Against Conceptual Poetry by Ron Silliman. Denver: Counterpath, 2014. 190 pp. $18.00.

Against Conceptual Poetry is the third volume of Silliman’s Universe long-poem project, its 45th degree according to the title page, and its 45.4th  degree according to its LC cataloguing data. So possibly another .6 degrees of this section are yet to come. The title appears to be a play on the title of conceptual poets Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith’s 2011 anthology Against Expression. The text carries many of the marks of a conceptual poem, and could be read as a kind of parody.

It’s a transcript, chopped into mostly Silliman-like six-word lines, of a 3-hour 12-minute interview that Eric Schmidt, ex-CEO of Novell and Google, Jared Cohen, once an advisor to U.S. Secretaries of State Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton, Scott Malcomson, once foreign editor of The New York Times, and Lisa Shields, vice president of the US think tank The Council on Foreign Relations, conducted in Britain with Julian Assange in 2011 as part of research for Schmidt and Cohen’s 2013 book The Digital Age. Created in Britain by Americans who are speaking with an Australian who is in flight from sex charges in Sweden and who operates the globally fugitive website Wikileaks in an attempt to be a political benefactor to global humanity, the text offers the first solid basis for the Bookthug claim that Silliman's Universe is a work of “globalization” literature. In the background as one reads is always the struggle of the US to drag Assange from his global perch and into the range of American national power.

Is Against Conceptual Poetry a conceptual poem? Certainly it is primarily a concept. From a literary/aesthetic perspective, once one has identified the concept – much like in Goldsmith’s The Weather – one may have no need to read further. Some conceptual poems – Peter Jaeger’s The Persons and Rapid Eye Movement come to mind – raise a

Northern Soul by Ron Silliman. Bristol: Shearsman Books, 2014.

This is the second published volume, and 10th section, of Ron Silliman’s three-century 360-section writing project Universe. The first volume, Revelator, I looked at earlier this year. There is not a great deal of difference between them. Both are written in short lines – Revelator in 5-word lines, Northern Soul in lines of 1 to 5 words. They have much the same abrupt shifts in focus, and a similar number of bird sightings per line -- birds come in and out of view in these two books more frequently than people.

Silliman, like George Bowering, is an older poet very much preoccupied with aging. “What time have I left / to live this dream” he asks in this book’s final lines (78). A few pages earlier, while recalling passing his childhood home in California, he had written “what visit / will be my last / to survive is / to sneak past / all the traps / Stones in / my head sing / This may be / the last / prime the pump / as if this / ink were blood” (65). Part of priming the pump for him is to undertake this audacious 360-part multi-century poem.

The various abrupt shifts among geographic locations – London, Lancashire, New Jersey, Rome, Los Angeles, Tuscany, Delaware, Pennsylvania, San Francisco, Ottawa – some visited in recollection, some in dreams, some seemingly in the

Reading the Difficulties: Dialogues with Contemporary American Innovative Poetry, ed. Thomas Fink and Judith Halden-Sullivan. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama Press, 2014. 230 pp. $34.95.


Reading the Difficulties is another spring 2014 release in the Modern/Contemporary Poetics series co-edited by Charles Bernstein and Hank Lazer. It is less a book about how to read ‘difficult’ contemporary poetry than one that presents examples of readers doing that. The subtitle, “dialogues with contemporary American innovative poetry,” suggests that “reading” can involve having “dialogues” with poems, and is a fair description of most of the contents. Two of the twelve essays are on Canadian poets, bpNichol and Lisa Robertson, who appear to have become honorary Americans for this occasion. Or perhaps “American” has been unconsciously redefined here as referencing North America – the rapid globalization of literary distribution and creation has complications for everyone. Also frequently cited here is a third Canadian, Steve McCaffery.

Difficult not to notice is the sometimes awkwardly close connection between the book and series co-editor Bernstein, who rather famously linked the word ‘difficulty’ to his own writing in his 2011 collection The Attack of the Difficult Poems. Much of the first third of this book reads like a tribute that important book. The lead-off contribution is his 2006 poem “Thank You for Saying Thank You,” which begins “This is a totally / accessible poem.” The fourth essay is a comparison by Stephen Paul Miller of Bernstein and Walter Benjamin as radical secular Jewish poets. Thirty-three mentions of Bernstein are listed in the index (mostly in the first 50 pages), more than double those of any other writer except for fellow Language poet Ron Silliman who receives 23.   

The arguments of most of the contributors indeed have their roots in Bernstein’s assertions over the years in work such as The Artifice of Absorption (1987) and Content’s Dream: Essays 1975-84 (2001) against the reduction by readers and teachers of literary works to their “content” – a scandalizing argument that has paralleled in the US poetry scene the one which I introduced to the Canadian Literature criticism scene in 1974 with my (“vastly influential” according to the Oxford Companion [one hopes!]) essay “Surviving the Paraphrase.” Paralleled with rather more panache, disruptive force and literary consequence, I would say. Here is some of Bernstein’s “artifice of absorption” argument against paraphrase, i.e. against throwing away a text’s materiality while “absorbing” its imagined/abstracted “meaning”:

Robert Duncan. Collected Essays and Other Prose. Ed. James Maynard. Berkeley: U of California P, 2014. 542 pp. $60.00.

This is the third gathering of Robert Duncan’s essays, following Duncan’s own selection of thirteen in Fictive Certainties, 1984, and Robert Bertolf’s selection of twenty in A Selected Prose in 1994. Maynard’s new selection of 41 essays certainly eclipses the other two, although it doesn't live up to its title of “Collected Essays” – something which Maynard hints in his introduction may have troubled him. He describes Collected Essays there, somewhat paradoxically, as including only “most of Duncan’s longer and more well-known essays along with a representative selection of other prose “ (xxxiv-xxxv) and calls for the publishing of  “a necessary companion volume for all of Duncan’s remaining uncollected prose” (xxxvi); he also provides a five-page “Appendix of Uncollected Essays and Other Prose.” His book’s title was possibly his publisher’s decision, perhaps dictated by its being part of the press’s series “The Collected Works of Robert Duncan.” Although Maynard also describes his new selected as a “reader’s edition” and only “lightly” edited, it is by far the most scholarly of the three, with a 51-page section of notes and a lengthy bibliography of the works and editions which Duncan appears to have cited.

Duncan’s 1984 selection, on which he worked intermittently for at least fifteen years, contained most of the essays that were influential in the reception of his poetry during the 1960s, its most productive decade – “Ideas on the Meaning of Form,” “Towards an Open Universe,” “The Sweetness and Greatness of Dante’s Divine Comedy,” “The Truth and Life of Myth,” and “Man’s Fulfillment in Order and Strife.” Bertolf in 1994 omits all but the first two of these, I suspect because the other three are among the most theosophical, performative and rhetorically extravagant of Duncan’s prose. One gets a sense that Duncan presented the essays he wanted to disseminate and be known by, and Bertolf those that he thought it politic for him to be known by. Maynard merely wants Duncan’s essays known and includes both these essays of wondrous excess and the somewhat more circumspect – “Ideas on the Meaning of Form” and “A Critical Difference of View.” Even in the latter, however, while writing less ecstatically, Duncan found it

Revelator by Ron Silliman. Toronto: Bookthug, 2013.

Poet Ron Silliman is probably best known not for his poetry but for theorizing “the new sentence” in 1977 and founding ‘Silliman’s Blog’ of literary commentary and reviews in 2002. To a lesser extent he is known as one of the US “Language” poets and editor of the poetry anthology In the American Tree. His “new sentence” – cogently described in 1993 by fellow Language poet Bob Perelman as a sentence that  “gains its effect by being placed next to another sentence to which it has [mostly] tangential relevance” – has become part of the toolkit of avant-garde poetics across North America.

He is also the author of large continuing poems, usually published in small book installments and later collected – Tjanting (1981), The Age of Huts (2007), and The Alphabet (2008). Revelator is described by Silliman as the first part of a 360 part (360 “degree,” that is) poem “Universe” – a book that would take him, his publisher says on the back cover, “three centuries to complete.” Especially with The Alphabet and this new project, Silliman is working in that size-fascinated tradition of American poetry – Whitman and his multitudes, Pound hoping to write a poem that would salvage all essential Western culture, Olson writing in the voice of Maximus. (“My book is bigger than book,” Robert Kroetsch teased the feminist editors of A Mazing Space in 1987– correctly alluding to the phallocentrism of such size matters.) With Universe Silliman appears to have trumped (or perhaps parodied?) his predecessors, even if he has no chance of completing. He does have two more parts of Universe in press for 2014 – Northern Soul from Shearsman in Bristol, and Against Conceptual Poetry from Counterpath in Denver. But most of the parts or degrees of Universe will apparently remain just that – concepts – unless he’s able to write them in a yet unknown part of the cosmos. As the cover blurb says, “We are hopeful.”

The title of this part, Revelator, references Saint John the Revelator / John of Patmos, the presumed writer of Revelations, the last book of the New Testament. John’s warnings of an impending apocalypse have usually been given less credence than other parts the New Testament; his was the last book to be added to the canon, a hundred years after the others, no earlier than 397 AD. So in Silliman’s Universe the last has finally – pun intended – come first. Revelator’s front cover – an over-exposed flooded-with-light photo of Silliman reading in 1978 on a San Francisco street