Ron Silliman, making poetry, unmaking rules [US]:
The Age of Huts (compleat) comes as a welcome collection from Chester County's own rabble-rouser-in-residence, poet Ron Silliman. Through his prodigious output and a hugely influential blog that has attracted more than a million hits, Silliman has become a kind of elder statesman in the world of innovative literature. While I'm reluctant to pigeonhole his work - sorry, his "texts" - into any specific -ism, there's no denying that The Age of Huts is a shining example of what the language poetry school has contributed to contemporary letters.
At the risk of gross oversimplification, language poetry demonstrates the ways in which words write us (and therefore construct reality) as much as we write them. The formal structure of The Age of Huts requires some explanation, so please bear with me. According to the preface, Silliman has been working for more than 30 years on a single poem titled "Ketjak." When complete, it will be made up of four texts: one long poem, Tjanting (already available in book form), and three poetry cycles (The Alphabet, Universe, and the present volume, The Age of Huts). Stay with me here. [...]
This entry was posted by eeksypeeksy
on Monday, June 25, 2007 at 12:57 PM.
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