Queen Tyro loved the river god of the Enipus, till the ocean god Poseidon grew jealous, disguised himself as the lesser god, her lover, and struck her with a tidal wave while he held her in his arms: and she bore him two sons, Pelias and Nelias…
Most poets who write what can be called by today’s meaning “obscure poems” are generally still in thrall to the subject. The problem with such poetry — the currently “obscure,” as it clings to the subject — is that much of it, beyond a certain level, is unjudgeable as well as dull.
A poet such as Silliman, however, beginning with his commitment to the sentence/writing/prose, as well as to what he calls “the materiality of the signifier,” manages to put a torque on a good deal of his work that orients it toward the object — which, for me as an sf writer, committed to my own object critique, reinvests it with a whole range of interest and intensity.
44. Often it’s been observed: Writing is largely habit. Paradoxically, not writing can also be a habit. The writer who, again and again, must defer or delay getting to pen, paper, or processor finally develops mental habits of deferment and delay. A good percent of what passes for “writer’s block” is simply the habit of not writing, gotten out of hand and reaching the level of addiction — possibly because of pleasurable feedback, such as concern and attention from others over the problem or even through good feelings about the things accomplished instead.
Thomas Disch’s cure for writer’s block at the Clarion Workshop was simply to insist that no other student communicate with the “blocked” student in any way, or even acknowledge his/her existence, until she or he had written a story.
As a technique, it was devastatingly effective — usually succeeding within twenty-four hours.
45. ABC, the first, gray, paper-covered chapbook of The Alphabet, was published by Tuumba Press in October, 1983. It consists of three parts, “Albany,” “Blue,” and “Carbon.”
“Albany”’ opening evokes a verbal arena between essay and narrative; yet the fragmentedness of the first sentence with the third’s non-sequitur creates narrative and argumentative dislocations — even if sentences two, four, and five alone almost cohere:
If the function of writing is “to express the world.” My father withheld child support, forcing my mother to live with her parents, my brother and I to be raised together in a small room. Grandfather called them niggers. I can’t afford an automobile. Far across the calm bay stood a complex of long yellow buildings, a prison…
Anyone who has passed through the Bay Area is likely to think of Alcatraz, sitting out in San Francisco Bay — and someone more familiar with the detailed geography of the environs will know that, from Albany, San Quentin is visible across the water (The “yellow” specifies it; Alcatraz is green) and connect it geographically with Silliman’s title. Readers of Silliman’s Ketjak and Tjanting will also suspect that some formal pattern governs the progression of sentences, even if it is not immediately visible. But even while the reader ponders on formal possibilities, the first sentence-fragment becomes the opening proposition of a grand syllogism, for which every subsequent sentence in the work serves in turn, through an initial implied “Then…,” as its inference.
The Alphabet’s next volume to reach print was Paradise (Burning Deck, Providence, in 1985—the first of Silliman’s poems I read. Its Library of Congress Catalogue Information erroneously gives Silliman’s birth date as 1935; actually he was born in ’46). Then came Lit (Poets and Poets Press, Elmwood, Connecticut, 1987), What (Figures, 1988), and Manifest (Zarstele Press, Leguna, 1990). The sixth volume to appear, Demo to Ink (Chax Press, Tucson, 1992), is relatively thick, the heftiest yet published. With its appearance, the whole Alphabet gains a structural clarity. Demo to Ink contains six parts, “Demo,” “Engines” (in collaboration with Rae Armantraut — joint authorship explaining, perhaps, the single plural among the alphabetic progression of part titles so far), “Force,” “Garfield,” “Hidden,” and “Ink,” continuing and defining the progression begun in the first volume, “Albany,” “Blue,” “Carbon”…
The alphabet is, above all things, an incrementally, incredibly, dazzlingly inventive exploration of possible sentence forms; questions, exhortations, fragments, run-ons…
Its first-level pleasure lies in the energy and inventiveness of precisely that array, stitched through the shocks and thrills of its equally interesting juxtapositions — suggesting a Rhetoric of near-all possible sentential collisions. Nor do the collisions really occur between sentences: most of the time, rather, they occur somewhere in the middle of the next sentence, when, no matter how prepared we are, its first few words have already established continuity with the sentence before: thus, because we cannot predict where semantic dislocation will manifest (and when it happens, it is always already, as it were, over), these juxtapositions remain fresh and are always and endlessly surprising. But it is these connections — and connections shattered — that are the contemplative objects of Silliman’s work; and it is these objects among the sentential cascade, in their rhythmic explosions across whatever generative structure we can pick up, that make the work more than, and more important than, a simple lyric rhapsody of discrete and sensuous sentences. For a reader open to them, such pleasures are like those of a day at the world’s largest and most exotic zoo, as we move, not from peacock to koala to python to three-toed sloth, but between animals that are always a hybrid of some two.
Poems suggest a vision of the world. And finally that vision turns around to place its own analytical grid before an image of the self that perceives.
The world of The Alphabet has a surprising material specificity, a social saturation, and an observational intelligence that is as concerned with the world as it is with the word.
And the poetic subject of The Alphabet?
It is not the subject unified by consistent and coherent narrative strategies. It is a subject that is, one suspects in those moments where formal patterns are intuitable, obsessively intrigued by system; but it is still a poetic subject who refuses to present him- or herself as outside history via the move of closing or completing an easily masterable system that, through the obvious gesture of closure, steps beyond historical consideration. It is a subject whose units both of perception and action are perceived as no larger than single sentences — axioms, grasps, insights, seizures, exhortations, visions.
Silliman’s criticism (e.g., The New Sentence, Roof Books, New York, 1989; or “Canons and Institutions: New Hope for the Disappeared,” in The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy, Charles Bernstein, ed., Roof Books, New York, 1990) tells us that there is nothing passive about such a poetic subject. Indeed, Silliman is the most passionate and persuasive polemicist I know of writing today. If anything, the rigorous anargumentative limits he has set on his poetic enterprise, most forcefully dramatized throughout the thirteen sections I have so far seen of The Alphabet, seems to have provided him with an explosively political arsenal of argumentative material.
Certainly the most systematic of poets (the sentence collections in succeeding sections of Ketjak, for example, expand by a strict Fibonacci series), Silliman is nevertheless a systematician of a very different sort from the ones modernism taught us how to read.
Most sensitive poetry readers would probably consider it near-sacrilege, say, to juggle significantly the order of The Cantos, the variously dated sections of “A” or the sub-poems that make up Passages. But while, at the level of system, Demo to Ink is clearly the “second” book of The Alphabet and “follows” ABC, an actual reader of the poem, even while he or she might idly wonder if the exigencies of small press poetry publishing were such that the Demo to Ink parts were, indeed, written right after “Albany,” “Blue,” and “Carbon,” and simply had to wait this long to see print, will still probably not sense any loss of enjoyment from the fact that she or he read other sections first; and that is specifically because we are not excluded from Silliman’s system, even when we’re not sure what it is — not in the same way that even the momentary inability to access some part of the background intellectual arma- menterium of the great high modernist monologues, no matter how much we’re impressed by them, still excludes us; and that exclusion, absent in Silliman, is still the esthetic aspect of the process by which an establishment excludes the oppressed from history.