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Cultural Studies. Linguistics. Originally appearing in 1977 and now in its 11th printing, THE NEW SENTENCE by Ron Silliman is a classic collection of essays by one of the sharpest minds in American contemporary poetic thought. It is a collection with rich insight into Silliman's own monumental poetical work and the writing of his peers, a book which both illuminates the concerns of the era in which it was written and radiates outward with a tremendous scope that continues to bear fruit for the contemporary reader. "Ron Silliman is a terrific prose critic...positively bristles with intellectual and political energy of a very high order" -Bruce Boone. ... Read more

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This book marks a huge break in US counter-poetics
This book with its innovative range of essay/poems and poems/essays marks a huge break in US counter-poetics in the, say, Jack Spicer mode of counter-hegemonic languagings and transnational westcoast imaginary.

The 'break' occurs somewhere in the Reagan era of political amnesia andneo formalism and petunia-poetry poetics of David Lehman et al; but forreaders like me schooled in the Whitmanic sublime canon and US culturalpoetics, never would US lyric poesy be the same after the 'new sentence'came down from on high or, better said, from the streets below theexclusionary lyric apparatus:I read the "Alphabet" worksentence by sentence clotted, dazed, dusted, displaced, amazed at the sheersyntactic inventiveness and learning. Ron Silliman has renovated the syntaxand linear formation of US poetics discourse from inside its white heatdead man walking/talking core. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (1)

The pleasures of language
Wow!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--God's plenty!I am also amazed as to who published this--a university better known for Bear Bryant.

Very highly recommended for anyone who doesn't feel that poetry (or in this case, prose poetry) has to "make sense." ... Read more

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Space heater. Writing gathers around the pigeons. This line leads to Uranus. Nun census. Silver fork upon a chipped blue plate. I saw sleeping bag, pillows in the Buick's back. The companionship of refrigerator's hum. This is beginning I again began not. Salt shaker tall as coffee's mug. Dented Opel's orange fender. Gray dawn. On the rain falls Spain mainly in the brain. Smudges forming fingertips on the back door's windows. X-ray reads gold-leaf sign on the glass. First sound of roommates beginning to stir. Grey into yellow comes sky to the room. Each page, once tree, soon shall be ash. Leather chipping, flaking off the tattered jacket. A woman who wears sweat pants. Detestimonialist. Don't sneeze on cat. Predictable boots worn by Frye people. Potholders old and dark. Ridges by bridges. Knife blade streaked with butter. That bus coming back this way. Rough surface of cat's tongue. Pin koans. Clutter of seeds, oils, spices atop the side board. Uganda Liquors.Pedestrians scamper across in the sun. Stake each sentence out. Call this 5 Corners. Knot this knot. Ball bounced into the panda plant. Cups fill the cupboard. Aliens from other planets are perfectly visible.Tamal is a half-name in the place of the name. The squeak of faucets. I was on the road discovered. Ash "tray." Yellow caterpillar tractor. Ashtray fills up. Waking is in each instant I am. Across, then down and across. Her tone to him through long years of rough intimacy was at once tender and gruff. Begin each letter at the top. Not this. Pit bull's spittle as it snarls. I saw a burgundy filling the clear vial at needle's end, my blood. Liquid detergent. Ing the trap bears ed. Roach holder made of a matchbook. She never lookd this way, whose face I sought a glimpse of. Free write each day. My fingers counted between nine and eleven.Any symbol is a contrary seen in a positive light. A specific shape, complex amd nameable, to each cloud. Sky pilot. Factory filld with sunrise. Scraping paper, leaving tracks. Forklift to timeclock of montage and cut. Call this tracing. 3 wooden rainwarpd chairs in the (back) yard. Fence is a verb. Scratch that. Each word in Max 3 meant polis. In the mind mines gape. Tell that to the Possum. Words tried to imagine. Coffee ground spilld on the stove top. Bare nap rugs on the cat. Mouth open, take a deep breath, say Ah.On the far gray bay side haze hued the hill.Rush of footsteps upstairs. Bathetic. In a middle that is not yet the middle. The mock coolness of the air-conditiond underground. Hours alter colors of the page. Grease sizzles, spitting on the stove top. Words vary. Swam past sand sharks. An idea of land's end. Pale luncher. An eternal groove around record's center. 4-tunneld city and 7 its hills. Owl light.Impaired eyes, desert rocks are attributed evenly throughout the pain. Red water. We saw on the sea sails. Stoppage makes the line. Translicity elects the voice. Cowabonga. But you dependent for what comes thru. Call it dogface. Know all blame, same difference. Doors "ajar." I glimpse the machinery of the modern dentist thru windows. Pills on my Tarot. Shade throws the light lamp. Pacific Palisades. Write between light green lines. Beer in waxed cups. Noon's rise mooning. Someone must make awnings. On the bus home from work, squinting at a thick printout. On a bus in dawn heavy fog, on my way to meet Taggart. Smouldering sienna. One ideogram, meaning lunch, middle or China. The familiar smell suddenly of balsawood and Testor's in a hospital corridor.My nose, seen as a waterfall.Disfeel an ease. Cary Grant on the face of George Washington. Or the faces of watchers through a window at sunset, their skin blue by the dim light of the telly. Once on the bus, took his shoes off. Detains, denotes detonation. His eyes enlarged by his glasses. ... Read more

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Between the Age of Innocence and the Age of Experience comes The Age of Huts. This book brings together for the first time all of the poems in Ron Silliman's Age of Huts cycle, including Ketjak, Sunset Debris, The Chinese Notebook, and 2197, as well as two key satellite texts, Sitting Up, Standing, Taking Steps, and BART. Each poem offers a radically different approach toward using language to explore the world. One of the founding works of Language Poetry, The Age of Huts is about everything, more or less literally, as each sentence, even each phrase, embarks on its own narrative, linking together to form a large polyphonic investigation of contemporary life. From Ketjak, one of the first poems to employ "the new sentence," to 2197, a serial work that scrambles the vocabulary and grammar of its sentences, The Age of Huts questions everything we have known about poetry in order to see the world anew. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

I Liked One Part of It!
I am intimidated by this book, so I open it up to The Chinese Notebook and find that it is a very witty take-off on Wittgenstein's notebooks.

Very fun. I suppose there could be a subtle differentiation between this and Wittgenstein, and how late Wittgenstein actually isn't about art, or isn't about words or art at all, or something, but is about intimacy, and this book isn't that intimate, at least not the part that I read. But it's smart, and engaging, and a lot more fun than I expected.

Read that part (Chinese Notebook), and then see if you have the nerve to try the other parts.

Ron Silliman's fascinating fracas with phrases and the fractured discourse

Ron Silliman, an envelope -pushing writer who's unmoored referents are written with a rigorous methodology and purpose , uses images and image-born phrases in long successions that are seemingly separate from the sentence before it and the sentence that follows. In this poet's case, though, his method isn't isolating sentences as autonomous language units in a gallery-lit vacuum, but rather to bring the rest of what's said in a place to bear.One has the dizzying sensation of hovering overhead a crowded train station at Holiday time; chaotic though it seems, one does understand that conversations continue, jarring contexts are rattling side by side like boxcars, images and remarks on physical things--a sign, a face, the light of day--are dropped and reappear , changed by response and changed as well by conversations around it competing for the human ear. Silliman's new collection, Age of Huts, brings together several books he's published as a long standing project. It makes for alternately exhilarating and exasperating reading. Those who stay with Silliman and his task are rewarded with what is really the most thorough on going examination of the American vernacular since William Carlos Williams composed and assembled his central epic poem Paterson in 1963. Silliman's is the language of a place, and there is a logic as the streams and eddies of unassigned sentences the blended variations at once rich, dissonant.

The pieces are independent of their human personalities and the disparate subjects, an olio of the philosophical and inane, autobiographical and picaresque, the snap shot summary and the extended and unmoored disquisition , are materials that are not so much "mashed together" (as the current and lazy parlance has it) but rather layered, tangled together, interacting in phonemes and bits of invested rhetoric that suggest a great , breathing beast, a language that collides , contradicts, clarifies and is, in effect, constantly making absolute statements about character and the nature of place, only to have the declarations modified, adjusted, changed into new discourses. Each line can well be said to be the start of another poem,and although the approach , which foregrounds language as subject matter, and while the aesthetic effect of Silliman's poetry is culminative--there is a cubist perspective that arises when one gets a hint that each of the writer's pieces, non sequitur that they may seem, have physical locations, sites, real people with whom he's had real conversations, and there is stammering and stuttering rhythm which is oddly musical as he works through his variations of chosen icons--tone appreciates the length to which Silliman has continued his course of examining the dictions and tropes that constitute the way we address experience and position ourselves in the world.

Anyone who thrilled to the shredded surrealism of Bob Dylan's liner notes for Bring It All Back Home or Highway 61 Revisited (or found themselves laughing out loud or being stunned with the cranked up mix of roadhouse wit and word-salad in his lone book Tarantula) will find a kindred spirit in Age of Hut (Compleat);Silliman loves language enough to take it apart to see where in the language the stress of personality comes in, the irreducible trace of individual intent that survives a language fragment being wrested from a larger context. That is the difference between Ron Silliman and others. The sound of the the words as they're spoken and linger in memory seems to be Silliman's central fascination, and to say the least, Age of Huts provides the shock and surprise of hearing ourselves speak in our plenitude, variously manic, reserved, joyous, cranky , curious all in the same clusters of utterance.
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This is the Small Press Traffic "Book of the Year 2004". This memoir provides an exquisitely rich exploration of the relation of context to reference, subtext to meaning, back story to present experience, and composition to poetics. All of Silliman's work unravels and reforms in this exemplary and exhilarating act of attention, recollection, and reflection. ... Read more

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Literary Nonfiction. Biography and Memoir. Part Nine in the ongoing series of collective autobiography, THE GRAND PIANO: PART 9 continues to mark the events, movements and intersections among ten contributing 1970s Language poets. "Like the early avant-gardes, the poets who gathered at THE GRAND PIANO developed not only an exacting and liberating poetics, but also a way of living-in-art. Its chronicle here is many things, among them a deeply human and amusing map to building community through literature in this most unlikely of times"--Cole Swensen. ... Read more

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Ron Silliman
Demo to Ink
ISBN 0-925904-07-4
1992, poetry 175 pages
$11 ... Read more

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A long overdue collection of critical writing on Oppen's substantial legacy.

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Poetry. N/O is a book-length poem in two parts that marks the nineteenth publication from Ron Silliman, a prolific American writer, critic and organizer of localized issues. Described as a "poem of moments," N/O expresses a poetic methodology that has brevity and wit on its side. At the same time, Silliman, who was once a leader of the Language poets, tips his hat to the tradition of the extended poem. N/O itself is considered to be two sections of Silliman's longer project, The Alphabet, which itself contributes to a life-long work called Ketjak. In N/O, the poet "rants, records, juxtaposes, declares, riffs, puns [and] pans" in expression of "his hunger and will to live and absorb" --Tom Beckett. Silliman, "a political poet par excellence," has written a book whose "pleasures.are resonant for the time they take to taste" --Samuel R. Delany. ... Read more

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Poetry. Reprint of the 1996 Meow press edition. Standing at the crossroads of New York School immediacy, high linguistic theory, radical Left politics, and Objectivist prosody, Ron Silliman's XING wants to make a deal with your poetic soul. One of the founding "Language Poets," Ron Silliman has written and edited 24 books to date, most of them available through SPD, including the anthology IN THE AMERICAN TREE. His popular blog has recently brought him to the attention of a new generation of poets. "Brown shoes/ with gray slacks. Sun/ bloats, setting// into the toxic sky"--from XING. ... Read more

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"The Sophist" was first published by Sun & Moon Press in 1987 and has been unavailable for well over a decade. A pivotal book for Bernstein, "The Sophist" demonstrated his great range of subject matter, style, and genre. By contrasting wildly different approaches to poetry, Bernstein not only questions the intrinsic value of any given form but also provides a model for his later heterogeneous books, including "My Way" and "With Strings". If sophism is the opposite of both philosophy and the lyric, then "The Sophist" is model for a rhetorical poetry that interrogates truth in the name of reason. ... Read more

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Chapters: Michael Palmer, Ron Silliman, Susan Howe, Nick Piombino, Charles Bernstein, Barrett Watten, Rae Armantrout, Hannah Weiner, Michael Davidson, Robert Grenier, Larry Eigner, Fanny Howe, Leslie Scalapino, Bob Perelman, Harryette Mullen, Lyn Hejinian, Clark Coolidge, Bruce Andrews, Alan Davies, Ray Dipalma, Leland Hickman, Steve Benson, Bernadette Mayer, Carla Harryman, Tina Darragh, Tom Mandel, Kit Robinson, Ted Pearson, Steve Mccaffery, Alan Bernheimer, P. Inman, Annex Press, David Melnick, L=a=n=g=u=a=g=e, This. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 141. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Michael Palmer (born May 11, 1943; Manhattan, New York) is a contemporary American poet and translator. He attended Harvard University where he earned a BA in French and a MA in Comparative Literature. He has worked extensively with Contemporary dance for over thirty years and has collaborated with many composers and visual artists. Palmer has lived in San Francisco since 1969. Palmer is the 2006 recipient of the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. This $100,000 (US) prize recognizes outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry. Michael Palmer began actively publishing poetry in the 1960s. Two events in the early sixties would prove particularly decisive for his development as a poet. First, he attended the now famous Vancouver Poetry Conference in 1963. This July-August 1963 Poetry Conference in Vancouver, British Columbia spanned three weeks and involved about sixty people who had registered for a program of discussions, workshops, lectures, and readings designed by Warren Tallman and Robert Creeley as a summer course at the University of B.C. There Palmer met writers and artists who would leave an indelible mark on his own developing sense of a poetics, especially ...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=849066 ... Read more

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Chapters: Hope Solo, Ron Silliman, Adam Carriker, Isaac Carpenter, Jeremy Bonderman, Travis Buck, Preston Zimmerman, Liz Heaston, Ray Mansfield. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 46. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt:Appearances (Goals). National team caps and goals correct as of 23 May 2010Hope Amelia Solo (born 30 July 1981, in Richland, Washington) is an American soccer goalkeeper currently playing for Saint Louis Athletica of Women's Professional Soccer and is a member of the United States women's national soccer team. Solo played soccer with the Three-River's Soccer Club in the Tri-Cities. She played forward until the end of high school, when she switched to goalkeeper. Solo played for several U.S. junior national soccer teams before joining the full U.S. national team in 2000. She was named a member of the Olympic team in 2004, making the 2004 Olympics in Athens as an alternate. Solo became the team's starting goalkeeper in 2005. She has recorded several clean sheets and once went 1,054 minutes without allowing a goal (a streak that ended in a 4-1 victory against France in the Algarve Cup). Solo nabs a shot from the Boston Breakers.As a forward in high school, Solo scored 109 goals, leading her team to three consecutive league titles from 1996-1998 and a state championship in her senior year. She was twice named a Parade All American. At the University of Washington, Solo switched to the goalkeeper position and was the team's all-time leader in clean-sheets, saves, and goals-against average (GAA). She was a four-time All-Pac-10 selection and a three-time NSCAA All-American. Following her college career, Solo was drafted for the now defunct WUSA team Philadelphia Charge in 2003. She also played for Kopparbergs/Göteborg FC of Göteborg, Sweden in the Swedish Premier Division in ...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=8322947 ... Read more