Ron Silliman as Revelator

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

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corner while passersby turn their backs – casts him as a second revelator, the prophet whose words are most likely in vain. Grandiose? – possibly.

Not surprisingly there are strong end-of-time implications in the poem – references to Silliman’s advancing age (he is now 67), to the continuing destruction of US farmland by urban sprawl, to the ruinous US invasion of Iraq, to the dying of US industrial towns because of globalization and the increasing violence of storms (here usually hurricanes Ivan, Sandy and Katrina) as our planet warms.

            how
does this outer life, apocalypse
reported, penetrate my dreams, three
men on the street walking
discussing who will reach 60
when, the way as teens
we spoke of 20, not
even seeing the homeless woman
asleep beneath the newspaper racks
at Mission & Fourth (21)

The poet’s aging becomes an implicit metaphor for the planet’s aging, his future death one for our civilization’s possible death.

            how
many words have I left.
Use them wisely, sparingly, each
could outlast me, to what
purpose but this compulsive record
forward from the age of
a small midcentury lad, sitting
crosslegged on my bed, scribbling
anything to be free, ... (32)

    ...futures
merge, mock, migrate, mesh, markets
more powerful than Marx imagined
new forests for old, scattered
brick, metal, you can see
where the garage exploded, compost
everything, at the end of
the Age of Man, gender
intended, drive he said, ... (36)

Not that these cultural observations are ever expressed discursively or thematically – Silliman is still composing paratactically here – juxtaposing phrases, images, scenes and actions of “tangential relevance” to one another. It is the recurring or ‘riming’ of images that creates his emphases on aging, mutability, wrong-headed US military action, destruction through climate change – a technique he may have learned from Robert Duncan, with whom he was close in the 1970s and to whom he has sometimes been compared. The recurrences – numerous birds, a train whistle, a dog’s bark, hurricanes (from Hurricane Ridge on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula through the 1933 hurricane that reshaped Ocean City, Maryland, to the more recent hurricanes Ivan, Katrina and Sandy) knit the poem together much more than its syntax.

                ... we watch
TV now with horror, water
rising in New Orleans, geese
before dawn already in flight,
somewhere a car alarm
                            ... collapse
of all infrastructure, or dystopia
in boats, we all someday
may live in the Superdome
glossy ibis dark & short
amid all the herons, egrets
scurrying little shorebirds, Mulberry Landing
vs. the dead lying abandoned
on the Convention Center sidewalk (47)

That cover blurb also says that “Universe is a poem of globalization and post-global poetics (an important reason for publishing this key section outside of the USA).” I don’t understand what “post-global” means here – Revelator’s poetics are neither global nor post-global but recognizably North American.  When Silliman writes “we all someday / may live in the Superdome,” his “we” seems much more readable as we-Americans than as all humanity. The images and scenes and the autobiographical references (and it’s impressive here to see how autobiography can be handled non-discursively) are almost entirely American – including his Creeley allusion immediately after “the Age of Man.” Though he writes of the decline of humankind, the only history he appears to know well enough to reference is US history – its domestic history & foreign wars. The most quintessentially American aspect of the poem strikes me as Silliman’s tendency to thus implicitly blame his country for the planet’s woes – a kind of reverse hubris that perhaps only non-American readers will easily notice.

                   at Monticello I
very nearly wept, to imagine
just once the president as
the smartest, most questioning, most
rigorous of all, no, that’s
not it either – seeing (hand
shielding brow) the trail ahead
is empty, the man stops
to unleash his dogs, mist
rises from the river ... (13)


to write at empire’s end
& not know it, knot
too tight, clotted, to pry
loose, They lost their way
may be said of us
for want of an enemy
(war equals conflict between states)
but when there is no
opposing power, the fan spins
silently overhead, the log reduced
to a lingering glow, ... (51)

                                 I hear
BART train’s ineluctable hum, ...
                                           ... horn
of Amtrak’s locomotive more distant
each town acknowledges its war dead
differently, photos on the news
reflect proud attention, the state
at its most wasteful, save
suicide watch on death row
lives as policy’s thoughtless cost,
seals pause at Limantour, heads
(two, three) above water, staring
beach full of sun bathers,
kite fliers, others playing catch
or Frisbee (58-9)

Whatever country the “degrees” of Universe are published in, its field of reference and implicit audience seem likely to remain American. But, this is a very interestingly written poem, and so again, like the cover blurb writer, “we are hopeful.”