. . . to Poetry
Well, what do you know: this month, after an absence of 41 years, poet Ron Silliman’s work – in the form of a long excerpt from his poem Revelator – appears again Poetry magazine. Silliman’s previous and only other appearance in the ‘zine came in 1969, the year his first book was published.
No, nobody’s going to write an epic, a la Odysseus and Penelope, about this particular return. Nor is Silliman here some sort of poet Tommy Thevenow, the major leaguer whose first home run in 1926 was not followed by another until 1938, 12 seasons and 3,347 at-bats later (that’s the record); Ron’s had plenty of round-trippers over the decades. But still, this may be the record, or close, for most years between appearances in the grand dame of American poetry magazines.
Anyway, I wanna talk about “from Revelator,” the Silliman poetry that Poetry published. It’s ten excerpts, amounting to approximately 465 lines (each with exactly five words) and 14 printed pages in the hard copy ‘zine.
But first, permit me dear readers of the glade to opine a bit regarding the po(etry)litics – by which I mean the significance – of Silliman being published in Poetry after so many years. It’s come about, I think it fair to say, as a result of Poetry’s recent move towards a more catholic approach to the possibilities of today’s poetry. For a long time – some would say since Henry Rago was editor (he died in 1969) and at least the last approximately 20 years – Poetry, the work published in it, has been – with a few notable exceptions (e.g., John Ashbery) has been decidedly uncomtemporary (as Silliman himself implied three years ago) and (my term here) awfully dull.
But in the last three years or so Poetry has broadened what it publishes. Poets and poems that you wouldn’t (and couldn’t) find in it twenty, ten, or even five years ago now appear just about every month. Look who has turned up in the ‘zine since 2007 or thereabouts (these are examples): Rae Armantrout (in five different issues), Fanny Howe (a couple times), a bunch of Flarfers + Conceptualists (a special section), Charles Bernstein (thrice), Ange Mlinko (a dozen or so separate time, a laudable instance of editorial enthusiasm unleashed), Inger Christensen, Robert Hass (the longish + disjunctive “September Notebook: Stories”), Juliana Spahr (a manifesto), and a large number of vis-po work (another special section, edited by Geof Huth).
As such, this month’s – drumroll, please – Return of Ron continues the magazine’s attempt to become a forum for new work from poets who write in ways decidedly different than the quieter staid verse that it primarily and even entirely featured in far too many issues for far too many years.
For this most welcome change I credit senior editor Don Share (he began at the ‘zine in October 2007), his boss Christian Wiman (who seems to have given Share room to move), and associate editor Fred Sasaki (who no doubt does a lot of the work). But whoever has made it happen, I celebrate the move towards presenting writing of a kinds different than its own recent tradition, to take a course that might (or plainly will) cause concern among that part of Poetry’s subscriber or readership that’s too often been inured to the fuddy-duddy.
Yes, “inured to the fuddy-duddy.” That’s what I say about those who – to take just examples from readers’ letters published in Poetry so far this year – find an esoteric allusion “solipsis[tic],” deplore “gutter language and “naughty children,” consider themselves “average Joes,” believe that poetry now finds itself in a “lowly state,” or find ampersands and “Dickinsonian dashes” distracting.
Hello? Dear people inured to the fuddy-duddy: wake up, please, and smell the kaliedoscope as it tickles your proprioception!
Now don’t get me wrong. Poetry’s recent efforts to expand its variety is but a start. There are at least fifty other poets – and that’s just off the top of my head – that should be published there, before the ‘zine can righteously be considered to have approached the wondrous range of today’s out-there and with-it writing. I hope Poetry’s editors actively solicit wide and far, and that poets I’m thinking about give it a shot.
Poetry, let’s face it, is well-positioned to attract poets of all kinds, in that unlike many journals it pays, and pays relatively well. At its standard rate of ten dollars per line, Silliman for example presumably received close to $5,000 for “from Revelator.” That’s a nice chunk of cash (although given the length of the excerpts, and their placement at the front of the issue, I hope Poetry applied a generous multiplier to Silliman’s payment). The Poetry Foundation has the money, and if they can build a $25 million headquarters and a million dollar website they can kick down a little more to the poets. So, go Poetry: keep paying the poets, and please: less pap, more inventive and visionary.
Poetry it seems to me is trying to become a kind of monthly big-tent three-ring verse-circus (and don’t forget the prose-poets, please). This is not a bad goal, it sounds fun as hell, but whether this can work or not in practice, I’m still not sure. Sometimes it’s really, really weird. Next month’s (July/August 2010) issue, whose table of contents and one essay are already available on-line, shows what I mean. It includes among other things two poems by the fresh, neo-surrealist, and riveting Sandra Simonds, to which I say yes!, and a poem by Anthony Madrid titled “In Hell the Units Are the Gallon and the Fuck” that I’ll wager will be a very lively read.
But next month’s Poetry will also include a portfolio of work by Robert Pinsky about which, sorry, I’m betting will strike me as populist doggerel [note: on 6/14, I learned via a blog post by Poetry editor Don Share that it’ll be a libretto, not poems by Pinsky]. Even worse, Poetry will feature an essay – I call it a stink-pile – on poetry by John Wooden, the just-dead ultra-conformist college hoops coach. The essay is already on-line (click here, but I warn you), and in it Wooden explicates a view of poetry as interesting and useful as a deflated basketball. Hallmark greeting cards are better than the verse quoted by Wooden in the essay. Crap like this shouldn’t be allowed in any tent, no matter how big and no matter how much inventive and experimental work is included.
But let’s get back to Silliman’s “from Revelator.”
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The 14 pages of excerpts from Silliman’s Revelator in the June 2010 Poetry amount to about 25% of the completed poem, according to information Ron kindly provided in response to an e-mail query. An interesting question, to me at least, is why were the particular poem-segments printed in the issue – and again, there are ten – chosen?
There’s little doubt that the excerpts were carefully selected. They are taken from different parts of the poem, and are not simply consecutive to one another (as can be deduced by listening to a reading by Silliman from earlier this year). Further, the excerpts vary in length. The longest is 84 lines (three others have more than 50), five have between 30 and 45, but one is but seven lines long. That short one got me started here – why those lines, and only those?, I asked myself – and from there the same but broader question: of everything in the poem, why these particular excerpts?
My answer is but a guess, a speculative assertion. However, I think it’s a good guess, and besides, by offering my two cents the poem, that which is at its core, can be focused on, which should be the main point here.
So here’s what I think: Revelator is a great poem, and the excerpts in Poetry were chosen
both because they are representative samples and include enough of Silliman’s core poetic / aesthetic / philosophical precepts (embedded in the lines) such that those new to his work – including that segment of Poetry readers that I call fuddy-duddies – might learn and see (assuming they give it a good honest read) what he’s up to as a poet, and might have their eyes and minds opened to its power and importance. The excerpts, in short, serve as a not quite but sort of a primer and/or prolegomenon to Silliman’s poetry, something that might be instructive to readers not yet familiar with it.
It’s “not quite but sort of” a primer because the principles presented even when overt are embedded in the lines, and sometimes presented as object lessons. But pointers about and examples illustrating what’s going on are there, and readers who don’t know Ron’s writing, who might be used to more explicitly narrative or bow-tied poems, are given plenty of signposts.
At the core of Silliman poetry – more accurately, the Silliman I’ve read over the years – is an intense focus on the present, the now. It’s something he learned first while working with prisoners in the early 1970s (see the note at the back of Circle “R” (Drogue Press, 1995), written in the third person but clearly Silliman’s own, and the section appended at the bottom of this post). For those doing time, yesterday and tomorrow aren’t nearly as relevant – to say the least – as today (this convict-view in Silliman deserves greater exploration, and someday I may well do so). The point though, is the NOW, and keeping the mind attuned to it.
And so in the first excerpt from Revelator in Poetry, a few lines into it, there’s a mention of a movie, about which Silliman writes:
. . . plot tooAnd there it is, the importance of attention, a pretty dang direct mention at that, and emphasized too, via the repetition and exclamation-pointing of the qualifier-conjunction.
dense to follow, unless (unless!)
mind’s eye gives attention . . .
And so too, in one of the later excerpts (I’ve added italics here is underscore my reference):
. . .young manI like the repetition of “all” in this excerpt, in that it again emphasizes the goal, the approach of the poet, and the fact that the principle set forth – Silliman’s thinking about what’s going on, his projection of self into the observed – is embedded in a detail (the guy with burrito), an instance of exactly the kind of particular that results from the focus on the now, and a detail and principle that – because it is presented in six concise and carefully constructed but almost nested-in-one-another clauses – requires from the reader the precise kind of attention that Silliman enacts and champions!
alone in Chipotle, chewing thoughtfully
his large burrito, not talking
taking it all in, eyes
absorbing all, could have been
had this taqueria been there
then, myself in 1964 . . .
The “from Revelator” excerpts in Poetry also include lines and phrases in which Silliman comments about his process or approach, which also give the reader an orientation to his work. There is, for example:
. . . what’s nearwhich seems to set forth the constant challenge of focusing on the now, and (this from the excerpt that’s but seven lines long):
is past too soon to
grasp fully the consequence, dawn
threatens a new day constantly
. . . —there’s an artwhich says something about how Silliman deals with the challenge of the cascade of moments. And then there’s this statement, the last example I’ll present (read the excerpts in Poetry, available on-line, to find more!), in which Silliman explains that his poetic adventure will never be finished and at the same time directly tells what he’s doing, as he does it (note the effect of the line break after “stretch”):
to it intuited before thought
thinks— . . .
. . . one project
I’ll not complete, that’s not
it’s point, but to stretch
even just a little, shape
& dimension, time & dominion,
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“After [his] early books [Crow], nox and Mohawk, Silliman began to understand the most important lesson of his work with prisoners – that there is no time other than the present – and began to apply it to prose in a poem called Ketjak. This lesson and that project have subsequently extended into a life work, in which each poem is at once distinct and always also part of a much larger process.”
– from the editorial material near the rear of Silliman’s
Circle “R” (Drogue Press, 1995)
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“Tomorrow’s a dream
Yesterday’s a memory
Both a passing of a cloud”
– from “No Beauty In Cell Bars”
a poem by Spoon Jackson
in
About Time III:
A Third Anthology of California Prison Writing
(Prison Arts Project, 1987)
a poem by Spoon Jackson
in
About Time III:
A Third Anthology of California Prison Writing
(Prison Arts Project, 1987)
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