The Age of Huts (compleat) (New California Poetry)

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The New Sentence

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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.

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The Alphabet (Modern & Contemporary Poetics)

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Tjanting (Salt Modern Poets S.)

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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.

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Under Albany (Salt Modern Lives S.)

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"Under Albany is the shadow movement of Ron Silliman's epic of everyday life, The Alphabet. Silliman provides a set of extended, vividly etched, mostly autobiographical, meditations on the background for each of the original 100 sentences of his 1981 poem Albany. This constructivist memoir provides an exquisitely rich exploration of the relation of context to reference, subtext to meaning, back story to presented experience, and composition to poetics. All of Silliman's work unravels and reforms in this exemplary and exhilarating act of attention, recollection, and reflection." --Charles Bernstein

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N/O

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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.

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