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Lit
- GenresPoetry
70 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 1987
About the author
Ron Silliman
66 books171 followersRon Silliman has written and edited 30 books to date, most recently articipating in the multi-volume collaborative autobiography, The Grand Piano. Between 1979 & 2004, Silliman wrote a single poem, entitled The Alphabet. In addition to Woundwood, a part of VOG, volumes published thus far from that project have included ABC, Demo to Ink, Jones, Lit, Manifest, N/O, Paradise, (R), Toner, What and Xing. The University of Alabama Press will publish the entire work as a single volume in 2008. Silliman has now begun writing a new poem entitled Universe.
Silliman was the 2006 Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere, a 2003 Literary Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and was a 2002 Fellow of the Pennsylvania Arts Council as well as a Pew Fellow in the Arts in 1998. He lives in Chester County, Pennsylvania, with his wife and two sons, and works as a market analyst in the computer industry.
Silliman was the 2006 Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere, a 2003 Literary Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and was a 2002 Fellow of the Pennsylvania Arts Council as well as a Pew Fellow in the Arts in 1998. He lives in Chester County, Pennsylvania, with his wife and two sons, and works as a market analyst in the computer industry.
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June 1, 2021The book's title, all caps, LIT, begins with the letter "L", which is the Lth letter of the alphabet — the twelfth — and the twelfth book-length section of Silliman’s the Alphabet. All twenty-six books came out as one volume in 2008. LIT was published stand-alone in 1987.
Written 1981-82 (though the date 1983 does appear once). A Polish electrician was making international headlines, Derrida thrown in a Czechoslovakian jail, and a former imperial power — speaking a kind of English — invaded a small archipelago in the Atlantic.
Oblique references are made to, I think, the Chadian coup d’état ushering into the world another dictator (CIA-funded, turns out), and new war in the Levant.
Oh yeah, and, what always feels like an international incident: midterm elections.
LIT doesn’t prominently signal any of this as global positioning, however, in fact these references are easy to overlook: “The bath mat is always damp.”
But they raise the question of the noun. For any of Silliman’s texts, the noun is a dominant linguistic feature of it. References demand nouns. The act of naming reaches as far and as wide as naming can go. “Sheik.” Condom, or honorific title? What about “camel”? Animal! except “sheik” and “camel” go semantically together, with a kind of orientalist lean to “a desire to confront the unimaginable.”
“The cat’s name is Turkey.”
Reaching like that, the writer questions the value of adjectives, the use of articles. But the craftwork of how to shape sentences doesn’t park itself at a dead-end of grammar. Form stays passionate. In LIT, the word is socially contested, from more than one side, power striating the word's social institutions.
There’s a ratio to be found, in any writing, between new acts of naming, or repeating the same names. Silliman’s prose-heavy mixed-genredness would play a big role in figuring out the ratio in LIT, because of the history of prose. (Their ratio would be fundamentally different in Larry EIgner’s poetry, for instance.)
History of prose includes 19C and early 20C realist and naturalist novels which explore the reaches of the noun as a way of naming a material world for expansionary imperial subjects. In Silliman, the omniscient viewpoint such a naming requires has vanished. What’s left is a subjective view left holding the bag — the bag of language. That’s a night-and-day difference.
Huge. It means hat a banana’s no longer the same banana in each case, though the noun be the same. Vocabulary keeps expanding outward in naming acts of the world — but only in order to witness itself shaping language, and in order to undermine (to deconstruct, really) that historically expansionary tendency of realism, with a deinflationary nominalism:
Blue.
Lube.
That’s how LIT begins. The “L” does a walk; and the “B.” Nominalism.
Subjective viewpoint. A sentence like this one may capture it for you: “Blue ink repeats the word: an I stares out, surrounded by syntax, by sinus.”
Subjective as opposed to omniscient, not as opposed to objective. That’s important.
Who owns that subjective viewpoint remains an open question and struggle in the text. “I work here,” the writer / writing says, in that Williams-Creeley sense but, unlike them, the question now (“here”) is: for whom?
Meanwhile, back in the USA, “By the junior college was the inevitable Militant Bookstore.” Ouch. What’s more: "The antennae of the race have been snapped off by idle youth." Seriously? Yes. Welcome to History, i.e. passage of time. It marks, marrs, puts it on Mars, the word.
What’s more: "Punk is a petroleum product." We’re in the USA, not north London.
And as we recall that for Pound poets are supposed to be the antennae of the so-called race, so this judgement adds one more reason to why — to leap beyond any exposition I provide here — a New York School model of poetics can’t get close enough to how the world is being made-over by capital: “Love it or live it, dear Barrett / It’s 5:15 a.m., that world is over”.
Is there no greater reflexive consciousness of "race" in LIT than Pound’s circa 1933? There is. In LIT, it is Black men who box on tv, and it is white men to watch. “Only one integrated neighborhood in a town of one million.” “Fed Workers Face Furloughs. Or that new math predicts cholo in a hairnet.” (The non sequiturial use of “or” here needs comment another time.) “The 3 pigs are aryan, the wolf big and black.”
What about: “Grammarian asleep under cactus regrets dream.” There is a grammarian motif throughout, someone wielding administrative powers associated with denying tenure, controlling the curriculum (divide by genre), preventing specifically poets from teaching specifically composition (of course!), and more. Does typecasting he-who-sleeps-beneath-a-cactus as a grammarian sufficiently détourne the racialized stereotype that lies behind the image? History. "The abstractions of history, lethal as a foodstamp, clarify the legal real, an all-over texture, the white race to oblivion...."
LIT as in: Literature. The Free Dictionary also suggests for the acronym: Life Is Tough. With Limerick Institute of Technology, you've gone too far down the list of options! There's not even the hint of limerick, or of Limerick, Ireland, in LIT. Long Island Tea? Right idea (slidin’ signifier) but wrong association contour (not followed through in text). Go back to the one in first place: literature. Better yet: Literature.
The usage of “lit” in the text also defines, by contextualizing, the word. Note the variety:
"Lit, then flickers, whispers, flashes out."
“Pink shape of future lit behind frosted glass”
"[...] body but a metaphor (who I was) for a medical model of that thing lit."
"The el to the Loop. Lit up, writing down: balances."
"[...] the lit in it falls to the were, he rows to the sure lea, a lie: thus did we cross the tea."
In the text, there's also: “Repeats literature without which.”
And what about: "Literal transfer." —A stretch? The text speculates at one point: "say what he wrote weren't words: that he merely scripted letters." “Uphill, these letters combine.” (The man pausies as he walks uphill, in order to steady himself and jot down a note.)
Then there are semantically overlapping fields to "literature," such as mention of book, book titles, teach, teaching, taught, knowledge, institutions, curriculum, genre, campus, dissertations, degree, students, papers, class, academics, department, tenure, University of Pittsburgh Press. But don’t forget: contest of the word. Where’s the writer in this swirl? Inside of it, but moreso outside of it.
LIT is composed of twelve sections, each section counting to twelve differently — which affects the look of text on page, and a lot else too. Most literally with section VII, where the text in the 1987 stand-alone edition goes sideways on the page in order to fit in the superlong lines — lines so long they seem to play with idea that they’re not line breaks at all but a right ragged margin: part of the effect. In the Alphabet, that sideways tilt is absent, and the effect instead is slightly of a Victorian-era omnibus book job, with every line a run-on indented just a bit off the left margin, crowded, wobbly.
Numbering: affects more than the visual look, too, goes to how, for instance, improvisation can structure the text in parts, in ways making the improv distinct from at-points comparably parallel experimental prose such as Clark Coolidge’s Mine (note date: 1982).
An entire problematic of fiction, of the fictional, emerges in LIT. It affects even a reader’s attitude toward how to the think about the “integrity” of the literary. “Fiction” as opposed to “narrative”: these are very different problems (theoretical, philosophical, etc).
“[…] Who said / I was uninterested in fiction?” There is no question that LIT uses fictional devices to bring about narrative continuities across elements of its twelve disparately organized and divergently oriented sections.
The central role of section VI is a fascinating place to start the enquiry into the fictive, as it “anchors” LIT with high verisimilitude realism. VI is where the eggs get boiled, if there are eggs (to paraphrase a sentence from LIT). Here we are allowed a permissible Bogart impersonation of Wittgenstein — The world is all that is the case, shuwheetaaht — that is referenced elsewhere as a joke that’s gone “stale.” Just the facts, m’am: VI starts: “The region itself is L-shaped [the “L” again!], a string of towns down along the coast, then suburbs spilling eastward to the mountains, beyond which lies the desert.” Structuralist Barthes would have a name for the convincing realism of discourse in VI.
Think of LIT as radiating out from VI, towards the beginning in one direction (towards section I), and towards the end in the other (towards section XII). The beginning of LIT is the farthest away from verisimilitude, yet closest to the actual presence of words on the page. The end, XII, by contrast, is at once polemical and highly literary (extensive incorporation of Zukofsky cadencing and rhyme).
As to fiction, there seem to be three ways that LIT approaches it.
First, “fiction” is a negative judgement (social, aesthetic, etc) the text makes against other texts, such as “the lit in it” that “he rows to the sure lea, a lie” (quoted above). So, fiction as: spurious, a lie. Ak, mere fiction.
Second, fiction calls up the question of ontology, the degree to which the text embodies human perception, what Barthes early-on describes in a memorable phrase as “the reality effect” of verisimilitude. There are plenty aesthetic moments of embodied perception in LIT, as we’d expect in a Silliman work. If it does embody perception, then the text is judged by reader as no longer fictional, but ontologically “real.” Yes? No? Or is it, rather, that only then is the text “real fiction,” fiction doing its job? But then on the other hand, to deliberately point out the artifice of the fictional is not necessarily to invoke an ontological question about reality, for artifice can be enjoyed for its own sake as the resourcefulness of language (this is what is explored in the opening sections).
With this last mention of fiction as the pleasure of artifice, I think we arrive at the crux of Silliman’s work, that these variegated values for the fictional, from 1-3 above, are only held apart and distinct, as they need to be, by the integrity of the noun referentially attaching the text to the world. It’s a deep antinomy of the work, to be both fiction #1 and #3 at once.
Where is there uncertainty, a moment of doubt? The noun’s integrity is under threat of a compromise by the fictional in that moment when the text is perceived by the reader to have separated (by a hair’s breadth) from the world, in order to aesthetically join with some other text on the page for a more pleasing aesthetic effect — as literature. This hesitation lasts for only the flash of an instant. Before the slippage moves on, continues to produce the real by legal definition and otherwise.
Written 1981-82 (though the date 1983 does appear once). A Polish electrician was making international headlines, Derrida thrown in a Czechoslovakian jail, and a former imperial power — speaking a kind of English — invaded a small archipelago in the Atlantic.
Oblique references are made to, I think, the Chadian coup d’état ushering into the world another dictator (CIA-funded, turns out), and new war in the Levant.
Oh yeah, and, what always feels like an international incident: midterm elections.
LIT doesn’t prominently signal any of this as global positioning, however, in fact these references are easy to overlook: “The bath mat is always damp.”
But they raise the question of the noun. For any of Silliman’s texts, the noun is a dominant linguistic feature of it. References demand nouns. The act of naming reaches as far and as wide as naming can go. “Sheik.” Condom, or honorific title? What about “camel”? Animal! except “sheik” and “camel” go semantically together, with a kind of orientalist lean to “a desire to confront the unimaginable.”
“The cat’s name is Turkey.”
Reaching like that, the writer questions the value of adjectives, the use of articles. But the craftwork of how to shape sentences doesn’t park itself at a dead-end of grammar. Form stays passionate. In LIT, the word is socially contested, from more than one side, power striating the word's social institutions.
There’s a ratio to be found, in any writing, between new acts of naming, or repeating the same names. Silliman’s prose-heavy mixed-genredness would play a big role in figuring out the ratio in LIT, because of the history of prose. (Their ratio would be fundamentally different in Larry EIgner’s poetry, for instance.)
History of prose includes 19C and early 20C realist and naturalist novels which explore the reaches of the noun as a way of naming a material world for expansionary imperial subjects. In Silliman, the omniscient viewpoint such a naming requires has vanished. What’s left is a subjective view left holding the bag — the bag of language. That’s a night-and-day difference.
Huge. It means hat a banana’s no longer the same banana in each case, though the noun be the same. Vocabulary keeps expanding outward in naming acts of the world — but only in order to witness itself shaping language, and in order to undermine (to deconstruct, really) that historically expansionary tendency of realism, with a deinflationary nominalism:
Blue.
Lube.
That’s how LIT begins. The “L” does a walk; and the “B.” Nominalism.
Subjective viewpoint. A sentence like this one may capture it for you: “Blue ink repeats the word: an I stares out, surrounded by syntax, by sinus.”
Subjective as opposed to omniscient, not as opposed to objective. That’s important.
Who owns that subjective viewpoint remains an open question and struggle in the text. “I work here,” the writer / writing says, in that Williams-Creeley sense but, unlike them, the question now (“here”) is: for whom?
Meanwhile, back in the USA, “By the junior college was the inevitable Militant Bookstore.” Ouch. What’s more: "The antennae of the race have been snapped off by idle youth." Seriously? Yes. Welcome to History, i.e. passage of time. It marks, marrs, puts it on Mars, the word.
What’s more: "Punk is a petroleum product." We’re in the USA, not north London.
And as we recall that for Pound poets are supposed to be the antennae of the so-called race, so this judgement adds one more reason to why — to leap beyond any exposition I provide here — a New York School model of poetics can’t get close enough to how the world is being made-over by capital: “Love it or live it, dear Barrett / It’s 5:15 a.m., that world is over”.
Is there no greater reflexive consciousness of "race" in LIT than Pound’s circa 1933? There is. In LIT, it is Black men who box on tv, and it is white men to watch. “Only one integrated neighborhood in a town of one million.” “Fed Workers Face Furloughs. Or that new math predicts cholo in a hairnet.” (The non sequiturial use of “or” here needs comment another time.) “The 3 pigs are aryan, the wolf big and black.”
What about: “Grammarian asleep under cactus regrets dream.” There is a grammarian motif throughout, someone wielding administrative powers associated with denying tenure, controlling the curriculum (divide by genre), preventing specifically poets from teaching specifically composition (of course!), and more. Does typecasting he-who-sleeps-beneath-a-cactus as a grammarian sufficiently détourne the racialized stereotype that lies behind the image? History. "The abstractions of history, lethal as a foodstamp, clarify the legal real, an all-over texture, the white race to oblivion...."
LIT as in: Literature. The Free Dictionary also suggests for the acronym: Life Is Tough. With Limerick Institute of Technology, you've gone too far down the list of options! There's not even the hint of limerick, or of Limerick, Ireland, in LIT. Long Island Tea? Right idea (slidin’ signifier) but wrong association contour (not followed through in text). Go back to the one in first place: literature. Better yet: Literature.
The usage of “lit” in the text also defines, by contextualizing, the word. Note the variety:
"Lit, then flickers, whispers, flashes out."
“Pink shape of future lit behind frosted glass”
"[...] body but a metaphor (who I was) for a medical model of that thing lit."
"The el to the Loop. Lit up, writing down: balances."
"[...] the lit in it falls to the were, he rows to the sure lea, a lie: thus did we cross the tea."
In the text, there's also: “Repeats literature without which.”
And what about: "Literal transfer." —A stretch? The text speculates at one point: "say what he wrote weren't words: that he merely scripted letters." “Uphill, these letters combine.” (The man pausies as he walks uphill, in order to steady himself and jot down a note.)
Then there are semantically overlapping fields to "literature," such as mention of book, book titles, teach, teaching, taught, knowledge, institutions, curriculum, genre, campus, dissertations, degree, students, papers, class, academics, department, tenure, University of Pittsburgh Press. But don’t forget: contest of the word. Where’s the writer in this swirl? Inside of it, but moreso outside of it.
LIT is composed of twelve sections, each section counting to twelve differently — which affects the look of text on page, and a lot else too. Most literally with section VII, where the text in the 1987 stand-alone edition goes sideways on the page in order to fit in the superlong lines — lines so long they seem to play with idea that they’re not line breaks at all but a right ragged margin: part of the effect. In the Alphabet, that sideways tilt is absent, and the effect instead is slightly of a Victorian-era omnibus book job, with every line a run-on indented just a bit off the left margin, crowded, wobbly.
Numbering: affects more than the visual look, too, goes to how, for instance, improvisation can structure the text in parts, in ways making the improv distinct from at-points comparably parallel experimental prose such as Clark Coolidge’s Mine (note date: 1982).
An entire problematic of fiction, of the fictional, emerges in LIT. It affects even a reader’s attitude toward how to the think about the “integrity” of the literary. “Fiction” as opposed to “narrative”: these are very different problems (theoretical, philosophical, etc).
“[…] Who said / I was uninterested in fiction?” There is no question that LIT uses fictional devices to bring about narrative continuities across elements of its twelve disparately organized and divergently oriented sections.
The central role of section VI is a fascinating place to start the enquiry into the fictive, as it “anchors” LIT with high verisimilitude realism. VI is where the eggs get boiled, if there are eggs (to paraphrase a sentence from LIT). Here we are allowed a permissible Bogart impersonation of Wittgenstein — The world is all that is the case, shuwheetaaht — that is referenced elsewhere as a joke that’s gone “stale.” Just the facts, m’am: VI starts: “The region itself is L-shaped [the “L” again!], a string of towns down along the coast, then suburbs spilling eastward to the mountains, beyond which lies the desert.” Structuralist Barthes would have a name for the convincing realism of discourse in VI.
Think of LIT as radiating out from VI, towards the beginning in one direction (towards section I), and towards the end in the other (towards section XII). The beginning of LIT is the farthest away from verisimilitude, yet closest to the actual presence of words on the page. The end, XII, by contrast, is at once polemical and highly literary (extensive incorporation of Zukofsky cadencing and rhyme).
As to fiction, there seem to be three ways that LIT approaches it.
First, “fiction” is a negative judgement (social, aesthetic, etc) the text makes against other texts, such as “the lit in it” that “he rows to the sure lea, a lie” (quoted above). So, fiction as: spurious, a lie. Ak, mere fiction.
Second, fiction calls up the question of ontology, the degree to which the text embodies human perception, what Barthes early-on describes in a memorable phrase as “the reality effect” of verisimilitude. There are plenty aesthetic moments of embodied perception in LIT, as we’d expect in a Silliman work. If it does embody perception, then the text is judged by reader as no longer fictional, but ontologically “real.” Yes? No? Or is it, rather, that only then is the text “real fiction,” fiction doing its job? But then on the other hand, to deliberately point out the artifice of the fictional is not necessarily to invoke an ontological question about reality, for artifice can be enjoyed for its own sake as the resourcefulness of language (this is what is explored in the opening sections).
With this last mention of fiction as the pleasure of artifice, I think we arrive at the crux of Silliman’s work, that these variegated values for the fictional, from 1-3 above, are only held apart and distinct, as they need to be, by the integrity of the noun referentially attaching the text to the world. It’s a deep antinomy of the work, to be both fiction #1 and #3 at once.
Where is there uncertainty, a moment of doubt? The noun’s integrity is under threat of a compromise by the fictional in that moment when the text is perceived by the reader to have separated (by a hair’s breadth) from the world, in order to aesthetically join with some other text on the page for a more pleasing aesthetic effect — as literature. This hesitation lasts for only the flash of an instant. Before the slippage moves on, continues to produce the real by legal definition and otherwise.
September 8, 2025
review of
Ron Silliman's Lit
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - August 16, 2025
This is the 7th bk I've read & reviewed by Silliman. I added him to my Top 100 Poets website ( http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/Top100P... ) (wch only has 23 poets listed on it currently) after I read his Ketjak & The Age of Huts (an early edition) wch I loved.. even after the honeymoon. Lit was somewhat different for me than the previous bks b/c I just enjoyed reading it as poetry (or perhaps I shd say as "writing" since the term "poetry" is largely meaningless to me), something I rarely do since I have a problematic love/hate attitude toward poetry in general.
Lit is the letter "l" in Silliman's huge bk the Alphabet, wch is the 9th bk I'm starting to read by him now. It was supported in part by "the National Endowment for the Arts" [..] "Creative Writing Fellowship" (p -i), something I find extraordinary & something that makes me, therefore, suspect this bk of being less radical than I might otherwise think it to be.
"I" starts off w/ an anagram, wch surprised me:
"Blue.
Lube." - p 1
& continues on w/ a progressively increasing number of words per stanza/paragraph, like Ketjak, wch I thought might be based on Fibonacci Numbers but wch isn't.
"Big. Boy.
Then. Theme. On time.
Saids. Bide. Buddy. Up over. To bending pony." - p 1
It's probably worth mentioning that after I read Lit the next Silliman bk I read was The New Sentence wch includes such astonishingly close reading & analysis of poetry that I realize that I'll never do Silliman's work a similar kind of 'justice'. W/ that in mind I feel like I'm excusing a superficial review in advance - wch isn't really my intention.
Unlike Ketjak, this has commas & question marks: "imagined January's smog-ridden tale, whose waggingplot evokes yams?" (p 2)
& then there's "Osip Brik": "detached as Osip Brik" (p 2), whose name I recognized asa Russian Revolution poet. I quote from my review of The Age of Huts:
"The next poem, in paragraph form, is called "I MEET OSIP BRIK". Brik was a Russian avant-garde writer & critic during the Russian Revolution. Silliman wdn't've met him b/c he died in 1945, Silliman was born in 1946. Of course, he cd be 'meeting' him in a more formal sense. The 1st paragraph is as follows:
""Sidewalks, people waving, is incoming insurgents. Experience of the predicated. Spaces in which land mass. Smell of warm, weather of I. Needle of diamond or pine. These are only Q-tips and have no other morning. The season is not the presence of the new which it recognize. The lower the themes, the higher the life. A needle I suddenly diamond to pine. Great sneeze of sense shake in the loose sleeping. News from the insect room. Blink objects forget lepers here. Several the voice, one the brain." - p 76"
- http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticS...
"II" starts w/ 2 words, "Read it." (p 4), leading to my wondering if "III" wd start w/ 3 words. Silliman always seems inspired & keeps me guessing. Take this excerpt from "II":
"Red an green or red or green.
Hour-like.
The smell of new bread.
Derricks in the gulf pierce skin of earth.
Coffee jitters.
Man in the caboose waves back.
Tar heater has its own sound.
More than a dozen.
Or a pear tree." - p 5
That seems almost straight-forward imagistic to me.
"Silliman is wrong and I can prove it." - p 7
Ha ha! Either/or (both) Silliman is being self-reflexively humorous or he's quoting someone else (either fictively or factually) who's perhpas, a critic of his poetic theories &/or his politics &/or whatever. Whatever the case, I find it funny.
"III" starts off w/ 4 words - or is it 5? Is "Hoagy's" one word or 2?
"Hoagy's busted in San
Salvador & B's skull, bulblike, glows" - p 16
"IV" is all multi-sentence paragraphs/stanzas. A sample one is this:
"Interruption generates summer, supper (an RV on a suburban lawn with the sign "Your tarot read here"). The androgynous economist trademarks lip and tongue. New theory of twilight. After nachos comes sex. Or that Nolan is Frankenthaler made neat. The blue parrot jealous of the simplest finch. I still haven't mentioned oranges. Boxes and brigands. Over the overpass to old Pot Hill. An emotion midway between anger and despair. The usual crowd at Taco Palace. The parked cabbie fast asleep." - p 22
Why do I enjoy this sequence of sentences? Maybe b/c each new sentence takes me to a new place. & then it's over. Sortof. But why begin sentences w/ a capital letter? Do you ever ask yourself that? In BalTimOre the cabbie wd probably be nodding out on heroin - is it the same wherever Silliman is writing about?
On page 24 he takes the title for a spin: "Lit, then flickers, whispers, flashes out." (p 24) I took it for granted that the title "Lit" stood for the beginning of "Literature" but maybe it refers to fire. Or neither. Or being drunk (He's lit).
"Three pigs got two bros spread-eagled against stucco wall." - p 24
Why do I distrust that? you don't ask. When whites, esp, use slang like "pigs" I have to wonder how much they're trying to impress the listener/reader w/ their street-smart politics - but what I see is stereotyping language. I've been stereotyped by hostile people my whole life, always negatively, so I distrust people who use stereotypes. Then again, I'm reading Silliman's sentence as if it's 1st person wch I have no good reason to believe, it cd be a quote. & what about "bros"? Having been raised by a family that wasn't exactly in my favor, the term "brother" as one of solidarity doesn't sit well w/ me, hence I don't use it politically. Are all black men my brothers? Nope, I've been tormented by many black men - & I've had good experiences w/ black men. Generalizing them in order to show that one isn't racist is just plain stupid. In another bk by Silliman he refers to something like 'right-wing anarchists' wch I took exception to. So let's look into Silliman's politics shall we?
Silliman was the editor of The Socialist Review. An interview w/ him on a Poetry Society of America webpage begins:
"Do you value the examination of the political in poetry? If so, what experience(s) taught you its importance?
"The simplest answer to this would be one word: Vietnam. But a truer, fuller answer would have to do with my having grown up in one of -- if not the -- poorest families in my community and my having worked for many years with prisoners and as a housing activist with very poor residents in San Francisco's Tenderloin." - https://poetrysociety.org/poems-essay...
Ok, I admit, I was going to write something snarky about Socialism, about National Socialism (Nazis), Fascists (Mussolini was a militant Socialist before he created Fascism), about Pol Pot (Cambodian genocide) & about how Socialists tend toward being a vanguard-for-the-proletariat (ie: power-hungry), about how Stalin betrayed the Republic in the Spanish Civil War, etc, etc, - but why pick on Silliman?
"V" is formally different than its predecessors (wch were formally different from each other), this time having 4 groups of 12 stanzes, each w/ 3 lines apiece.
"8
Bees are harvesting the clover.
The sky remains grey for weeks.
The tricycle lies abandoned by the steps." - p 26
"4
Tamed by Milton, I lie on Mother's head.
The bee was a large as a mouse.
The bush grew against the side of the house, huddled against the wind." - p 28
Can we assume that "The bee was a large as a mouse." was intended to bee "The bee was as large as a mouse."? Or is Silliman being tricky?
"VI" is a description of a town where's he an academic.
"The region itself is L-shaped, a string of towns down along the coast, then suburbs spilling eastward to the mountains, beyond which lies the desert. In the spring when the jacaranda blooms, the streets are lined with purple. Those young navy boys don't know a drag queen when they see one. At the base of the bridge is Chicano Park. All of the students wore cutoffs. Melvyn suggests a game of charades. My room was painted seven different shades of white." - p 35
"VII" is sideways.
"New paragraph: old tricks. Dear squeegee, vend hither. Cloves pierce the orange rind, while out the dusty window a neighbor stands at his mailbox staring at an envelope, a rooster crows, and in my daypack is a broken telephone. The wind is full in the sheets on the line and the pages must be cut apart before you begin writing. The cat sniffs at the sausage. A small red metal "glass" in which toothbrushes and razors are stuffed. Jitterbugging, here we come! The blue one is the creme rinse. Mike Heath on a pop fly. Floss, 100,000 Indonesian political prisoners have been kept in jail since the coup 17 years ago." - p 39
"Nobody's mutter beats Anselm's." - p 40
I knew Anselm Hollo & considered him a friend. One thing I loved about him was how absolutely immersed in poetry & poets he was.
"VIII" consists entirely of a one-paragraph quote from Thoreau:
""Write often, write upon a thousand themes, rather than long at a time, not trying to turn too many feeble somersets in the air—and so come down upon your head at last. Antaeus-like, be not long absent from the ground. Those sentences are good and well discharged which are like so many little resiliencies from the spring floor of our life—a distinct fruit and kernal itself, springing from the terra firma. Let there be as many distinct plants s the soil and light can sustain. Take as many bounds in a day as possible. Sentences uttered with your back to the wall.
"Henry David Thoreau
November 12, 1851" - p 44
I take it that Silliman identifies w/ Thoreau's advice - but do I really have enuf to go on to do so? Perhaps he just wanted to quote Thoreau re writing w/o necessarily agreeing w/ it.
"IX"'s 2nd stanza seems like somewhat standard poetry to me. Just sayin', I'm not knockin' it.
"Hand trim lawn.
Under these stairs
find cool shadows.
Poor stereo lacks
one speaker. Shape
of word one.
On line sheets
form sails. Boy
shoots with his
cheeks, ricochets whisper.
Goggle. Blue lube,
big bad boy." - p 45
For me, it's just refreshing for "On line" to refer to a clothesline & for "Goggle" to be "Goggle" instead of "Google".
In "X" I noticed the rhyming (& wordplay) more than I had previously:
"4th: the count adds up
Dear gem spa, it's 5:15
(aha) what limit to pure
differential clatter (cough) the stuff
of art (thus fart: Life
parts, the River Jordan, marts
of perfect bondage, margins) starts
to get simple: fee fi
phoneme, name it, sit straight
sing "Hail to the Chief
he's a dirty little thief"" - p 50
Then there's calling attn to pronunciation oddities in English:
"Laughter slaughters laughter" - p 52
"XI" starts like this:
"Painter's reconstruction of the color white
Clatter of birds' wings crowds the sky
Sighing, declarative sentences makes wrong judgment or none
Sandwich wrap harbors dark nine grain bread
Out the window, fog shuts sky
Rhyme invoked scandal greases new semi-gloss wall" - p 57
I imagine Silliman's different moods as he writes each of these poems. The above? A scandal-grease mood, the kind you keep in sandwich-wrap for a rainy day.
"XII" starts w/:
"Words wiggle, tickle, setting cat's whiskery nostrils atwitch, rooster's yodel, breeze in tall grass (little spider), grasses, is as/was is (fuzzy), a blue prick bleeds & what remains (flock of gulls) means, O new Spring (!)" - p 62
Note that there's an exclamation mark!, possibly the 1st one I've ever seen him use. I'm glad he refrained from writing a poem in wch every sentence ends w/ one. That might prove fatal to the reader.
"being neither fosters purchase, sculpted tragedy of a playground killing turned into "features" fathers a false remorse (sullen competent cop shakes head), mothers no new insight, the boy just bled two pages away from where Garfield contemplates lasagna." - p 66
My reviewer notes about this says "more believable politics". That strikes me as an odd thing for me to say. The above is media analysis, the implication of having tragedy 2 pages away from comedy in a 'news'paper.
& if you're going to 'thank god' for anything, thank it for word-play: "But. Bit. Chewing. Down into. Onto a chunk of. Ontological chocolate." (p 68)
& sew on.
Ron Silliman's Lit
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - August 16, 2025
This is the 7th bk I've read & reviewed by Silliman. I added him to my Top 100 Poets website ( http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/Top100P... ) (wch only has 23 poets listed on it currently) after I read his Ketjak & The Age of Huts (an early edition) wch I loved.. even after the honeymoon. Lit was somewhat different for me than the previous bks b/c I just enjoyed reading it as poetry (or perhaps I shd say as "writing" since the term "poetry" is largely meaningless to me), something I rarely do since I have a problematic love/hate attitude toward poetry in general.
Lit is the letter "l" in Silliman's huge bk the Alphabet, wch is the 9th bk I'm starting to read by him now. It was supported in part by "the National Endowment for the Arts" [..] "Creative Writing Fellowship" (p -i), something I find extraordinary & something that makes me, therefore, suspect this bk of being less radical than I might otherwise think it to be.
"I" starts off w/ an anagram, wch surprised me:
"Blue.
Lube." - p 1
& continues on w/ a progressively increasing number of words per stanza/paragraph, like Ketjak, wch I thought might be based on Fibonacci Numbers but wch isn't.
"Big. Boy.
Then. Theme. On time.
Saids. Bide. Buddy. Up over. To bending pony." - p 1
It's probably worth mentioning that after I read Lit the next Silliman bk I read was The New Sentence wch includes such astonishingly close reading & analysis of poetry that I realize that I'll never do Silliman's work a similar kind of 'justice'. W/ that in mind I feel like I'm excusing a superficial review in advance - wch isn't really my intention.
Unlike Ketjak, this has commas & question marks: "imagined January's smog-ridden tale, whose waggingplot evokes yams?" (p 2)
& then there's "Osip Brik": "detached as Osip Brik" (p 2), whose name I recognized asa Russian Revolution poet. I quote from my review of The Age of Huts:
"The next poem, in paragraph form, is called "I MEET OSIP BRIK". Brik was a Russian avant-garde writer & critic during the Russian Revolution. Silliman wdn't've met him b/c he died in 1945, Silliman was born in 1946. Of course, he cd be 'meeting' him in a more formal sense. The 1st paragraph is as follows:
""Sidewalks, people waving, is incoming insurgents. Experience of the predicated. Spaces in which land mass. Smell of warm, weather of I. Needle of diamond or pine. These are only Q-tips and have no other morning. The season is not the presence of the new which it recognize. The lower the themes, the higher the life. A needle I suddenly diamond to pine. Great sneeze of sense shake in the loose sleeping. News from the insect room. Blink objects forget lepers here. Several the voice, one the brain." - p 76"
- http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticS...
"II" starts w/ 2 words, "Read it." (p 4), leading to my wondering if "III" wd start w/ 3 words. Silliman always seems inspired & keeps me guessing. Take this excerpt from "II":
"Red an green or red or green.
Hour-like.
The smell of new bread.
Derricks in the gulf pierce skin of earth.
Coffee jitters.
Man in the caboose waves back.
Tar heater has its own sound.
More than a dozen.
Or a pear tree." - p 5
That seems almost straight-forward imagistic to me.
"Silliman is wrong and I can prove it." - p 7
Ha ha! Either/or (both) Silliman is being self-reflexively humorous or he's quoting someone else (either fictively or factually) who's perhpas, a critic of his poetic theories &/or his politics &/or whatever. Whatever the case, I find it funny.
"III" starts off w/ 4 words - or is it 5? Is "Hoagy's" one word or 2?
"Hoagy's busted in San
Salvador & B's skull, bulblike, glows" - p 16
"IV" is all multi-sentence paragraphs/stanzas. A sample one is this:
"Interruption generates summer, supper (an RV on a suburban lawn with the sign "Your tarot read here"). The androgynous economist trademarks lip and tongue. New theory of twilight. After nachos comes sex. Or that Nolan is Frankenthaler made neat. The blue parrot jealous of the simplest finch. I still haven't mentioned oranges. Boxes and brigands. Over the overpass to old Pot Hill. An emotion midway between anger and despair. The usual crowd at Taco Palace. The parked cabbie fast asleep." - p 22
Why do I enjoy this sequence of sentences? Maybe b/c each new sentence takes me to a new place. & then it's over. Sortof. But why begin sentences w/ a capital letter? Do you ever ask yourself that? In BalTimOre the cabbie wd probably be nodding out on heroin - is it the same wherever Silliman is writing about?
On page 24 he takes the title for a spin: "Lit, then flickers, whispers, flashes out." (p 24) I took it for granted that the title "Lit" stood for the beginning of "Literature" but maybe it refers to fire. Or neither. Or being drunk (He's lit).
"Three pigs got two bros spread-eagled against stucco wall." - p 24
Why do I distrust that? you don't ask. When whites, esp, use slang like "pigs" I have to wonder how much they're trying to impress the listener/reader w/ their street-smart politics - but what I see is stereotyping language. I've been stereotyped by hostile people my whole life, always negatively, so I distrust people who use stereotypes. Then again, I'm reading Silliman's sentence as if it's 1st person wch I have no good reason to believe, it cd be a quote. & what about "bros"? Having been raised by a family that wasn't exactly in my favor, the term "brother" as one of solidarity doesn't sit well w/ me, hence I don't use it politically. Are all black men my brothers? Nope, I've been tormented by many black men - & I've had good experiences w/ black men. Generalizing them in order to show that one isn't racist is just plain stupid. In another bk by Silliman he refers to something like 'right-wing anarchists' wch I took exception to. So let's look into Silliman's politics shall we?
Silliman was the editor of The Socialist Review. An interview w/ him on a Poetry Society of America webpage begins:
"Do you value the examination of the political in poetry? If so, what experience(s) taught you its importance?
"The simplest answer to this would be one word: Vietnam. But a truer, fuller answer would have to do with my having grown up in one of -- if not the -- poorest families in my community and my having worked for many years with prisoners and as a housing activist with very poor residents in San Francisco's Tenderloin." - https://poetrysociety.org/poems-essay...
Ok, I admit, I was going to write something snarky about Socialism, about National Socialism (Nazis), Fascists (Mussolini was a militant Socialist before he created Fascism), about Pol Pot (Cambodian genocide) & about how Socialists tend toward being a vanguard-for-the-proletariat (ie: power-hungry), about how Stalin betrayed the Republic in the Spanish Civil War, etc, etc, - but why pick on Silliman?
"V" is formally different than its predecessors (wch were formally different from each other), this time having 4 groups of 12 stanzes, each w/ 3 lines apiece.
"8
Bees are harvesting the clover.
The sky remains grey for weeks.
The tricycle lies abandoned by the steps." - p 26
"4
Tamed by Milton, I lie on Mother's head.
The bee was a large as a mouse.
The bush grew against the side of the house, huddled against the wind." - p 28
Can we assume that "The bee was a large as a mouse." was intended to bee "The bee was as large as a mouse."? Or is Silliman being tricky?
"VI" is a description of a town where's he an academic.
"The region itself is L-shaped, a string of towns down along the coast, then suburbs spilling eastward to the mountains, beyond which lies the desert. In the spring when the jacaranda blooms, the streets are lined with purple. Those young navy boys don't know a drag queen when they see one. At the base of the bridge is Chicano Park. All of the students wore cutoffs. Melvyn suggests a game of charades. My room was painted seven different shades of white." - p 35
"VII" is sideways.
"New paragraph: old tricks. Dear squeegee, vend hither. Cloves pierce the orange rind, while out the dusty window a neighbor stands at his mailbox staring at an envelope, a rooster crows, and in my daypack is a broken telephone. The wind is full in the sheets on the line and the pages must be cut apart before you begin writing. The cat sniffs at the sausage. A small red metal "glass" in which toothbrushes and razors are stuffed. Jitterbugging, here we come! The blue one is the creme rinse. Mike Heath on a pop fly. Floss, 100,000 Indonesian political prisoners have been kept in jail since the coup 17 years ago." - p 39
"Nobody's mutter beats Anselm's." - p 40
I knew Anselm Hollo & considered him a friend. One thing I loved about him was how absolutely immersed in poetry & poets he was.
"VIII" consists entirely of a one-paragraph quote from Thoreau:
""Write often, write upon a thousand themes, rather than long at a time, not trying to turn too many feeble somersets in the air—and so come down upon your head at last. Antaeus-like, be not long absent from the ground. Those sentences are good and well discharged which are like so many little resiliencies from the spring floor of our life—a distinct fruit and kernal itself, springing from the terra firma. Let there be as many distinct plants s the soil and light can sustain. Take as many bounds in a day as possible. Sentences uttered with your back to the wall.
"Henry David Thoreau
November 12, 1851" - p 44
I take it that Silliman identifies w/ Thoreau's advice - but do I really have enuf to go on to do so? Perhaps he just wanted to quote Thoreau re writing w/o necessarily agreeing w/ it.
"IX"'s 2nd stanza seems like somewhat standard poetry to me. Just sayin', I'm not knockin' it.
"Hand trim lawn.
Under these stairs
find cool shadows.
Poor stereo lacks
one speaker. Shape
of word one.
On line sheets
form sails. Boy
shoots with his
cheeks, ricochets whisper.
Goggle. Blue lube,
big bad boy." - p 45
For me, it's just refreshing for "On line" to refer to a clothesline & for "Goggle" to be "Goggle" instead of "Google".
In "X" I noticed the rhyming (& wordplay) more than I had previously:
"4th: the count adds up
Dear gem spa, it's 5:15
(aha) what limit to pure
differential clatter (cough) the stuff
of art (thus fart: Life
parts, the River Jordan, marts
of perfect bondage, margins) starts
to get simple: fee fi
phoneme, name it, sit straight
sing "Hail to the Chief
he's a dirty little thief"" - p 50
Then there's calling attn to pronunciation oddities in English:
"Laughter slaughters laughter" - p 52
"XI" starts like this:
"Painter's reconstruction of the color white
Clatter of birds' wings crowds the sky
Sighing, declarative sentences makes wrong judgment or none
Sandwich wrap harbors dark nine grain bread
Out the window, fog shuts sky
Rhyme invoked scandal greases new semi-gloss wall" - p 57
I imagine Silliman's different moods as he writes each of these poems. The above? A scandal-grease mood, the kind you keep in sandwich-wrap for a rainy day.
"XII" starts w/:
"Words wiggle, tickle, setting cat's whiskery nostrils atwitch, rooster's yodel, breeze in tall grass (little spider), grasses, is as/was is (fuzzy), a blue prick bleeds & what remains (flock of gulls) means, O new Spring (!)" - p 62
Note that there's an exclamation mark!, possibly the 1st one I've ever seen him use. I'm glad he refrained from writing a poem in wch every sentence ends w/ one. That might prove fatal to the reader.
"being neither fosters purchase, sculpted tragedy of a playground killing turned into "features" fathers a false remorse (sullen competent cop shakes head), mothers no new insight, the boy just bled two pages away from where Garfield contemplates lasagna." - p 66
My reviewer notes about this says "more believable politics". That strikes me as an odd thing for me to say. The above is media analysis, the implication of having tragedy 2 pages away from comedy in a 'news'paper.
& if you're going to 'thank god' for anything, thank it for word-play: "But. Bit. Chewing. Down into. Onto a chunk of. Ontological chocolate." (p 68)
& sew on.
July 16, 2013
Lit is playful then striking then recursive, reference a line made pages ago, an image that has stuck in the stacking scratches:
“Think of phone lines as houses joining hands.”
Then later:
“You Imagine each car as belonging to its house.”
It builds, it deflates. It fills you with poetry.
“Think of phone lines as houses joining hands.”
Then later:
“You Imagine each car as belonging to its house.”
It builds, it deflates. It fills you with poetry.
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