
apprenticeship in that sense. There is no question in my mind that those
poets were the ones asking the most demanding questions of themselves
and of poetry in the period when I first really began writing. But of those
poets, the only ones that I had any sort of relationship with during the late
‘60s were Robert Duncan, Ken Irby and, via mail, Robert Kelly. I met
[David] Bromige in ’68 and it took us awhile to get to really know one
another. (<http://home.jps.net/~nada/silliman.htm>)

The key point to be taken from these notes of influence is that Silliman has always been
affected by writers who ask difficult questions and refuse to conform to mainstream
modes of presentation. Pound, for example, spent much of his career searching for the
term that defined his textual practice and what he valued in poetry (and the visual arts,
sculpture especially): “imagism” and “vorticism” were two of the terms he embraced and
later dropped. Silliman, too, struggles to define and express in critical terms his own
textual practice and the practice of other writers he admires. The New Sentence should be
read as a culmination of this struggle, but certainly not the final word, for he continues to
refine his thinking about poetics. His blog, which can be accessed at <http://