Ron Silliman - Language Poetry and Critical Writing

Language Poetry and Critical Writing

While Silliman has come to be associated with the Language poets, he came of age under the sign of Donald Allen's New American Poetry (1960). Silliman was first published in Berkeley, in 1965. In the 1960s he was published by journals associated with what he calls the School of Quietude, such as Poetry Northwest, TriQuarterly, Southern Review and Poetry. Silliman found such early acceptance to be a sign of the lack of standards or rigor characteristic of that literary tendency and began looking for alternatives.

Silliman edited a newsletter, Tottels (1970–81), that was one of the early venues for Language Poetry. However, it was "The Dwelling Place," a feature of nine poets that Silliman did for Alcheringa in 1975 that Silliman himself describes as his "first attempt to write about language poetry". In 1976 & '77, he co-curated a reading series with Tom Mandel, at the Grand Piano, a coffee house in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, continuing a series originally founded by Barrett Watten. This series was followed by one at the Tassajara Bakery, co-curated with Bob Perelman, and a series combining poets with performance artists at The Farm, co-curated with Jill Scott.

Silliman's mature critical writing dates to the early/mid-1970s when he was asked to discuss his thinking about the role of reference in poetry, leading to the essay "Disappearance of the Author, Appearance of the World," which first appeared in the journal Art Con. Soon thereafter he edited a special issue of the magazine Margins devoted to the work of poet Clark Coolidge and began to give talks and contribute essays on a regular basis thereafter. As was mentioned above, Silliman was influenced by (and subsequently has written extensively on) the "New American Poetry", referring to the poets who first appeared in Donald Allen's groundbreaking anthology The New American Poetry 1945–1960. Today, those same (but then relatively unknown) poets included in this anthology are now recognizable or precedent figures in the current cultural landscape.

In 1986, Silliman's anthology, In the American Tree, one of the foremost collections of American language poetry, was published by the National Poetry Foundation.